Historically, agriculture has been crucial to Pakistan’s economic growth and development and remains so even today.

The volume is organized in a way that aims to take the reader from an understanding of the central concepts examined in all the studies (poverty reduction, property rights, and collective action) to the application of these concepts in different c

The major theoretical enterprise of this book is to understand how the institutions of collective action and property rights influence rural poverty and livelihoods.

The first section of the chapter describes the physical, technical, and socioeconomic as well as policy governance conditions.

This chapter examines the role of groups and networks in helping the poor manage their exposure to risks and cope with shocks to their livelihoods in the rural Philippines.

In this concluding chapter we turn from a detailed analysis of the findings from the studies collected here to the contributions they make to the literature on their respective themes in terms of the way that collective action and property rights

In doing so, the chapter builds on research addressing how poor households respond to shocks; see Morduch (2005) and references therein, the review paper by Skoufias and Quisumbing (2005), and the recent collection edited by Dercon (2005).