Building cleaner communities in equatorial Africa: Road upgrades and household waste management in northern Benin

IF 4.7 2区环境科学与生态学 Q2 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Environmental Development Pub Date : 2025-02-17 DOI:10.1016/j.envdev.2025.101179

Dafeng Xu

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Scholars have long discussed various transportation tools as key factors in building sustainable societies by either generating or reducing environmental hazards. We examine effects of road upgrades on household waste management, an environmental outcome that is less explored in prior research, yet particularly relevant in the Global South. We use the latest census and health survey data from Benin to estimate how household waste disposal practices in northern Benin were affected by a major road project that began to be used in 2011. We use difference-in-differences regression models to estimate the effect of the road project by comparing areas with and without road upgrades, before and after the construction. Results show that this road project led to a statistically significant and sizeable increase in the sustainable, service-based collection of household waste in communities that were involved in the project and were historically less developed. The positive environmental effects were concentrated among rural communities. These results illustrate that improvements in transportation infrastructure facilitate environmental management—specifically waste management in this paper—by making the delivery of environmental services more effective and accessible to ordinary people. Overall, this paper provides policy recommendation for politicians and planners to consider transportation as an integral part of sustainable social and economic development.

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来源期刊

Environmental Development Social Sciences-Geography, Planning and Development

CiteScore

8.40

自引率

1.90%

发文量

审稿时长

74 days

期刊介绍： Environmental Development provides a future oriented, pro-active, authoritative source of information and learning for researchers, postgraduate students, policymakers, and managers, and bridges the gap between fundamental research and the application in management and policy practices. It stimulates the exchange and coupling of traditional scientific knowledge on the environment, with the experiential knowledge among decision makers and other stakeholders and also connects natural sciences and social and behavioral sciences. Environmental Development includes and promotes scientific work from the non-western world, and also strengthens the collaboration between the developed and developing world. Further it links environmental research to broader issues of economic and social-cultural developments, and is intended to shorten the delays between research and publication, while ensuring thorough peer review. Environmental Development also creates a forum for transnational communication, discussion and global action. Environmental Development is open to a broad range of disciplines and authors. The journal welcomes, in particular, contributions from a younger generation of researchers, and papers expanding the frontiers of environmental sciences, pointing at new directions and innovative answers. All submissions to Environmental Development are reviewed using the general criteria of quality, originality, precision, importance of topic and insights, clarity of exposition, which are in keeping with the journal''s aims and scope.