Determining the Likelihood of Locals' Dependence on Forest Resources Influenced by Personal and Household Characteristics

Abstract

Forest resources are critical for the livelihood and survival of tribal and other disadvantaged communities that live in and around protected areas. Dependence on forest resources is a function of cultural, social, and economic inequalities, which might influence household forest resource preferences. We investigate whether personal and household characteristics influence the likelihood of managing locals’ dependency on forest resources. The research is conducted in 28 villages of the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, India. A total of 1498 respondents are chosen using a systematic random sampling method and data is collected using a semi-structured interview schedule. SPSS V21 is used to clean and analyze the data. As forest resource dependence is discrete data, an ordinal logit model was applied. Hence, we determine the magnitude of the variation in the dependent variable. Although sex, poverty status, social category and fuel source for cooking appear to explain no significant change in dependence on forest resources such as Fuelwood, Timber, Tendu, and Mahua; respondents’ age, education, type of household, primary occupation, source of lightning, income from agriculture and forest products determine statistically significant variations on forest dependence. We conclude that household dependence on forest resources is context-specific and depends on a variety of factors such as cultural alignment, complementarity of activities, habitat dependency and economic strata, economic value of resource and gender roles, and institutional arrangement between the locals and formal actors.

Keywords

• dependence on forest resources
• livelihood
• timber and non-timber forest resources
• logit model