Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development

Ian Scoones

• Publisher: Practical Action Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780448756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The message of Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development is clear: livelihoods approaches are an essential lens on questions of rural development, but these need to be situated in a better understanding of political economy. The book looks at the role of social institutions and the politics of policy, as well as issues of identity, gender and generation. The relationships between sustainability and livelihoods are examined, and the book situates livelihoods analysis within a wider political economy of environmental and agrarian change. Four dimensions of a new politics of livelihoods are suggested: a politics of interests, individuals, knowledge and ecology. Together, these suggest new ways of conceptualizing rural and agrarian issues, with profound implications for both thinking and action.

Chapter 1

Livelihoods Perspectives: A Brief History

Livelihoods perspectives have become increasingly central in discussions of rural development over the past few decades. 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. In a short book on a very big idea, the coverage cannot be exhaustive. My aim is to offer a range of insights and perspectives to help move forward debates about livelihoods, rural development and agrarian change.

A focus on livelihoods is of course not new. An integrated, holistic, bottom-up perspective centred on the understanding of what people do to make a living in diverse social contexts and circumstances has been central to rural development thinking and practice for decades. From colonial field practice to integrated rural development to contemporary aid policy, livelihoods have offered a way of integrating sectoral concerns and rooting endeavours in the specifics of local settings. Today, livelihood thinking is being reinvented for new challenges, including climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, social protection and more.

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 show graphs of the number of uses of the terms “livelihoods” and “sustainable livelihoods” in books and journal articles over time. There is a growing usage, especially from the 1990s.

But sometimes in the welter of enthusiasm for livelihoods approaches, frameworks and concepts, analytical rigour and conceptual clarity are lost. What do we mean when we talk of rural livelihoods? What analytical perspectives help us in any field investigation? And what are the implications for wider frameworks of understanding that are aimed at guiding policy and practice? This book will begin to answer these questions.

Figure 1.1 The term livelihoods as used in books, 1950–2008 (percentage of all books scanned in Ngram Viewer from Google Books)

Figure 1.2 Number of published items with livelihoods and sustainable livelihoods in journal articles 1994–2013 (from Thomson Reuters Web of Science)

Livelihoods Thinking

Despite the claims of some genealogies of livelihoods thinking, such perspectives did not suddenly emerge in 1992 with the influential paper by Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway. Far from it: in fact, a cross-disciplinary livelihoods perspective has a rich and important history that reaches back much further and has profoundly influenced thinking and practice.

In the 1820s, William Cobbett travelled across southern and central England on a horse engaged in “actual observation of rural conditions” to inform his political campaigns, all documented in his travelogue, Rural Rides (Cobbett 1885). Later in this book, I argue that Karl Marx in his classic treatise on the method of critical political economy, Grundrisse (Marx 1973), advocated key elements of a livelihoods approach. Early geographical and social anthropological studies looked at “livelihoods” or “modes of life” (cf. Evans Pritchard 1940; Vidal de la Bache 1911; see Sakdapolorak 2014), and Karl Polanyi, who was interested in the relationships between society and markets in economic transformation (1944), was working on a book, The Livelihood of Man, when he died (Polanyi 1977; see Kaag et al. 2004). In the 1940s and 1950s, the work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in what is now Zambia carried out what we would call livelihoods research. This involved collaborations of ecologists, anthropologists, agriculturalists and economists looking at changing rural systems and their development challenges (Werbner 1984; Fardon 1990). While not labelled as such, this work involved quintessential livelihoods analysis — integrative, locally embedded, cross-sectoral analysis informed by a deep field engagement and a commitment to action.

Yet such perspectives did not dominate development thinking in the coming decades. As theories of modernization came to influence development discourse, more mono-disciplinary perspectives ruled the roost. Policy advice was influenced more by professional economists than by the rural development generalists and field-based administrators of the past. Framing this perspective in terms of predictive models of supply and demand, inputs and outputs, and micro and macroeconomics suited the perceived needs of the time. The post-World War II development institutions — the World Bank, the UN system, the bilateral development agencies, as well as national governments in newly independent countries across the world — reflected the hegemony of this framing of policy, linking economics with specialist technical disciplines from the natural, medical and engineering sciences. This pushed alternative sources of social science expertise, and particularly cross-disciplinary livelihoods perspectives, to the side. While alternative, radical Marxist thinkers engaged at the macro level in the political and economic relations of capitalism in post-colonial formations, they rarely delved into the particular, micro level contextual realities on the ground.

Of course this was not universally true, and there were some important, more nuanced contributions offered by both economists and Marxist scholars, particularly in the fields of agricultural economics and geography. The village studies tradition was an important, empirically based alternative to other rural economic analyses (Lipton and Moore 1972; Harriss 2011). In India, for example, a classic series of studies looked at the diverse impacts of the Green Revolution (Farmer 1977; Walker and Ryan 1990). In many respects these were livelihood studies, although with a focus on the microeconomics of farm production and patterns of household accumulation. 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). In the same period, from a different theoretical tradition, field studies such as the classic examination of rural change in northern Nigeria by Michael Watts (1983), Silent Violence, offered important insights into the contested patterns of livelihood change.

These studies served as inspirations for wider bodies of work that followed. Building on the village studies work, household and farming systems studies became an important part of development research in the 1980s (Moock 1986), particularly that focused on intra-household dynamics (Guyer and Peters 1987). Farming systems research was encouraged in a range of countries, with the aim of getting a more integrated, systems perspective on farm problems. Later, agro-ecosystem analysis (Conway 1985) and rapid and participatory rural appraisal approaches (Chambers 2008) expanded the range of methods and styles of field engagement.

Studies focusing on livelihood and environmental change were also important. Given the concern for dynamic ecologies, history and longitudinal change, gender and social differentiation and cultural contexts, geographers, social anthropologists and socio-economists offered a series of influential rich picture analyses of rural settings in this period.¹ This defined the fields of environment and development, as well as livelihoods under stress, with the emphasis on coping strategies and livelihood adaptation.

This line of work overlapped substantially with studies from Marxist political geography, but it had another intellectual trajectory that came to be labelled “political ecology.”² At root, political ecology focuses on the intersections of structural, political forces and ecological dynamics, although there are many different strands and variations. Political ecology is characterized, in part, by its commitment to local-level fieldwork, with understandings embedded in the complex realities of diverse livelihoods but linking to more macro-structural issues.

The environment and development movement of the 1980s and 1990s threw up concerns about linking poverty reduction and development to longer-term environmental shocks and stresses. The term “sustainability” entered the lexicon in a big way following the publication of the Brundtland report in 1987 (WCED 1987) and became a central policy concern following the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Scoones 2007). The sustainable development agenda combined, often in a very uneasy way, livelihoods concerns with the priorities of local people, the central feature of Agenda 21, and global concerns with environmental issues, enshrined in conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. These issues have in turn been explored in cross-disciplinary studies of socio-ecological systems, resilience and sustainability science (Folke et al. 2002; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Clarke and Dickson 2003; Walker and Salt 2006).

Thus, all these approaches — village studies, household economics and gender analyses, farming systems research, agro-ecosystem analysis, rapid and participatory appraisal, studies of socio-environmental change, cultural ecology, political ecology, sustainability science and resilience studies (and many other strands and variants³) — have offered diverse insights into the way complex, rural livelihoods intersect with political, economic and environmental processes. These are insights from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, drawing from both the natural and social sciences. Each has different emphases and disciplinary foci, and each has engaged in rural development policy and practice in different ways, with more or less influence.

Sustainable Rural Livelihoods

Recent interest in livelihoods thinking emerged from the late 1980s with the connection of the three words: sustainable, rural and livelihoods.⁴ This connection was reputedly made in 1986 in a hotel in Geneva during a discussion of the Food 2000 report for the Bruntdland Commission.⁵ In the report, M.S. Swaminathan, Robert Chambers and others laid out a vision for a people-oriented development that had as its starting point the rural realities of poor people (Swaminathan et al. 1987). This was a strong theme in Chambers’ writing, and especially in his massively influential book Rural Development: Putting the Last First (Chambers 1983). This book was influenced in turn by his earlier experiences as a district officer and a manager of integrated research studies (Cornwall and Scoones 2011). In 1987, under the visionary direction of Richard Sandbrook, the International Institute for Environment and Development organized a conference on sustainable livelihoods (Conroy and Litvinoff 1988). And Chambers wrote the overview paper (1987).

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 stated:

A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base. (Conway and Chambers 1992: 6)⁶

This paper is considered the starting point for what came to be known later in the 1990s as the “sustainable livelihoods approach.” At the time,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise for this Book
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Inter-Church Organization for Development Cooperation Statement
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Author's Preface
• 1 - Livelihoods Perspectives: A Brief History
• 2 - Livelihoods, Poverty and Wellbeing
• 3 - Livelihoods Frameworks and Beyond
• 4 - Access and Control: Institutions, Organizations and Policy Processes
• 5 - Livelihoods, the Environment and Sustainability
• 6 - Livelihoods and Political Economy
• 7 - Asking the Right Questions: An Extended Livelihoods Approach
• 8 - Methods for Livelihoods Analysis
• 9 - Bringing Politics Back In: New Challenges for Livelihoods Perspectives
• References
• Index
• Back Cover