The Sustainable (Rural) Livelihoods framework
DFID Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
The phrase Sustainable Livelihoods may be traced from the work of Robert Chambers and others, through a research programme undertaken by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, involving work in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Mali in particular.
A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base (DfID, 1999, Section 1.1; see also Scoones, 1998, and Carney, 1998, p. 4).
This approach has been broadly adopted by the Department for International Development (DfID) and a range of other development agencies and is therefore described here as the ‘official’ or dominant framework [see also www.livelihoods.org]. DfID (1999, 2000) has issued detailed ‘guidance sheets’ which are useful to explicate what rapidly became a familiar framework in the late 1990s, shown in the accompanying diagram [not attached]. Within a particular ‘vulnerability context’, defined for example by shifting seasonal constraints, short-term economic shocks and longer-term trends of change, people deploy five types of ‘livelihood assets’ or capital in variable combinations, within circumstances influenced by institutional structures and processes, in order to pursue diverse ‘livelihood strategies’, with more or less measurable ‘livelihood outcomes’.
A series of ‘core concepts’ is defined. Firstly, the approach is ‘people-centred’, in that the making of policy is based on understanding the realities of struggle of poor people themselves, on the principle of their participation in determining priorities for practical intervention, and on their need to influence the institutional structures and processes that govern their lives. Secondly, it is ‘holistic’ in that it is ‘non-sectoral’ and it recognises multiple influences, multiple actors, multiple strategies and multiple outcomes. Thirdly, it is ‘dynamic’ in that it attempts to understand change, complex cause-and-effect relationships and ‘iterative chains of events’. Fourthly, it starts with analysis of strengths rather than of needs, and seeks to build on everyone’s inherent potential. Fifthly, it attempts to ‘bridge the gap’ between macro- and micro-levels. Sixthly, it is committed explicitly to several different dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic, social and institutional. Conflicts between these dimensions are, however, recognised.
Some strengths of the SL approach are as follows.
- It seeks to understand changing combinations of modes of livelihood in a dynamic and historical context.
- It explicitly advocates a creative tension between different levels of analysis.
- It acknowledges the need to transcend the boundaries between conventionally discrete sectors (urban/rural, industrial/agricultural, formal/informal, etc.).
- It implicitly recognises the necessity to investigate the relationships between different activities that constitute household livelihoods, which in turn requires attention both to intra-household and to extra-household social relations.
Some weaknesses, however, may also be identified.
- Elements of the ‘vulnerability context’, such as rampant inflation and extreme uncivil conflict and ripples of mass redundancy, are surely much more important than would appear to be allowed for.
- The language of ‘multiplier effects’ predominates, as does the presumption that it is possible to expand people’s ‘asset pentagons’ in a generalised and incremental fashion. Inequalities of power and conflicts of interest are not, perhaps, sufficiently acknowledged, either within local ‘communities’ themselves or between ‘communities’ and, for example, regional elites and government agencies.
- The notion of ‘participation’ that dominates the discourse of intervention - with typically unresolved tension between these two words - presupposes heavy investment in ‘community’ on the part of donor agencies and thence a rhetorical tendency to disguise or weaken the probability that, in one way or another, enhancement of the livelihoods of one group or stratum or class will undermine the livelihoods of another group or stratum or class.
- The qualifier ‘sustainable’ begs many questions which are not resolved even by positive ‘livelihood outcomes’ of the kind indicated in the framework. ‘Sustainable’ for whom? By what criteria? In the short term or the long term?
More generally, equating ‘assets’ theoretically with varieties of ‘capital’, through the ‘asset pentagon’ inscribed in the diagram, intellectually distorts our understanding of capital and politically distorts our understanding of the causes of poverty. On the first point, capital is properly a social relation between people, not an attribute of rich or poor households or individuals, respectively. On the second point, attention is displaced from the inequalities of power that must surely be invoked to explain the persistence or the worsening of poverty. For a powerful critique of the notion of ‘social capital’, in particular, as it has been adopted by the World Bank and other agencies in recent years, see Ben Fine’s book Social Capital versus Social Theory (2001).