Rural community forestry-user-group membership fees and women's fuelwood-collection time in Malawian villages: an instrumental-variable analysis of forest-boundary proximity

Community forest user groups in Malawi typically require an annual membership fee, and the fee is often justified as a conservation instrument. The fee is better understood as a price of access whose behavioural consequences fall disproportionately on women's fuelwood-collection time, and that the causal effect can be identified only if the fee is instrumented by a plausibly exogenous source of cost exposure. To anchor the design in measurable quantities, the paper draws on the DHS Program indicator 'HIV test for women: Absent at the time of blood collection: Interviewed' across 28 African countries and 55 country-survey observations between 2003 and 2025, with a mean of 0.967 and a standard deviation of 1.488. The indicator is used here only to characterise the scale and dispersion of a comparable survey-based measure, not to estimate the effect of interest. The paper concludes that the fee-time relationship is identified only under a boundary-proximity instrument that is defended on institutional rather than statistical grounds, and that studies reporting fee effects without such a defence are likely to overstate the protective effect of user-group membership on women's collection time.