This paper sets out to explore the links between livelihood diversification and access to natural resources, and it does this bearing in mind the need to make micro-macro policy links between local level rural livelihoods and national level poverty reduction efforts represented by Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).
The paper provides a synopsis of the livelihoods approach, summarises ideas and recent evidence concerning livelihood diversification, links diversification to natural resource access considerations, considers policy environments pertinent to both diversification and natural resource access, and proposes policy areas that could form the basis of action oriented research initiatives in this area.
The paper takes the view, supported by a considerable literature and much empirical evidence, that livelihood diversification is generally a good thing for rural poverty reduction. It helps to lessen the vulnerability of the poor to food insecurity and livelihood collapse; it can provide the basis for building assets that permit individuals and households to construct their own exit routes out of poverty; and it can improve the quality and sustainability of natural resources that constitute key assets in rural livelihoods.
These effects occur because diversification widens people’s options, reduces reliance on particular natural resources, encourages spatially diverse transactions, increases cash in circulation in rural areas, and enhances human capital by providing those who diversify with new skills and experiences.
These beneficial effects of diversification depend upon social attributes of mobility, flexibility, and adaptability, as well as on the ease of engaging in spatially diverse transactions. These attributes are often inhibited by local level policy environments, as well as by poor local governance, which as often as not are characterised by fees, fines, permits, bribes, licenses, roadblocks and other petty barriers to exchange and mobility. The poor find it more difficult to negotiate such barriers than the better off.
Natural resources are fundamental assets in rural livelihoods, but access to them needs to be viewed through the same lens of widening options and opportunity as livelihood diversification itself. Natural resource management regimes that inhibit exchanges, substitutions and transactions also inhibit livelihood diversification with negative consequences for their long run quality and sustainability. Land tenure and common property management institutions are often inhibiting in this way either by placing barriers in the way of transfers between users or by being founded on exclusionary principles in their establishment.
Land tenure regimes are prone to cause multiple difficulties for diverse livelihood strategies. In customary tenure systems, ownership security may be contingent and unclear and risky, making it difficult to exit or enter farming and resulting in patchy and inadequate development of a rental market in farmland. Inheritance rules are typically conservative and patriarchal and exclude women from inheriting or bequeathing land. New land legislation often fails to address fundamental inflexibility problems and is unadventurous in seeking workable institutional methods that could create more scope for land transfers and exchanges while providing security for owners and tenants.
Contemporary approaches to common property resources in the form of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), including co-management regimes, also have flaws in a livelihood diversification context. They are almost always sectoral in conception (forests, fisheries, wildlife etc) whereas diverse rural livelihoods are fundamentally cross-sectoral in character; for this reason they assume a homogeneity in reliance on or demand for access to a resource which rarely corresponds to variations in underlying livelihood priorities; they often also embody exclusionary notions of territory that inhibit flexibility and create barriers to the ability of new or different users to access the resource.
The gender construction of property management regimes is almost always disadvantageous to women. Women are often not permitted to own or inherit land; if they are widowed or divorced the land to which they have been entitled within their marriage may be withdrawn from them; within patriarchal societies CBNRM regimes tend to be dominated by men even if it is women who have the greatest stake in the livelihood contributions of the resource that is being regulated.
The contemporary approach is to site all poverty policy matters within the umbrella of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process at central government level. PRSPs are informed by stakeholder consultations and participatory poverty assessments that often prioritize cross-sector issues and reducing barriers to the exercise of livelihood choices; however the documents themselves have a tendency to end up as disconnected sector and sub-sector expenditure plans. PRSPs are more often than not found to be basically inimical to migration and mobility, weak in their articulation of cross-sector issues, and weaker still in providing enabling environments for spatially dispersed livelihoods.
The PRSP process is associated with democratic decentralization processes that are being pursued in many low income countries supported by donors. Devolved natural resource management in the form of CBNRMs is also becoming linked retrospectively to decentralization, even though these originated from distinct starting points. For livelihood diversification, decentralization represents both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is that local institutions can be better adapted to local needs, and can grasp the nettle of the cross-sectoral diversity that actually characterises people’s lives. The threat is that cash-strapped local councils will merely devise more onerous blockages to people’s livelihood options in pursuit of revenues in order to pay for the costs of running district and regional assemblies.
The paper proposes five policy topics that could provide the basis for policy oriented research linking livelihood diversification to natural resource access. Gender is a cross-cutting theme that should be central to all the policy topics. These are:
land tenure reform
rural taxation and business licensing (linked to decentralization)
migration and remittances
diversification & CBNRMs
integration of cross-sectoral thinking in PRSPs
It is appropriate to conclude this paper in the spirit with which it began. While livelihood diversification is an established fact of rural people’s struggle to improve their lives, and an accumulating body of evidence points to the benefits of this process for both people and sustainable natural resources, poverty reduction policies lag far behind these insights. In particular, a considerable unwillingness to move away from orthodox sectoral thinking is manifested in PRSPs, and in the government expenditure plans that they contain, and almost no thought is given to constructing the elusive “enabling environments” that would make it easier for people to exercise their own initiatives in the quest to move out of poverty.
