While community-based natural resource management projects have acquired increasing importance in the last decade, the notion of ‘community’ that is implicit in them has been subject to critique on a number of grounds. It is this that forms the starting point for my dissertation. This dissertation starts by discussing the diverse forms that ‘the community’ takes in three different water projects in the state of Maharashtra in western India. For instance, the community could be either an administrative unit or an ecological unit or an irrigation unit, and each of these has different equity and sustainability implications. The three cases also differ in the kind of internal characteristics they possess and how these contribute to decentralized sustainable development. Furthermore, while reified notions of the community serve a strategic purpose in one water project, in general, utopian notions of communities could lead to lack of acknowledgement of the interaction between the community and other institutions such as markets, with the result that an important arena of influencing equity is lost. Secondly, a study of three kinds of equities within the three communities—equities in rule content, process of rule-making and outcomes, reveals that the redistributive potential of water is realized only to a limited extent. The different equities are inter-related and depend on a variety of factors such as ideological motivation of the actors, the kind of water source, the prior internal organization present, the legal validity of the institutional arrangements and the nature of the leadership. Equity in content is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for equity in outcome. But equity in rule-making is the most critical—it is needed for implementation, to ensure continued equity in content and outcome, and to provide flexibility to use unexpected opportunities for changes in equity. Thirdly, I discuss the role that the state can play in further facilitating community-based sustainable development efforts. For instance, the state can use legislation for a clearer constitution of the unit of the community, as well as facilitate equity by influencing the decision-making rules that associations involved in water projects follow.

In this study I explore two understudied aspects of India's informal economy, viz. the institutions that sustain informal knowledge, and gender disparities among self-employed workers using a combination of primary survey and interview methods as well as econometric estimation. The data used in the study come from the Indian National Sample Survey (NSS) as well as from fieldwork conducted in the city of Banaras (Varanasi) in North India. The vast majority of the Indian work-force is "uneducated" from a conventional point of view. Even when they have received some schooling, formal education rarely prepares individuals for employment. Rather, various forms of apprenticeships and on-the-job training are the dominant modes of knowledge acquisition. The institutions that enable creation and transfer of knowledge in the informal economy are poorly understood because informal knowledge itself is understudied. However, the rise of the so-called "Knowledge Society" has created a large literature on traditional and indigenous knowledge and has brought some visibility to the informal knowledge possessed by peasants, artisans, and other workers in the informal economy. The present study extends this strand of research. In Chapter Three, taking the weaving industry as a case-study, work is introduced into the study of knowledge. Thus informal knowledge is studied in the context of the production relations that create and sustain it. Further, the family mode of production and apprenticeships are foregrounded as important institutions that achieve inter-generational transfer of knowledge at a low cost. Clustering of weaving firms ensures fast dissemination of new fabric designs and patterns which holds down monopoly rents. In Chapter Four taking advantage of a recently issued Geographical Indication (GI), an intellectual property right (IPR) that attempts to standardize the Banaras Sari to protect its niche in the face of powerloom-made imitation products, I investigate the likely effects of such an attempt to create craft authenticity. Through field observations and via interviews with weavers, merchants, State officials and NGO workers, I find that the criteria of authenticity have largely been developed without consulting artisans and as a result tend to be overly restrictive. In contrast, I find that weavers themselves have a more dynamic and fluid notion of authenticity. Homeworking women are widely perceived to be among the most vulnerable and exploited groups of workers. Piece-rates and undocumented hours of work hide extremely low hourly wages and workers themselves are often invisible. Though women form a crucial part of the Banaras textile industry, to the outside observer they are invisible, both because they are in purdah and because women's work proceeds in the shadow of weaving itself, which is a male occupation. In Chapter Five, using field observations, interviews, and time-use analysis I show that women perform paid work for up to eight hours a day but are still seen as working in their spare time. Because the opportunity cost of spare time is zero, any wage above zero is deemed an improvement. Hourly wage rates in Banaras are found to be as low as eight to ten cents an hour, well below the legal minimum wage. In Chapter Six, I use National Sample Survey data on the informal textile industry to test the hypothesis that emerges from ethnographic work in Banaras. If women are indeed penalized for undertaking joint production of market and non-market goods, women working on their own without hired workers are expected to perform much worse than men working by themselves. I find that after accounting for differences in education, assets, working hours, occupation and other relevant variables, women working by themselves earn 52% less than their male counterparts. This gender penalty disappears in case of self-employed women who can afford to employ wage-workers. I also show that women in the informal economy are more likely to be engaged in putting-out or subcontracting arrangements and suffer a gender penalty as a result.

<p> This study is designed to answer one main research question: How could tertiary education quality be redefined and measured through the education production function model in developing countries. The study will use Indonesia as the target country to carry out research activities. Quality of tertiary education has been one of the most frequently discussed topics in relevant fields in academia and human development. As enrollment continuously increases and education systems expand in many developing countries, quality becomes their biggest concern. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide stakeholders a different and more practical approach to reevaluate tertiary education quality through quantifiable variables and to measure quality through educational input, equity and equality, labor market relevance, and system assurance factors. </p><p> Human capital theory serves as the guiding theoretical framework for this dissertation. The education production function model is the foundation for quality redefinition. Within the four quantifiable variables, benefit incidence analysis is used to measure equity and equality, economic rate of return is used to measure labor market relevance of the tertiary education system, and returns to investment is used to evaluate how education outputs yield from inputs. The study is designed to have an umbrella structure, with tertiary education quality being at the top of the skeleton and educational input, equity and equality, labor market relevance, and system assurance being the four supporting pillars.</p><p> With the redefinition of tertiary education quality, four main research questions will be answered respectively. Educational input in Indonesia has been improving in the past decade; however, it is still behind compared to peer ASEAN countries and countries with similar economic profiles. Indonesia's tertiary education access inequality is mainly caused by socioeconomic differences. The labor market absorbs a majority of tertiary graduates and yields much higher returns at the tertiary level, and it has been responding very positively toward the continuously expanding graduating class. The quality assurance system suffers from shortstaffing, low financial support, low capacity, and weak government support. At its current accrediting pace, Indonesia's tertiary education institutions will not be able to improve as fast as they are willing to.</p>

Community-based natural resource management has become immensely popular among some policy makers on the assumption that involvement of local communities can achieve conservation goals with greater efficiency and equity. However, the community is quite often conceived of as an undifferentiated whole. Given that diverse groups may exist within a community, with heterogeneous interests, abilities, incentives, and social affiliations, such a conception is problematic. This dissertation empirically investigates the effects of heterogeneity on use and management of common forests. This dissertation conducts a meso-level study of heterogeneity using the 'community' as the unit of analysis. The data are derived from fieldwork conducted in the middle Himalayan ranges of Himachal Pradesh, India in 2004. During this fieldwork, survey data were collected in 54 forest communities. This method contrasts with the usual practice of examining individual motivations or conducting a cross-section country-level study. There are two key findings. First, three dimensions of heterogeneity affect collective management of forests: heterogeneity in wealth, social groups and incentives. However, these effects are complex and non-linear. The empirical results suggest that both social and wealth heterogeneity have a non-monotonic relationship with cooperation. In addition, heterogeneity in incentives decreases cooperation conditional on the presence of wealth heterogeneity. These results imply that cooperation does not depend on social parochialism, very high levels of wealth heterogeneity reduce cooperation, and a divergence between wealth and incentive to cooperate decreases the level of collective management. Second, forest use is affected by heterogeneity as well. The sampled communities have access to forests that are common property, in that rights of use are vested with the community and not the individual. This means that all individuals in the community should be able to use the forest to the same degree. However, on investigating the effect of heterogeneity in forest use, the dissertation finds that wealth heterogeneity increases whereas social heterogeneity decreases the extent of forest use even after controlling for market related factors. The results therefore, suggest that the social structure of the community plays an important role in determining both the degree of cooperation and extent of forest use at the community level.