There are three Excel files containing data arising from household surveys of two villages in Lamjung district of Nepal and four settlements near Merowe Dam in Sudan. The data include social profile of these villages (including livelihood strategies) and information with regard to access to natural resources and project impacts. Data from Khasur village in Lamjung district of Nepal focus on villagers' access to forest resources and their participation on REDD+ pilot project whereas Bhulbhule data focus on household profile and people's reaction to the development of a hydropower project. The data from Merowe dam case study in Sudan focus on impacts of hydropower development, including issues of local people's displacement and access to land and water. Samples of information sheet/consent form and the questionnaires used for data collection in each of the case study sites are also provided. The data are from the household surveys of two villages (Khasur and Bhulbhule) in Lamjung district of Nepal and four settlements near Merowe Dam in Sudan. The data include social profile of these villages (including livelihood strategies) and information with regard to access to natural resources and project impacts. The household data arose from the research project on 'Rethinking Environment and Development in an Era of Global Norms: An Exploration of Forests and Water in Nepal, Sudan and Uganda'. The research responds to the unprecedented emergence of global environmental norms intended to reconcile natural resource management with poverty alleviation in a just manner. Prominent examples of such norms are the REDD+ safeguards under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the recommendations issued by the World Commission on Dams. The norms possess the potential to transform development practice, so long as they effectively support poor people’s claims on natural resources and rights to sustainable livelihoods. Their increasing significance also challenges research to develop new theory on the dynamics of environment and development that attends to cross-scale relationships between socio-environmental struggles in specific sites, higher-level mobilizations and global norms. The research project examines the effects of global environmental norms on marginalized people’s access to natural resources and livelihoods in the Global South. It employs a political ecology approach expanded through attention to notions of justice and cross-scale environmental politics. Notions of justice are at the core of many socio-environmental struggles, relating to issues of distribution, participation, recognition as well as human and ecological capabilities. They affect what people do, what claims they make on natural resources, how they perceive their own capabilities, and how they develop visions of a good life and desirable ecological capabilities. Ideas about justice are an integral element of environmental politics across scales, connecting local struggles to mobilizations at national and international levels as well as global norms – and causing frictions between them. Building on previous research, this project proceeds by way of four case studies from Nepal, Sudan and Uganda. The first two case studies situated in western Nepal focus on an analysis of people’s reactions to a hydropower project (in one site) and villagers’ participation in a REDD+ pilot project (in another). A third case study on the Merowe hydro-electric dam in Sudan looks at the displacement of people living in the dam site, and the reactions of exiled community members and international activists. The fourth case study compares two carbon forestry projects in Uganda, the Trees for Global Benefit project in Bushenyi and the FACE-UWA project at Mount Elgon.
The case studies were purposively chosen to include variation along these critical dimensions: natural resource (including cases on forests and water), uptake in higher-level mobilizations (including cases where uptake took place and cases where it did not) and ‘success’ (including cases where actions were taken to improve marginalized people’s access to and control over resources as well as cases where this did not happen). The data that are provided here were collected through random household surveys in two villages in Lamjung district of Nepal and four settlements near Merowe Dam in Sudan. Questionnaire interviews were conducted with a 20%-random sample of households in each focal village. The interviews elicited data on current livelihoods (disaggregated by gender), including attention to assets, activities and outcomes. Questions were asked to households about their access to natural resources before and after the environmental project. The data were then recorded in questionnaires and entered into an Excel database.
