1. INTRODUCTION

This paper is concerned with making policy links between livelihood diversification in rural areas of low income countries and access to natural resources by the poor. As such it brings together three intersecting factors that play a critical role in the effectiveness or otherwise of efforts to reduce rural poverty. First, there is the substantially improved understanding that we now have of the multiple and diverse character of rural livelihoods. Second, there is the interaction between diverse livelihoods and the management of the natural resources upon which they to a greater or lesser extent depend. Third, there is the challenge that diverse livelihoods pose for connecting livelihood strategies to national level policies, and especially to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).

Livelihood diversification challenges conventional wisdoms about poverty reduction in rural areas across several important strands of policy. While it is well understood that diversification occurs in large measure to ameliorate the riskiness of natural resource-based livelihoods, and to overcome the consumption smoothing problem created by seasonality, it is less commonly noted that it also represents a failure of the structural adjustment project of the 1980s and 1990s to deliver the improving economic conditions for agricultural production that were promised in countless policy documents of that period. For many poor small farmers, the past two decades, far from securing them more robust and improving livelihoods from crop and livestock production, have in reality created conditions in which agriculture is unable to provide them with a sufficient livelihood, thus making the pursuit of alternative sources of livelihood a necessity as much as a choice.

Research into the nature of rural poverty utilising the livelihoods approach tends to uncover aspects of rural poverty that have not been well understood, or have been neglected in mainstream policy discourses. Poverty and vulnerability are often associated with undue reliance on agriculture, rather than the converse. As illustrated by the food security crisis that occurred in southern African countries in 2001-03, it was semi-subsistence agriculturalists with few options for alternative sources of income generation that were most prone to acute food insecurity in the face of relatively rather minor adverse climate hazards. Moreover, evidence is accumulating that growth linkages to and from agriculture may work in opposing ways to prevailing orthodoxies. Instead of yield growth in agriculture being the origin of linked growth in other rural sectors (the rural growth linkage model), yield growth may occur due to resources generated from non-farm (and often non-rural) activities. Migration, mobility, flexibility and adaptability are downplayed, ignored, or blocked by policy and institutions; whereas these are the very attributes of diverse rural livelihoods that can lead in the end to stronger rather than declining rural livelihoods, and improving rather than degrading natural resources

This paper explores these themes, relating them especially to natural resource access considerations. The next section provides a brief resumé of the livelihoods approach and the status of natural resource access in livelihood thinking. The third section summarises the current state of knowledge concerning diversification and its dynamics from a poverty reduction perspective. The fourth section makes the links between diversification and natural resource access, differentiating this between land access and common property resource access that has tended to come under community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) regimes in recent years. A fifth section begins to make connections between the livelihood diversification-natural resource access nexus and the wider policy environment which in various ways hampers or facilitates spatially dispersed livelihood options. This wider policy environment includes local level policies and institutions, often nowadays evolving in a decentralization context, and the micro-macro links to central policies converging on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process. The sixth section sets out an action-oriented research agenda arising from the findings of the preceding sections.

The paper draws extensively from recent research by the authors linking livelihood diversification to policy processes in eastern and southern Africa^[1]. While the discussion and conclusions are thus related closely to Sub-Saharan African concerns, examples from other regions are also used to explore more generally applicable issues.