Study title

Forest resources have an important role in supporting the livelihood strategies of rural communities in Malawi, especially for the poorest village members, and can have an important equalising effect. The management system of forest ecosystems determines how those resources are distributed to local users and therefore influences total societal welfare. The aim of this study is to assess how the implementation of community-based management policies influences the welfare of the local forest users by understanding the relevance importance of forest resources for rural communities in Malawi by using discrete choice experiment to understand how people value the distribution of forest resources. The purpose of the survey was to collect socio-economic characteristics of respondents, e.g., income, livelihood activities, gender, household size, literacy level, asset holding, and specific uses of forest resources under the current forest management to complement the data collected through discrete choice experiment and provide a general overview of the rural population living in the surrounding of forest area (paper currently under review). The survey was conducted with a sample of adults (male and female, 18-65 years old) randomly selected from six rural villages in Mangochi District in Malawi. Moreover, the survey data have been used to perform an integrated assessment of the welfare impact of CBM policies on beneficiaries by quantifying the aggregate availability of forest resources given the ecological status of the forest and the total societal welfare according to how those resources are distributed to local users (paper published: Dreoni, Ilda, et al. "Assessing the welfare impacts of forest ecosystem service management policies and their distributional rules." Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 5 (2022): 1-17.).Thesis title: Preferences for forest benefits: are distributive justice principles reflected in values for Ecosystem Services? The purpose of the...