Page - (000238) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

labor andmanagerial labor is not a likely hindrance to the outcomes of interest. Thus, this preliminary livelihood index offers insight into a project’s ability to improve local economicwell-beingby focusingon thenecessary (thoughpossibly insufficient) components of an enhanced livelihood. 12.3 FieldMethods The three projects under evaluation have been registered under theGoldStandard orVoluntaryCarbonStandard since2012, enabling adequate time for the projects to perform and to begin to make an impact on the community of interest. The projects are located inCambodia eachproject is national in scope.Theprojects all market their carbonassets as“pro-poor”, “GoldStandard”oruseful for sustainable development, citing community benefits as a salient marketing feature of their project in addition to the environmental benefits. This research is based on 144 semi-structured interviews with 91 individual carbonassetmanagers,projectmanagers, andfinanciers. Interviewees included the full range of people involved with, and impacted by, the project, including: technology producers (including designers, factoryworkers, supervisors, and dis- tributors), technology promoters, micro credit agents, local banking institutions, recipienthouseholds (bothhusbandandwifewhenpossible),households thatopted not to participate in the project, agricultural extensionworkers involved inproject dissemination, carbon asset managers, carbon asset brokers, financiers, foreign consultants to the projects, hedge fundmanagers, and researcherswho had previ- ouslywritten onor had reportedlyobservedmyprojects of interest. In formulating the interviews and research approach, process tracing provided the analytic basis; it is amethod that focuses on identifying sequential processes andmechanismsthatdetermineoutcomesof interest (Checkel2008;Bennett2010). Process tracing favors“thick” (in-depth) analysisofa small setof casesbecauseof its primary interest in sequential processeswithin a case, as opposed to comparing correlations of data across a large N case-set. For example, the semi-structured interviews, conducted with a translator, followed a basic template designed to quantify gains (and losses) from project participation in terms of income, time, andopportunitycosts,whilealsocoveringqualitativequestionsontheparticipants’ assessmentof theirqualityof life ingeneral terms, and the impactof theprojecton their livelihoodsandchoices.Open-endedquestions suchas“what is yourgreatest concern about the project?” helped to identify the criteria for locally-relevant project success.The theory inquestionhere relates to thebelief that carbonmarket projects that target households and utilize point-of-use technologies for public healtharegoing tosupport local, sustainabledevelopmentandare thereforeworthy of premium carbon credit labels such as the “Gold Standard” or the privileged position of being named “charismatic carbon”within the carbonmarket commu- nity. Process tracing can dig deeply into the assumption that household-scale interventions are synonymouswith local development. 222 J.Hyman