Evidence on the Social, Economic, and Environmental Impact of Interventions That Facilitate Bamboo Industry Development for Sustainable Livelihoods : A Systematic Map

Bamboo’s perceived potential in livelihood development has led to development interventions that aim to strengthen the bamboo industry via activities such as training participants in bamboo management, strengthening institutions, and raising awareness. Using the Campaign for Environmental Evidence’s guidelines, we systematically map the available evidence of the impact of these interventions. The evidence is scattered across peer-reviewed and grey literature, with no universal reporting standards. Search sources for this systematic evidence map include a bibliographic database, CABdirect (now known as CABI Digital Library); a search platform for peer-reviewed literature, the Web of Science Core Collection; a bibliographic database for academic literature on agriculture and related fields, SEARCH by the USDA National Agricultural Library; a public search engine for scholarly literature, Google Scholar; a general search engine, Google; and the websites of 37 organizations, with both proprietary search engines and Google used to search for pdf files. Overall, 36 documents are included in the final review, describing 28 unique interventions from 13 countries. Most evidence is found outside the peer-reviewed literature. Outcomes including income changes, increased participation and engagement, and policy changes are reported, with economic impacts dominating the evidence base. Very little evidence of negative outcomes is found, likely constrained by reporting bias. Reporting on evidence of these interventions is limited, with many interventions being excluded from the database due to a lack of identifiable evidence of outcomes or impact.