INTD 200 Chapter Notes -Participatory Rural Appraisal, Pentagon, Food Security
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5 Dec 2012
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A Framework for Livelihoods Analysis 12/5/12 1:22 AM
Thinking through diversified rural livelihoods
‘assets-mediating processes-activities’ framework
• poverty reduction
• sustainability
• livelihood strategies
Originates from
• Vulnerability and famines
• Analysis of poverty-environment interactions
• Livelihood systems approach to gender analysis
• The asset vulnerability approach to urban poverty reduction
• Research on sustainable rural livelihoods
Regard asset status of the poor as fundamental to understanding the options
open to them, the strategies they adopt for survival and their vulnerability to
adverse trends and events
Believe poverty policy should be about raising the asset status of the poor or
enabling existing assets that are idle to be used productively
Positive approach
Useful
• Micro policies
• Tracing local impact of macro policies
A framework for the analysis of rural livelihoods
It is the rural household that is taken as the main social unit to which the
framework is applied.
Assets
• Starting point
• Assets owned, controlled, claimed or in some other means accessed
by the household
• Assets as stocks of capital: give rise to a flow of output, enable
future investment
• Categories of Assets (Swift)
o Investments: human, individual, and collective assets
o Stores: food, items of value, money
o Claims: reciprocal claims on other households, claims on
patrons, government and the international community
• Categories of Assets (food security context)
o Productive capital
o Non-productive capital
o Human capital
o Income
o Claims
• Natural Capital: land, water and biological resources that are
utilized by people to generate means of survival
o Not static
o Enhanced when it is brought under human control
o A gradient between low and high agro ecological potential
o Renewable and non-renewable resources
• Physical Capital: created by economic production processes
o A producer good
o Purchased in order to create a flow of outputs into the future
o Infrastructural assets: roads, power lines, water supplies
• Human Capital: labour available to the household
o Education, skills, health
• Financial Capital and Substitutes: stocks of money to which the
household has access
o Savings, credits and loans
o Fungibility ! means of switching easily
• Social Capital: reciprocity within communities and between
households based on trust deriving from social ties
Mediating Processes
• Institutions and social relations
• Social: gender, caste, class, age, ethnicity, religion
• Institutions: formal rules, conventions, informal codes of behaviour
o Reduce uncertainty by establishing a stable structure to
human interaction
• Organizations: groups of individuals bound by some common
purpose to achieve objectives
• Livelihood diversification occurs more through necessity than choice
Activities and Livelihood Strategies
• Livelihood strategies are dynamic
• Activities that generate the means of household survival
• Natural Resource Activities
o Collection or gathering