Addressing livelihoods within the landscape in the Nile Basin

Water for a food-secure world

Addressing Livelihoods within the Landscape in the Nile Basin

Kinde Getnet, Nancy Johnson, Jemimah Njuki, Don Peden, Katherine Snyder

Nile Basin Development ChallengeScience and Reflection WorkshopAddis Ababa, 4-6 May 2011

Water for a food-secure worldWater for a food-secure world

Defining livelihoodsLivelihoods can be:

urban or rural

farming, pastoral, fishing A livelihood system comprises the capabilities, gendered, age-defined (including both material and social resources) sustainable, assets and activities required for a means of resilient living.

The livelihoods approach is:

“a direct response to the disappointing results of former approaches in devising effective policies to alleviate poverty, such as those based on income, consumption criteria or basic needs.” (de Haan and Zoomers, 2005)

Livelihoods’ five capitals: human (education, health..), social (networks), financial (cash, credit), natural (land, trees, water), physical (infrastructure, equipment)

Moving beyond the capitals: Livelihoods are mediated by social-institutional processes. Livelihoods and environment mutually constituting to create a landscape.


Livelihoods Framework(below from Scoones 2009)


Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths• Move beyond technical fix approach and assumptions of progress brought by

neo-liberal reform• Multidisciplinary• Holistic: attention to context, complexity and diversity, livelihood portfolios

Weaknesses• Tendency to “crunch rural livelihoods into category of agricultural and natural

resource management based strategies” (Bebbington, 1999) which leaves out attention to importance of other non-rural strategies.

• Focus on the local left out attention to processes of globalization• Lack of sufficient attention to power and politics• Difficulty in dealing with change – global (climate change, markets) and long-

term shifts in rural economies


Expanding the analysis

• Dealing with scale: from local (and within local) to district to regional to national

• Including meaning and perception:– What are the local meanings attached to the five capitals/assets

and how do these meanings affect choices and decisions?– How do people perceive development and RWM (resilience,

sustainability, etc) and what do they want to achieve?

• Grappling with livelihoods trajectories: which direction are livelihoods (and whose) headed and how do we assign values to that direction?

• Incorporating power: culture, institutions, governance


Dealing with scale


Context


Issues across scales

• Networks and social capital (pursuing livelihood strategies through social relations; rural/urban migration)

• Looking for the global (national, regional, district) in the local (crop and input prices, decentralization policies, trade barriers, discourses and ideologies of development)

• Power and politics: who wins, who loses, decentralization policies, national investment plans

• Value chains (chat, rural/urban markets)• Resource flows: livestock, money, trees, etc• Institutions


Key Elements and Research Questions in Nile Basin Sites

• Landscape patterns: diversification of resources across the landscape (a diversity index?)– What are farmers’ diversification practices?– How do these practices affect livelihoods and land use?– How does diversification affect adoption of RWM practices?– How does diversification affect the environment and water resources?

• Labor patterns: by gender, age, group, season, space– What are the labor patterns over time and space within the sites and

how might these patterns affect RWM adoption?


Research Questions cont’d

• Asset base: security of land and other NR tenure, land rentals patterns, multiple uses/values of livestock– How does the household asset mix affect ability of farmers to

adopt?

• Migration and movement across space– How does migration and movement of people and livestock

affect livelihoods. How might they affect RWM?

• Patterns of stratification– How does social differentiation affect RWM?– Which segments of the community are most likely to benefit from

RWM?


Perceptions and Value

• What are local perceptions of RWM? • What do farmers (male, female, young, old)

perceive to be their principal livelihood constraints and opportunities?

• How do the ways in which farmers value their resources and assets affect their willingness to adopt changed practices?


Challenging Issues

• Understanding long-term change (agrarian economy, climate change, etc.)

• Targeting (life-cycle issues, gender, power): who, when and how

• Integration with other project components (modeling, etc.)


Questions for Debate

• Who should we target for interventions and what criteria should we use to identify them (land size, vulnerability, gender etc.?)

• How do we integrate (sequencing issues, indicators, data needs) the livelihoods work with the rest of the project (and modelers, mappers, process people)?


Questions

• What are the key gender issues (access to land, division of labor, etc) to consider to achieve the goal of improved livelihoods and environmental sustianability?

• How do we integrate gender into the innovation platforms, the action research, the modeling and the mapping?


Questions

• What changes do you think the project will achieve at the landscape, farm scale and what are the implications for household livelihoods within the time frame of the project ?

• What should the project do to increase its impact at the landscape, farm and household level within the time frame of the project?

Addressing livelihoods within the landscape in the Nile Basin

Technology

livelihoods livelihoods

rural livelihoods

livelihoods approach

livelihoods trajectories

livelihoods framework

goal of improved livelihoods

local perceptions of

labor patterns