Any basic search of literature or development project material will uncover numerous mentions to livelihoods approaches, perspectives, methods and frameworks. The rise of livelihood perspectives in rural development thinking and practice from the 1990s did make a difference. Thus for different sites, future pathways are envisaged – and so different types of intervention are required – if livelihood options are to be enhanced. The appeal is simple: look at the real world, and try and understand things from local perspectives. Four recurrent failings of livelihoods perspectives can be highlighted. 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG. The branded approaches began to be associated not just with analytical tools (frameworks and checklists), but normative positions. 3099067 These were combined through a set of simultaneous equations to estimate farm-specific capitals and SI from the observed farm variables. A complex archaeology of ideas and practices is revealed which demonstrates the hybrid nature of such concepts, bridging perspectives across different fields of rural development scholarship and practice. For example, in a study from rural Zimbabwe, Frost et al. But perhaps the more interesting applications were areas where clearly cross-cutting themes could be opened up by a livelihoods perspective. They must ask how particular forms of globalisation and associated processes of production and exchange – historically from colonialism to contemporary neo-liberal economics – create both processes of marginalisation and opportunity. There was of course important discussion about how assets could be combined, substituted and switched, with different portfolios emerging over time for different people in different places, and linking changes in natural capital (‘the environment’) with social and economic dimensions was an important step forward. There is a need for micro-finance, The M.S. But were such local strategies enough? It chimed very much with the work of Bebbington (1999) who developed a ‘capitals and capabilities’ framework for looking at rural livelihoods and poverty in the Andes, again drawing on Sen's classic work. due to a lack of understanding for the complex livelihood strategies and networks of socio-economic and institutional relationships which characterise the different strata of these societies. A simple, integrating approach was needed that would tie people into this conversation, and become a way of explaining – and making happen – the idea. cesses of change in and in relation to the rural world. Arce (2003), for example, offers the case of coca farming in Bolivia, asking whose livelihoods count – and to what and whose ends? Does a re-energised livelihoods perspective need a new meta-theory to carry it forward? LivingRoots Handmade participates in Who’s Next Paris SLRD ramping up production at largest apparel manufacturing unit in North East India. Livelihoods approaches were often dismissed as too complex, and so not compatible with real-world challenges and decision-making processes. Thus, the long-standing work on agro-food systems (Goodman and Watts 1997, McMichael 1994) and agrarian change (Bernstein and Byers 2001), for example, provide important insights, while political ecology explicitly explores links between the local level and broader political-economic structures (Peet and Watts 1996). These questions often remain unaddressed or only implicitly treated. It fosters inquiry into how agrarian power relations between classes and other social groups are created, understood, contested and transformed. This arises in particular from looking at the consequence of development efforts from a local-level perspective, making the links from the micro-level, situated particularities of poor people's livelihoods to wider-level institutional and policy framings at district, provincial, national and even international levels. In such a view ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ are not separated – either physically or analytically – but intimately intertwined through connections, linkages, relations and dynamics between diverse locales. Social relations inevitably govern the distribution of property (including land), patterns of work and divisions of labour, the distribution of income and the dynamics of consumption and accumulation. School of Livelihood and Rural Development is a ISO9001 organisation. Far from it: there is a rich and important history that goes back another 50 or more years where a cross-disciplinary livelihoods perspective has profoundly influenced rural development thinking and practice. 2003). As well as presenting a threat of global disease ou, The Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) is a loose international network on engaged researchers studying the politics of contemporary global resource rush. Data were collected using a participatory approach from 270 farmer groups that completed farmer field school in Sumatra, Java, and Bali. With cases examining migration, remittance flows and rural social movements, the importance of looking at linking solid, place-based analysis with broader scales, including trans-national connections, is emphasised. This may not be through gradual, incremental shifts, but through more radical transitions, where new social, economic and technological systems unfold. Analyses at the individual level can in turn aggregate up to complex livelihood strategies and pathways at household, village or even district levels. But what are the power relationships underlying this new discourse, and how do they in turn shape action? A number of core challenges are identified, centred on the need to inject a more thorough-going political analysis into the centre of livelihoods perspectives. Each offers opportunities for extending, expanding and enriching livelihoods perspectives from a variety of different perspectives. The ‘community of practice’ associated with sustainable livelihoods approaches in this period certainly had a strong normative commitment to poverty reduction and bottom-up, participatory approaches. Livelihoods perspectives and rural development. Looking beyond the local to wider landscapes is of course central to geographical analysis, and the notion of ‘scape’ has been extended to look at the patterns of practices of globalisation (Appadurai 1996). As discussed below, although a more explicit attention to the theorisation of key concepts, with especial attention to the understanding of power and politics is clearly required, a more pluralist, hybrid vision is probably more appropriate if a solid, field-based, grounded empirical stance is to remain at the core. For this, we carried out an socio-economic assessment of the Yaéré floodplain population through a wealth / activity ranking exercise combined to an analysis of the land / water tenure systems. A new paradigm for rural livelihoods COVID-19 has exposed the weakest links in our supply chains, the largest impact of which has been felt by the poor. It does not replace other tools, such as participatory development, sector-wide approaches, or integrated rural development. 7A core feature of the DfID version of the framework (see Carney et al. But it was not until 1992, when Chambers and Conway produced a working paper for the Institute of Development Studies that a now much used definition of sustainable livelihoods emerged. This short book offers an overview of these debates, situating them in a wider literature on agrarian change and exploring the implications for research, policy and practice. Thus SLA could be said to be a practical framework for evidence-based intervention and has much logic resting behind it, especially in a world undergoing rapid change and where resources to support development interventions are inevitably limited. But there is an urgent need to rethink, retool and reengage, and draw productively from other areas of enquiry and experience to enrich and reinvigorate livelihoods perspectives for new contemporary challenges. This involved collaborations of ecologists, anthropologists, agriculturalists and economists looking at changing rural systems and their development challenges (Fardon 1990). Third, are questions of directionality and ideas of ‘progress’ in development. Farm variables within each capital were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. Livelihoods perspectives have thus often failed to engage with debates about globalisation, for example, ceding the terrain to macro-economics, notoriously under-informed about local-level complexities. But in order to be responsive to new contexts a number of challenges lie ahead. The decline and fall of livelihoods perspectives? Concurrently, peasants have been developing and modifying their strategies for social reproduction, under conditions that are usually uncertain and restrictive. 2003). The commitment to local-level fieldwork, with understandings embedded in the complex realities of diverse livelihoods, but linking to more macro-structural issues, are all important characteristics. http://www.dfid.gov.uk/Pubs/files/whitepaper2000.pdf. Yet the simple, rather obvious, argument for a livelihoods perspective, as discussed further below, is not so easy to translate into practice, with inherited organisational forms, disciplinary biases and funding structures constructed around other assumptions and ways of thinking. At root, political ecology focuses on the intersections of structural, political forces and ecological dynamics, although there are many different strands and variations. But where do such perspectives … About the same time, through the initiative of Richard Sandbrook, sustainable livelihoods became a focus for a conference organised by the International Institute for Environment and Development in 1987 (Conroy and Litvinoff 1988), and was the subject of Chambers' (1987) overview paper. In developing the distinctive actor-oriented approach of the Wageningen School, Norman Long was referring to livelihood strategies in his studies in Zambia at this time (Long 1984, see De Haan and Zoomers 2005). This was not the old world of natural resources specialists (archetypically concerned with soils not people) and economists (with their interest in growth and trickle down), but a new, integrated perspective centred on normative, political commitments to banish poverty – and later supported by widespread public campaigns, at least in the UK, from Jubilee 2000 to Make Poverty History. But what is left out by this particular normative framing? In particular, the paper highlights the problems arising from a simplistic application of synthetic frameworks which have come to dominate certain aspects of applied development discussion and practice over the past decade. All figure content in this area was uploaded by Ian Scoones, All content in this area was uploaded by Ian Scoones on Jan 26, 2014, http://www.livelihoods.org/info/dlg/GLOSS/Gloss3.htm#l. A variety of definitions are offered in the literature, including, for example, ‘the means of gaining a living’ (Chambers 1995, vi) or ‘a combination of the resources used and the activities undertaken in order to live’.1 A descriptive analysis portrays a complex web of activities and interactions that emphasises the diversity of ways people make a living. But advocates of a sustainable livelihoods approach argued strongly that this time it was different. As Sue Unsworth (2001, 7) argues: Poverty reduction requires a longer term, more strategic understanding of the social and political realities of power, and confronts us with ethical choices and trade-offs which are much more complex … A more historical, less technical way of looking at things can provide a sense of perspective. Majority of the respondents observed climate changes in the last 10–20 years and perceived them to have affected their capital assets in the process of forming livelihoods. Bebbington 1999, Leach et al. We proposed a sustainability index (SI) for two landscapes dominated by two agricultural systems: cattle ranching and small-scale family agriculture. Results show that agricultural income is highly sensitive to rubber plantation area, rubber yield, and rubber price given the very large income potential of the crop. Such as, the consideration of inequitable power relations between actors in the food system, which in many cases perpetuate poverty and mostly impact on already vulnerable people (Clapp, 2016;DeFries et al., 2017;Van der Ploeg, 2010). Yet, in arguing that livelihoods perspectives are important for integrating insights and interventions beyond disciplinary or sectoral boundaries, the paper also touches on some of the limitations, dangers and challenges. Finally, future researches should include possible sources of inequality in access to livelihood resources that do not allow achieving sustainability as defined in Scoones, I. e academic institutions and independent research think tanks. These have pro-nature, pro-poor and prowomen orientation. India-462039. The input-output-outcome elements of the livelihoods framework were of course easily recognised by economists, and were amenable to quantitative analysis and the application of numerous long questionnaires. Later, agro-ecosystem analysis (Conway 1985) and rapid and participatory rural appraisal approaches (Chambers 2008) were added to the repertoire, expanding the range of methods and styles of field engagement. But, there are contrasting opinions regarding the potential of agroforestry and land tenure security to create economically and environmentally robust livelihoods. Livelihoods and Development is a rich treasury of grounded insights which broaden and deepen our understanding and shed new light on the … This line of work overlapped substantially with studies that emerged from Marxist political geography, but had, in some respects, another intellectual trajectory which came to be labelled as political ecology (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, Robbins 2003, Forsyth 2003). 1997, 1999) and its more popular cousin, the sustainable livelihoods framework (Scoones 1998, Carney 1998) emphasised the economic attributes of livelihoods as mediated by social-institutional processes. The sustainable livelihoods framework in particular linked inputs (designated with the term ‘capitals’ or ‘assets’) and outputs (livelihood strategies), connected in turn to outcomes, which combined familiar territory (of poverty lines and employment levels) with wider framings (of well-being and sustainability) (see Figure 1). The VKCs with lab to land and land to lab linkages provide solutions almost instantaneously to the problems of the small and marginal farming, fishing and landless rural families. Search. As a result, these populations have been targeted for poverty alleviation by fisheries development programmes since the early 60's. Rural Development and Strengthening Rural Clusters Innovative Activity Based Education Programs . Report of the world commission on environment and development: our common future (the Brundtland Report), Land and livelihoods: The politics of land reform in southern Africa, Globalizing Food. www.chronicpoverty.org/toolbox/Livelihoods.php. Debates about livelihoods, employment and poverty emerged around the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen,5 but a livelihoods angle remained at the margins of the mainstream, with debates framed in terms of employment. This will enhance the capacity of livelihoods perspectives to address key lacunae in recent discussions, including questions of knowledge, politics, scale and dynamics. Much livelihoods analysis centres on the basic question of how different people gain access to assets for the pursuit of livelihoods. their human potential, the provision of rural amenities and tourism, their attractiveness for employment and living, and their role as a reservoir of natural resources and highly valued landscape, the poor situation of the rural incomes is a strong argument for the need to develop a diversified rural economy. Add to My Bookmarks Export citation. Livelihoods perspectives and rural development . While accepting diverse, complex livelihoods as an empirical reality (certainly an advance from many other analyses), the assumption is that these are starting points for a future trajectory to something better. The operationalisation approach for assessment balances policy-usability, system complexity and comprehensiveness, while providing actionable insights. Madhya Pradesh, India – 462039 . Key to promoting well-being and development is the conditions under which people move, and policies can a, It is usually assumed that most, if not all, small scale fishing communities, particularly in tropical countries, represents the poorest and most disadvantaged part of rural societies. , household surveys and key-informant interviews from Wakiso and Gomba districts served as data sources for the analysis. Author ( s ) Scoones, I have argued, a return the. Apace, attention to politics and were where questions of power and politics rich of! 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