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Droughts can affect people's political trust positively, through rallying effects, or negatively, through blame attribution. We examine how drought conditions affect political trust in the context of Africa. We link high-precision exogenous climate data to survey respondents, 2002-2018, and report moderate negative effects of drought conditions on people's trust in their president. These negative effects increase with the severity of drought conditions. The political economy of favoritism, where some regions are preferentially treated by rulers, should result in heterogeneous effects across territories. We find that trust increases in capital regions and in leader birth regions during dry conditions. In contrast, when droughts take place in such regions, trust levels fall in other regions. This is in line with the idea that capital regions and leader birth regions could be preferentially treated in the aftermath of droughts. Understanding these processes further is important given their salience because of global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rulers of weak states face a predicament. They lack capacity to monitor crime and need citizens to partake in intelligence-sharing. Yet, agents of such authorities are seldom trusted, raising doubts about whether locals will provide information. The case of wildlife poaching in African countries illustrates this tension, where rangers are few and offenders on good terms with locals. Why do some locals choose to assist rangers and report on poachers, while others refrain from doing so? We surveyed 2300 residents in and near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We find that people that are afraid of rangers and perceive them as corruptible are less willing to assist in information-sharing. Seeing poaching as condemnable also matters. In contrast, individuals' stakes in conservation and perceptions of wildlife as threatened do not predict our outcome. For effective community policing, policy needs to change how officials are seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent and how do men and women differ in their attitudes about poaching? Although research suggests that women can be more concerned about environmental degradation than men, inquiries about communities in protected areas are ambiguous: women are disproportionately affected by anti‐poaching laws and can have greater motivations to violate rules. We conducted a large‐scale survey in communities within the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and explored attitudes regarding; concern about resources, rule compliance, poaching, and anti‐poaching activities. Although women's attitudes generally are not divergent from men's, we find some differences among nonelectrified households and those with a dependence on resources; these women are less likely to condemn commercial poaching and less willing to engage in anti‐poaching activities. Men in poorer households are more likely to know a poacher. We identify a need of further understanding the causes behind gender differences in conservation attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which resource users abide by rules is a fundamental question in the governance of conservation efforts, such as national parks, often challenged by poaching. While a large literature studies the factors fostering regulatory compliance in national settings, we know less about these processes in transboundary conservation areas, an increasingly common type of park that straddles the borders of several countries. This study aims to explore how the previously identified dynamics associated with achieving compliance play out in transboundary settings. Focusing on the world's largest transboundary conservation area -- the Kavango Zambezi Tranfrontier Conservation Area -- the study uses interviews with elite actors involved in the management of the area to provide insights in the process of fostering compliance in transboundary conservation areas. As in nationally governed parks, it appears crucial that efforts in sharing the benefits from conservation and involving stakeholders in management are successful. Yet, the empirical analysis reveals that transnational settings provide even further challenges: the governance of such parks depends critically on trust-building efforts among a larger number of actors positioned at different levels. It also involves the need for harmonizing policy between the involved states, both in terms of the design of regulations and as regards the sanctions imposed on rule violators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small island states have in recent decades been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. Violent winds, floods, and draughts have had severe consequences for millions of people and currently present an increasingly significant challenge for development and poverty alleviation in small islands. However, although islands tend to have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce widely different outcomes in different island states, indicating great variation in resilience. While some islands seem to cope and adapt fairly well, others suffer tremendously. That is the impact of natural hazards of the same physical magnitude ranges from going more or less unnoticed or causing only small disturbances to resulting in severe catastrophes. The overall objective of this paper is to explore the suggested sources of this variation further. More specifically, with the point of departure in theories about how institutions and social contracts affect collective action and adaptive capacities, this paper sets out to investigate how political institutions such as democracy, corruption, and government effectiveness impact the overall resilience of island states. While claims over the importance of institutions are well abound in the literature, there is a serious lack of systematic empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study's quantitative, time series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's fisheries are under severe pressure. Yet, according to the marine trophic index, the health and stability of marine ecosystems vary greatly across countries. The argument developed and tested in this article holds that some of the sources of this variation can potentially be derived from differences in the character of two fundamental relationships in society - a horizontal one between resource users and a vertical relationship between the government and the resource users. The empirical analysis focuses on sub- Saharan Africa and finds that levels of ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity and levels of democracy in the year that each country declared its exclusive economic zone have a close relationship with ensuing marine exploitation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a research project which explores the relationship between the perceived threat of losing power without compensation, institutional quality and economic development. The project uses a process-tracing method to compare independent variables involve in the relationship. It analyzes the threats to leaders in Botswana, Ghana, Chile, Bolivia, South Korea and Cambodia. It covers the strength of civil society, the degree of inter-group inequality and the political role of the middle class.