Farming as a livelihood source for the urban poor of Nakuru, Kenya

Farming among urban dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa is a common phenomenon. The present study, carried out in a medium-sized town in Kenya, not only confirmed this but also showed that farming by urban dwellers in the rural areas was even more important for these households’ livelihoods than farming in town. However, those who could benefit most from farming, i.e. the urban poor, appeared to be underrepresented among urban farming households and those urban poor who did farm, either in urban or in rural areas, performed worse than the farming non-poor. The importance of farming as a livelihood source is illustrated by the fact that in years with very little or no harvest due to drought, many of the poor farming households faced food shortages.     

Contested Space,Contested Livelihoods: A Review of Mongolia's Pastureland Management and Land‐Tenure Reform

In the early 2000s, the discovery of significant minerals wealth in the Gobi Desert marked the beginning of Mongolia's economic boom. Rapid GDP growth however challenges long‐held assumptions about place and land rights, leading to contested and sometimes contradictory outcomes, which are embedded in evolving perceptions and realities of land‐tenure rights, development rights, and local livelihood sustainability. Framed within the debates surrounding natural resources development and the contradictions in scale and user rights, this essay identifies three distinct periods of land‐tenure debate in Mongolia. In each period, pastureland management debates are influenced by different narratives, including those of development economists, scholars, NGOs, and local voices. This essay draws on an extensive review of policy documents and contemporary literature to consider the multiscalar implications of rapid national growth on internal population redistribution, land‐use rights, and the underlying importance of place.     

Climate adaptation,local institutions,and rural livelihoods: A comparative study of herder communities in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia,China

Climate variability has been evident on the Mongolian plateau in recent decades. Livelihood adaptation to climate variability is important for local sustainable development. This paper applies an analytical framework focused on adaptation, institutions, and livelihoods to study climate adaptation in the Mongolian grasslands. A household survey was designed and implemented in each of three broad vegetation types in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. The analytical results show that livelihood adaptation strategies of herders vary greatly across the border between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, China. Local institutions played important roles in shaping and facilitating livelihood adaptation strategies of herders. Mobility and communal pooling were the two key categories of adaptation strategies in Mongolia, and they were shaped and facilitated by local communal institutions. Storage, livelihood diversification, and market exchange were the three key categories of adaptation strategies in Inner Mongolia, and they were mainly shaped and facilitated by local government and market institutions. Local institutions enhanced but also at times undermined adaptive capacity of herder communities in the two countries, but in different ways. Sedentary grazing has increased livelihood vulnerability of herders to climate variability and change. With grazing sedentarization, the purchase and storage of forage has become an important strategy of herders to adapt to the highly variable climate. The multilevel statistical models of forage purchasing behaviors show that the strategies of livestock management, household financial capital, environmental (i.e., precipitation and vegetation growth) variability, and the status of pasture degradation were the major determinants of this adaptation strategy.     

Heavy burdens: Gendered livelihood strategies of porters in Accra,Ghana

Urban poverty is invariably linked to sociospatial dimensions of livelihood strategies. Gendered social relations, for example, have been seen to impact the ability of females to access resources, to gain assets, and to engage in viable income‐generating activities. Focussing on the livelihood strategies of the urban poor as they intersect with neoliberal economic reforms in contemporary Ghana, this paper draws on a field‐based survey of porters in Accra, mostly migrants from rural agricultural northern Ghana, whose primary livelihoods derive from transporting goods for clients in congested market areas of the urban industrial south. The paper highlights the gendered aspects of porters' livelihood experiences such as differences in migration patterns, reliance on physical labour and living conditions, which relatively few analyses have examined, especially as these relate to wider socioeconomic processes. The study illustrates how this perspective is important to understand the intersection of livelihood strategies, gender and national economic reforms in promoting both rural and urban development.     

西秦岭地区农户生计改变对生态建设的影响——以甘肃省陇南市为例

以西秦岭典型地区甘肃省陇南市为案例区,分析了农户生计改变与生态文明建设的关系,探讨了以农户生计改善为目标的生态文明建设思路。在揭示陇南市生态文明建设面临生产和生活空间不足、生态环境脆弱、农村贫困面大和传统资源利用模式普遍等主要难点的基础上,利用第六次人口普查和陇南市武都区农户问卷调查数据,分析了1999年退耕还林以来在农户生计五大资本方面发生的变化,以及农户生计改变对生态文明建设的影响。研究认为,理想状态下,农户生计能力的提升对提高国土空间利用效率、促进资源利用节约、改善生态环境有益。但陇南市因自然环境困境,在农户生计能力提升的同时,也存在一些阶段性的问题。针对这些问题,陇南市应树立以生态促发展、以农业促发展的思路,努力提升农户生计水平,为构筑有效率的空间结构,建立资源节约型社会体系提供支撑。     

Resource Development and the Perpetuation of Poverty in Rural Laos

ABSTRACT

Government efforts to industrialise and modernise the Lao economy through intensive resource development are having adverse effects on rural livelihoods as resources are degraded and access to limited land and natural resources has intensified. In one of the country's key river basins, Nam Ngum, a series of resource developments including hydropower, mining and agricultural plantations have modified the landscape over the last four decades. Uncoordinated resource developments are putting intense pressure on increasingly scarce natural resources and affecting the lives of people who are dependent on them. Economic diversification of rural households in Feuang District in the Nam Ngum River Basin has created significant discrepancies between the rich and the poor, yet all households remain primarily dependent on agriculture. Land is of enduring importance to rural livelihoods. National development intervention has failed to secure basic livelihoods for rural households.     

Assessing vulnerability to climate change and socioeconomic stressors in the Reef Islands group,Solomon Islands

This article assesses the vulnerability to climatic and socioeconomic stresses in the Reef Islands, Solomon Islands, an atoll island group in the Southwest Pacific. Climate change and the associated sea-level rise are often seen as the most pressing challenges to atoll communities, yet this study aims at critically re-assessing this view by placing climate in the context of a range of other internal and external stressors affecting local livelihoods, including population growth, inadequate land use practices, and lack of economic potential, as well as external factors such as poorly developed infrastructure, economic marginalization and weak governance of Solomon Islands. Findings suggest that some of these non-climatic stresses are currently – and in the short term – more important determinants of local vulnerability than climate change and sea-level rise. Certainly, these stresses are likely to be exacerbated by different elements of climate change in the short, medium and long term, but generally speaking climate change does not appear to be a major driver of the current changes in the islands. On the basis of these observations, the possible adaptation options, relevant to different time scales, are discussed.     

‘Rising Waters Don't Lift All Boats’: a sustainable livelihood analysis of recursive cycles of vulnerability and maladaptation to flood risk in rural Bihar,India

ABSTRACT

Bihar, in the central Gangetic Basin, is simultaneously India's poorest and most flood-prone State. Climate change models currently identify a heightening of Bihar's flood risk, as rainfall patterns become more intense and Himalayan glaciers recede. During the past half century, the major strategy deployed by the State and national governments to address the risk of floods has involved the construction of embankments: raised areas of land that seek to control river flow and provide temporary sanctuaries for flood-affected populations. In this article, qualitative data from interviews with flood-affected villagers and policy makers at local, district and State levels are used to assess the social implications of embankments as an adaptive response to flood risk. Evidence from these testimonies leads us to conceptualise embankments as contributing to recursive cycles of vulnerability, in which women, children and poorer social segments have been unwitting bearers. Hence, reliance on embankments is a maladaptation that perpetuates, if not exacerbates, the severe manifestations of social and economic inequality that continue to plague rural Bihar. Perhaps not surprisingly, the voices of those whose lives have been made more difficult by embankments are heard all too infrequently in policy debates. This emphasises the need for climate adaptation initiatives to be anchored in a sustainable livelihood approach, for which the prime analytical objective is to understand the factors that enable or constrain the abilities of people, especially those who are most vulnerable, to make decisions about their lives.     

Fighting Over Forest: Toward a Shared Analysis of Livelihood Conflicts and Conflict Management in Ghana

Conflicts undermine forest-based livelihoods for the rural poor. Conflict management is key to preventing such conflicts. This article analyzes actor perceptions of forest- and tree-related conflicts and conflict management in Ghana's high forest zone. It also assesses a phased methodology that promotes shared problem definition and ownership of recommendations on conflict resolution strategies through the presentation and discussion of findings from document analysis, surveys, interviews, and focus-group discussions at a workshop with forest professionals held in Kumasi, Ghana. The study found that conflicts are inherent in forest-based livelihoods due to policy and legislative failures and institutional deficiencies, perceived goal incompatibility, opportunities for interfering with the attainment of one another's goals, and environmental scarcity. Ongoing forest governance reforms in Ghana should consider the stepwise conflict management model developed by the workshop participants involved in this study, but expand it to include the views of other stakeholder groups.     

Shifting Tides,Complex Lives: The Dynamics of Fishing and Tourism Livelihoods on the Kenyan Coast

This article investigates the complexities of fisher livelihoods and their interactions with the tourism industry on the Kenyan coast, to better understand how the prospects for alternative livelihoods, such as tourism, reduce fishing pressure. Data were derived from a questionnaire of 123 households and 30 interviews. Results showed that fishers cover the whole socioeconomic spectrum and that the role of fishing in livelihoods is heterogeneous both between individuals and for individuals over time. The majority of fishers do not combine tourism and fishing simultaneously, but livelihoods are characterized by a process of moving in and out of various activities as opportunities present themselves. There was no evidence of systematic or permanent displacement of fishers as a result of tourism. Given that fishing is not only an occupation carried out by those with no alternatives, prospects for alternative livelihoods systematically reducing fishing effort, predicated on this assumption, are questioned.