Brian Belcher

• Ph.D.
• Chair at Royal Roads University

A Theory of Change (ToC) is a set of testable hypotheses that model how an intervention will contribute to a change process. ToC development and use can help in the design of transdisciplinary research to build trust and accountability in the research process. We present an online process for ToC facilitation and offer guidance to collaboratively b...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to assess the contributions of graduate research to social innovation and change for learning and improved transdisciplinary practice. Universities, as centers of teaching and research, face high demand from society to address urgent social and environmental challenges. Faculty and students are keen to use their...

Any effort to understand, evaluate, and improve the impact of research must begin with clear concepts and definitions. Currently, key terms to describe research results are used ambiguously, and the most common definitions for these terms are fundamentally flawed. This hinders research design, evaluation, learning, and accountability. Specifically,...

Theory of Change (ToC) has been promoted as a useful tool in sustainability research for visioning, planning, communication, monitoring, evaluation and learning. It involves a mapping of steps towards a desired long-term goal supplemented with continuous reflection on how and why change is expected to happen in a particular context. However, there...

Forests, trees and agroforestry are part of major land-use transitions worldwide, with an impact on the balance between the global issues of planetary boundaries and local concerns about livelihoods and peoples’ rights. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include complex trade-offs between various local and global interests in forests or de...

Researchers and research organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their work contributes to positive change and helps solve pressing societal challenges. There is a simultaneous trend towards more engaged transdisciplinary research that is complexity-aware and appreciates that change happens through systems transformation, no...

With high and increasing expectations for research to have social and environmental impact, there is a corresponding need for appropriate methods to demonstrate (for accountability) and analyze (for learning) whether and how research projects contribute to change processes. Evaluation is especially challenging for problem-oriented research that emp...

Hansson and Polk (2018, Research Evaluation, 27/2: 132-44) aim to assess the usefulness of the concepts of relevance, credibility, and legitimacy for understanding the link between process and impact in transdisciplinary (TD) research. However, the article misrepresents some of the ideas in the two main reference articles. It also uses definitions...

There is a need to better understand how scientific knowledge is used in decision-making. This is especially true in the Global South where policy processes often occur under high political uncertainty and where a shift toward multilevel governance and decision-making brings new opportunities and challenges. This study applies knowledge-policy mode...

More and more effective research is needed to help address complex sustainability problems. Many research approaches have adopted more transdisciplinary characteristics as a way to improve effectiveness. However, empirical evidence of the extent to which and how transdisciplinary research design and implementation contribute to (more) effective sci...

There are high expectations for contemporary forestry research, and sustainability research more broadly, to have impact in the form of improved institutions, policy and practice and improved social and environmental conditions. As part of this trend, there has been an evolution of research approaches that move beyond isolated, reductionist, discip...

The terms “outcome” and “impact” are ubiquitous in evaluation discourse. However, there are many competing definitions that lack clarity and consistency and sometimes represent fundamentally different meanings. This leads to profound confusion, undermines efforts to improve learning and accountability, and represents a challenge for the evaluation...

The increasing external demand from research funders and research managers to assess, evaluate and demonstrate the quality and the effectiveness of research is well known. Less discussed, but equally important, is the evolving interest and use of research evaluation to support learning and adaptive management within research programmes. This is esp...

Research increasingly seeks both to generate knowledge and to contribute to real-world solutions, with strong emphasis on context and social engagement. As boundaries between disciplines are crossed, and as research engages more with stakeholders in complex systems, traditional academic definitions and criteria of research quality are no longer suf...

The study uses a novel method to investigate the role of forest proximity, market remoteness, and caste in determining household income, especially forest income, in an underdeveloped region of India. A high (>50%) proportion of total income is earned in cash. Forest products contribute substantially to total income, with fuelwood as the most impor...

More than 10,000 years after the Agricultural Revolution started, millions of rural smallholders across the developing world may still derive as much income from foraging forests and wildlands as from cultivating crops. These steady environmental income flows come often from public forests, and are extracted by men and women alike. However, inflexi...

This paper presents results from a comparative analysis of environmental income from approximately 8000 households in 24 developing countries collected by research partners in CIFOR’s Poverty Environment Network (PEN). Environmental income accounts for 28% of total household income, 77% of which comes from natural forests. Environmental income shar...

Very little has yet been written about the cultural or economic contributions of woodcarving to people's livelihoods or the consequences of felling hardwood and softwood trees for the international woodcarving trade. Carving Out a Future is the first examination of this trade and its critical links to rural livelihoods, biodiversity, conservation,...

Effective monitoring is a fundamental requirement for adaptive management. The need for better tools for monitoring livelihoods is particularly acute. A simple indicators-based livelihoods monitoring tool to be used at the village scale was developed and tested. Participatory methods were used to elicit local perceptions and aspirations about devel...

Quarterly socioeconomic data from 240 households are used to study the links between forest-related income and rural livelihoods in southern China. Results show average forest-related income shares of 31.5%, which was predominantly derived from cultivated non-timber sources. Forest-related income was important to households at all income levels, al...

Despite becoming one of China's fastest expanding and most valuable forest land uses, bamboo's role in livelihoods and rural development is poorly understood. Detailed quantitative data from 240 households were used to study the contribution of bamboo to household income and rural livelihoods in 12 remote and mountainous villages in southern China....

Guaranteeing households' equal access to land has long been advocated as paramount to implement development policies in Rural China. Given the chronic land scarcity in densely populated regions of China, finding a compromise between private and collective land rights has been important to protect livelihood safety nets and to address poverty issues...

We adapt participatory photography as a tool for engaging local stakeholders and for incorporating local knowledge, preferences, and values into natural resources planning and management. Participatory photography workshops were organized in six villages in Lao PDR, as a step toward creating an indicators-based livelihoods monitoring tool, as part...

Image speckle is inherent in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data resulting in difficulty interpreting raw radar imagery and necessitating some form of image enhancement. A wide variety of filter types are available to reduce speckle and a number of univariate or subjective methods have been proposed to evaluate their efficacy. However, there are fe...

There is a new and increasing emphasis on poverty alleviation and livelihoods improvement in forestry, representing both a challenge and an opportunity. This paper briefly reviews the evolution of the ‘livelihoods’ issue, analyzes the concept of ‘poverty alleviation’ and discusses means by which forestry can contribute to livelihoods improvement. I...

Resin producing agroforestry in the Krui area of Sumatra in Indonesia is presented as an environmentally friendly, income generating land-use system which contributes to both development and conservation objectives. We studied the change in household income portfolios in three communities in the Krui area. The studies revealed that in the period 19...

This paper analyzes the spatial distribution and patterns of land use change associated with expansion of bamboo production in three important bamboo-producing counties (Anji, Pingjiang and Muchuan) along a development gradient in China. Existing and new bamboo plantations tend to be located at higher elevation and on sloping lands around formerly...

This article challenges the pervasive view that commercialisation of non-timber forest products can (easily) achieve ecosystem and species conservation as well as improving livelihoods. Following a brief review of who and what is involved, it focuses on the main ecological and livelihood risks of unconsidered promotion of NTFP commercialisation, dr...

"This article addresses the question, to what extent and under which conditions nontimber forest product (NTFP) trade leads to both livelihood improvement and forest conservation. We based the analysis on a standardized expert-judgment assessment of the livelihood and environmental outcomes of 55 cases of NTFP trade from Asia, Africa, and Latin Ame...

Understanding of the role and potential of nontimber forest products (NTFPs) for livelihood improvement and conservation has been hindered by a lack of a clear theoretical framework and a functional typology of cases. To help fill this gap, we did a comparative analysis of 61 cases of commercial NTFP production in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. C...

There is a range of forest management systems between pure extraction and plantation systems. Such “intermediate systems” range from wild forests modified for increased production of selected products to anthropogenic forests with a high-density of valuable species growing within a relatively diverse and complex structure. These systems, classed he...

The characteristics of the plant species diversity of natural secondary forest community in the northwest Zhejiang Province were studied. The plant growth form and the importance value of the community were determined, and the richness, evenness, and species diversity index of each layer of the community were calculated with varied calculation meth...

The changing role of forests in people’s livelihoods in frontier areas is important from the perspective of poverty alleviation and forest conservation. This study explores the link between expanding economic opportunities, forest dependence, and welfare in 73 villages. Village economic options, forest cover, and land suitability for agriculture an...

In the growing literature at the interface of rural livelihood improvement and conservation of natural forests, two overarching issues stand out: (1) How and to what extent use of forest resources do and can contribute to poverty alleviation and (2) How and to what extent poverty alleviation and forest conservation are and can be made convergent ra...

There is a range of forest management systems between pure extraction and plantation systems. Such “intermediate systems” range from wild forests modified for increased production of selected products to anthropogenic forests with a high-density of valuable species growing within a relatively diverse and complex structure. These systems, classed he...

As part of a multi-collaborator research project on the potential of non-timber forest product (NTFP) trade for conservation and development we designed tools to assess the effects of NTFP trade on people's livelihoods and the environment. To assess livelihood outcomes of NTFP trade we used the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods framework and identified...

Forest-based farmers are faced with rapidly changing economic opportunities due to many factors. In response, farmers are changing their main economic activities and land uses. This study compares the financial costs and benefits of the principal land use options in two sub-districts of East Kalimantan Province, Indonesia. Financial benefits of oil...

We analyse the collaboration between forestry research institutions and forestry departments in China based on a bibliometric study of four leading Chinese forestry journals. Multiple-authored papers are frequent, and there is a significant collaboration between research and implementing agencies. This collaboration centres on applied research, bei...

Forestry and poverty analyses in China show an ambiguous relationship. While the co-occurrence of forest rich areas and poor counties has been noted by some authors, others have stressed the role played by forestry in these areas where it is frequently one of the few options available. Our study indicates that the expansion of off-farm income is th...

Forest-based farmers are faced with rapidly changing economic opportunities due to many factors. In response, farmers are changing their main economic activities and land uses. This study compares the financial costs and benefits of the principal land use options in two sub-districts of East Kalimantan Province, Indonesia. Financial benefits of oil...

Engagement in the market changes the opportunities and strategies of forest-related peoples. Efforts to support rural development need to better understand the potential importance of markets and the way people respond to them. To this end, we compared 61 case studies of the commercial production and trade of nontimber forest products from Asia, Af...

Woodcarving, like the trade in many non-timber products, is largely hidden from the attention of policy makers in the development, forestry and tourism sectors. In this infobrief, we draw attention to the importance of woodcarving to local livelihoods and the negative repercussions on species and ecosystems. We then suggest means of making the wood...

Bamboo, with a long tradition in China, is one of the emerging sectors in the Chinese economy. It is making an increasingly large contribution to farmers' income and playing an important role in rural industrial development. Bamboo products are also being substituted for wood products, a process that has been accelerated by a variety of policy meas...

Rattan, as is the case for many non- wood forest products (NWFPs), is typically produced under extensive conditions - the bulk of the world's supply still comes from wild resources - by people with relatively little economic and political power. Individual producers tend to harvest small quantities in remote and highly dispersed production areas, o...

Bamboos have often been viewed as inferior products, labeled as the “poor man's timber.” Development groups have proposed bamboo production as an opportunity for increasing the wealth of the lower-income groups. This paper is a study of the household economy of 200 bamboo farmers in eight townships of Anji County in China. The authors describe the...

China's major economc policy changes since 1978 have had a great impact on the forestry sector. This paper aims to document these changes in the case of bamboo, and at the same time show bamboo's contribution to rural development in the new policy and economic conditions. New challenges will have to be met, such a diversification, improvement in qu...

This paper examines the performance of an adaptive collaborative management approach (ACM) to increasing poor people's access to, rights and benefits from a community-based nonwood forest product (NWFP) network enterprise in the Eastern Hills of Nepal. This network has rights over some 2,000 hectares of community forests and more than 1,346 member...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-227).