Study title

Tanzania

Individual

Household

We carried out a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of the social impacts of WMAs, adopting a Before/After, Control/Impact (BACI) design, collecting data from 24 villages participating in 6 different WMAs across two geographical regions (northern Tanzania semi-arid rangelands; southern Tanzania miombo woodlands), and 18 statistically matched control villages. Across these 42 villages, we collected participatory wealth ranking data for 13,578 households. Using this as sampling frame, we selected within each village 10 ‘very poor’ households (according to wealth ranking as of 2007); 10 households with household members in ‘leadership’ positions (as of 2014/15); and 20 households from the rest of the village register (the ‘other’ stratum). Alongside the main household survey, we also randomly sampled 20 wives of male heads of sampled households, with the same relative proportions within the three strata as for households in the main survey. This gave quantitative surveys with a stratified random sample of 1,924 household heads and 945 household heads’ wives. All data were collected in 2014/15, with questions on recall of conditions in 2007 (based on participatory, site-specific event calendars) providing a baseline. Questions addressed household demographics, land and livestock assets, resource use, income-generating activities and income portfolios, participation in natural resource management decision-making, perceived benefits and costs of conservation. Datasets permit research on livelihood and wealth trajectories, and social impacts, costs and benefits of conservation interventions in the context of community-based natural resource management. Detailed qualitative work (not deposited here, but analysed and written up in some depth and published) provides explanatory context.A plain language statement was gone through with each potential respondent, explaining the research collaboration and its aims and methods, and the interviewees’ right to decline prior to or drop out at any time during the survey. Respondents were then asked for their informed consent to participate in the survey. Participation was voluntary and no cash payment was offered. Small inexpensive but locally appreciated courtesy gifts such as tea, sugar or phone credit vouchers were offered as a thank you after the survey.