The reports in this series are outputs from the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) research programme organised and coordinated by the University of Bath, UK and financed by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, between 2002 and 2007.Ethiopia is one of the four countries selected for the research. 1The aim of the programme is to develop a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the social and cultural construction of wellbeing in developing country contexts, and thereby investigate linkages between quality of life, power and poverty in order to contribute to improving policy and practice.WeD Ethiopia selected twenty rural and two urban sites for its WIDE 2 research.Community profiles for fifteen of the rural sites had been produced in 1995 and 1996 (WIDE1) 3 and five new sites were added in 2003, when further community level research was undertaken in the twenty sites (WIDE2), involving exploratory protocol-guided research during one month in July and August 2003 by teams composed of one female and one male researcher in each site.Six sites were selected for the DEEP 4 research, including four of the rural sites and both urban sites. 5In-depth fieldwork was carried out between July 2004 and November 2005 by teams composed of one female and one male researcher spending about three weeks of each month in their respective sites.The four rural sites were chosen from the two largest regions: Oromia and Amhara.In each region one of the selected sites was more remote (Korodegaga in Oromia and Dinki in Amhara), and the other closer to market and state influences (Turufe Kecheme in Oromia and Yetmen in Amhara).The urban sites, Kolfe in the capital city, Addis Ababa, and Arada in Kebele 08/09 of Shashemene, a business city in the south, were selected on the basis of the research team's interests in market areas, community-based organisations and urban-rural linkages.One of the rural sites, Turufe Kecheme, is close to Shashemene town.

Climate change is causing growing variability and uncertainty in rainfall in Africa. Since the continent's food production systems are dominantly rain-fed, these changes are putting food security a ...

Widespread poverty as well as food and income insecurity plague Africa’s dominant smallholder agriculture. Paradoxically, the very people who mainly depend on agriculture are not able to secure the ...

Failures in considering and properly addressing local resistance have become costly for both the local people and the investors. Land acquisition policies need to be accompanied by mechanisms that ...

While MSB has many years of experience of implementing environmental and gender perspectives in its humanitarian work; disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation present a different set of opportunities and challenges. Thesefurther emphasise the inclusion of a social change component that overlaps somewhat with more conventional development work. MSB commissioned the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) to prepare this report, noting that women and men (as well as girls and boys) are affected differently by: i) the impacts of climate change, ii) efforts related to climate change adaptation (CCA), and iii) disaster risk reduction (DRR).

The management of soils is an important issue for policy makers in Ethiopia. However, most of the interventions designed to conserve the soil resources have fallen short of the expectations, performing impressively in the short run, but proving unsustainable on a long-term basis. There are no simple explanations for the failure of these interventions to reverse soil degradation, but it has been evident for some time that there is all uneasy connection between 'objective' assessments of the state of the land and the way this information is used ill the policy-making processes. It is now widely accepted that understanding the processes of the soil degradation is not simply a matter of analysing changes in the stock of physical and nutrient capital. While studies of nutrient balances are an important component of research in soil erosion and land degradation, their results need to be considered in the context of social, cultural and political factors.This paper presents the results of a study in Tigray, Ethiopia, exploring local people's perceptions on and understanding of their land resources, and the way their views influence natural resource management. Our findings indicate that land use is not only a function of the physical properties of fields, but is also shaped by historical processes and local cultural values, and that management strategies adopted by farmers are influenced by a broad range of factors. These include history of tenure and patterns of inheritance, investment in a plot.. and the sense of place, identity and attachment to a locality that develops over time as generations pass through the same family dwelling. Land users in Tigray do not judge arable land purely in terms of its agricultural value.The cultural and social values attributed to specific tracts of land also play an important role in shaping the physical condition of fields and the manner in which farmers interact with their surroundings may explain why certain plots are still 'good', despite having been continuously cultivated by successive generations. It also accounts for local resistance to some types of land redistribution and acceptance of others. Policy makers, therefore, need to pay more attention to the relations between people and land, and to the value that farmers attach to their land resources. Our findings have significant implications for policies on agricultural extension and land redistribution, and for on-farm research, as the type of plot used to test technologies will have a significant impact on the outcome of trials. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.