College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Effectively evaluating environmental, social, and economic outcomes in voluntary sustainability programs: Lessons from Laos(2022) Traldi, Rebecca; Silva, Julie A; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Voluntary sustainability programs (VSPs) are a subset of environmental interventions which rely on participants’ willingness to engage, rather than mandatory regulation. VSPs have been a central component of sustainable development and environmental mitigation strategies for decades, with significant investments from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), multilaterals, and the private sector. VSPs typically aim to positively influence environmental, economic, and social outcomes, although program-specific priorities often result in an uneven focus across these three domains (also known as the three pillars of sustainability). Despite their popularity, questions regarding the value of VSPs remain unanswered. Assessments of VSPs typically do not eliminate rival explanations for program outcomes when evaluating their successes and failures, thus limiting our understanding of their effectiveness.This dissertation addresses this gap by investigating socioeconomic and environmental outcomes for agriculture and forestry VSPs. Mixed methods including systematic review, inverse probability-of-treatment weighted regression (IPWR), and inequality and polarization decomposition provide insights both at a global level, and for two national case studies in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (hereafter Laos). A wide range of datasets inform the analysis, including nationally representative poverty and expenditure surveys and land-use land cover estimates derived from remotely sensed imagery. By exploring a variety of VSPs – including agricultural and forestry voluntary sustainability standards and sustainable development projects – the study acknowledges the context-specific nature of VSP impact, while also drawing generalizable insights relevant for different types of interventions. The research findings presented in this dissertation elucidate the degree to which VSPs deliver on stated goals and objectives. First, a systematic literature review reveals that the evidence base for VSP impact remains limited, with some geographies, sustainability outcomes, and project types receiving more inquiry and evaluation than others. Second, an IPWR analysis suggests that agriculture and forestry VSPs have achieved some success in generating positive outcomes – specifically, for poverty and forest cover. However, variations in project focus and design bring different results. For example, food security and livelihoods programs which prioritize local socioeconomic well-being can generate significant co-benefits for environmental outcomes, and resource management projects can positively impact forest cover. Conversely, the forest management projects considered here do not achieve significant benefits for poverty or forest cover – presumably due to challenges like land tenure insecurity, insufficient participant incentives, and persistent drivers of deforestation (illegal logging, large-scale concessions). Finally, an assessment of economic inequality and polarization associated with the Laos rubber boom demonstrates the importance of assessing how VSPs influence economic inequality. It also indicates that VSPs must address inequality’s systemic drivers – including dispossession from land and forest resources, lacking worker protections, livelihood vulnerability, and barriers for smallholders – to maximize potential benefits. Overall, this dissertation research provides an example of how evidence synthesis, quasi-experimental methods, and consideration of economic, social, and environmental sustainability can deepen our understanding of VSPs.Item Do Cellmates Matter? A Study of Prison Peer Effects under Essential Heterogeneity(2014) Harris, Heather Michele; Reuter, Peter; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines prison peer effects in an adult prison population in the United States using a unique dataset assembled from the administrative databases of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. The members of a first-time prison release cohort were identified and matched to each of the cellmates with whom they shared a double cell. These data were then linked to arrest history data from the Pennsylvania State Police. Criminological theories of social influence expect unobserved and difficult to quantify factors, such as criminality, to affect criminal behavior both independently and through intermediate decisions, including the choice to maintain prison peer associations. Those theories, therefore, implicitly assume the presence of essential heterogeneity, which helps to account for the response heterogeneity observed in studies of social influence. This study introduces the concept of essential heterogeneity to criminology and is the first to apply a method to address it, local instrumental variables, to estimate causal social interaction effects. The analyses presented in this study demonstrate that there is considerable response heterogeneity in prison peer effects. That response heterogeneity is attributable to essential heterogeneity, as implicitly expected by criminological learning theories. However, the null average effects estimated do not accord with the predictions of criminological learning theories, including differential association, balance, and prisonization theories, each of which expects peers who are, on average, more criminally experienced to exert criminogenic effects. The presence of essential heterogeneity indicates that estimating average prison peer effects does little to adequately characterize the relationship between social interactions with cellmates and releasee reoffending behaviors. Within the null average prison peer effect estimates lies tremendous variation in marginal prison peer effects. Some marginal prison peer effects are significantly criminogenic, while others are significantly crimino-suppressive. That substantial variation in the measured effect of prison peers on reoffending persists despite rigorous analysis and the inclusion of robust theoretically relevant controls suggests that future work should focus on creating constructs more appropriate to the task of determining who is harmed and who is helped as a result of interactions with prison peers.