Search

How does male out‐migration impact women's experience of post‐disaster reconstruction? This paper employs survey data collected by Nepal's Housing Recovery Reconstruction Platform in 2018 to establish robust associations between male out‐migration and three indicators of women's participation in rebuilding their private houses after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake: (i) knowing where to consult for information; (ii) visiting a local government official by oneself; and (iii) signing a rebuilding agreement with the local government. Twenty‐six semi‐structured interviews conducted in 2022 further revealed that women whose husbands were abroad undertook roles that they would not have performed had their spouse been present, including in relation to management and decision‐making. However, the interviews also highlighted challenges that women had to overcome, such as a lack of knowledge of procuring materials and difficulties leading the process as a woman. This study advances the literature by establishing a relationship between male out‐migration and variation in women's post‐earthquake rebuilding experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is the greatest governance challenge humanity has ever faced. Understanding why some governments successfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and others fail is thus imperative. While regime type is often hypothesized to be a source of variation in greenhouse gas emissions, empirical findings about the effects of democracy and autocracy on climate action are contradictory. This research note reconciles these inconsistencies and adopts a quasi-experimental approach to investigate the relationship between democratization and greenhouse gas emissions. A fixed effects model with a synthetic control estimator is used to construct appropriate counterfactuals and evaluate the effect of regime type on emissions with data from the World Bank and Varieties of Democracy Project. The analysis shows that movement toward democracy does not have a significant effect on emissions, suggesting that research on the politics of emissions reduction should focus on factors other than regime type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]