This is an excerpt from Hamilton Jordan's book No Such Thing as a Bad Day reprinted with permission.

Appropriate utilization of forest resources is important for improving rural household livelihoods and conservation in the forest rich areas of developing countries. Using a survey of 1074 rural households in 20 administrative villages in the four southern mountainous townships in Zhouzhi County, Xian, China, we find that there are four forestry-related livelihood activities in our survey site....

In conflict-affected situations, aid-funded livelihood interventions are often tasked with a dual imperative: to generate material welfare benefits and to contribute to peacebuilding outcomes. There may be some logic to such a transformative agenda, but does the reality square with the rhetoric? Through a review of the effectiveness of a range of livelihood promotion interventions--from job cre...