Access to natural resources has been a constant theme in debates on poverty alleviation strategies. In the last decade, with the renewed international commitment to poverty reduction, there have been significant theoretical and practical advances in the way poverty-environment linkages are considered in mainstream development policy. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) emerged partly as a result of this rethinking of poverty-environment linkages and has since become a driving force in its evolution. The SLA has become a shared point of reference and organising framework for many development agencies. It is therefore important to evaluate what the SLA has contributed to an understanding of poverty, vulnerability and livelihood issues related to access to natural resources. That is the objective of this paper.
The SL approach was developed within research institutes (eg. the Institute of Development Studies), NGOs (eg. CARE and Oxfam) and donors (Department for International Development and the United Nations Development Program). Whilst the SL framework is constantly evolving, experimental in nature and the product of institutional collaboration, it is already widely used in a number of influential international development agencies, informing program content, assessment parameters and goal formation (Carney et al, 1999). It has been used by FAO in its strategic framework (Altarelli and Carloni 1999), by CARE in its 'household livelihood security' program (Drinkwater and Rusinow, 1999), by the UNDP and Oxfam (Neefjes, 1999). In the UK, the Department for International Development (DfID) increasingly uses SL approaches in the context of the commitment made in the Government White Papers on International Development (DfID 1997; DfID, 2000) to work towards the International Development Target of eliminating poverty by 2015.
The SLA does not claim to be a new development paradigm or even a new approach to development. The favored terms by those involved in the evolution of the SLA is 'Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches' - meaning a set of principles, backed up with a set of tools; the plural (approaches) is used deliberately to indicate that there is no single way forward that might conflict with other development approaches (Ashley and Carney 1999:9). The evolution of the SLA has been a self-conscious process with much review amongst SLA practitioners to examine whether or not the SLA is in fact contributing towards an improved understanding and targeting of development problems. Evidence of the benefits of SLA and an evaluation of its contribution are difficult for several reasons. First, it is hard to draw a line between the SLA and other approaches to development because the SLA is an evolutionary collection of best practice principles. Secondly, it is hard to maintain clarity between the contribution of SLA as an approach to development practice, an analytical framework and a development objective. Finally, because 'sustainable livelihoods' has been a development objective for so long it is difficult to distinguish the difference that the - for this purpose not helpfully named - SLA has made.
These difficulties in the evaluation of SLA are particularly pronounced in considering the SLA contribution towards the issue of the rural poor and access to natural resources. This issue is closest to the heart and evolution of the SLA and the terms and concepts used are hard to distinguish from those used in the last few decades of development debate. Nevertheless, precisely because the concepts surrounding access to natural resources have been so considered in SLA, the framework also has the potential to make a significant contribution to the debate.
This paper assumes some basic knowledge of the SLA and familiarity with key documents. Readers totally unfamiliar with SLA might like to consult the following documents:
The Sustainable Livelihoods Guidance Sheets (DfID 2000); available on-line these papers provide the most accessible overview of SL.
Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: What Contribution Can We Make? (ed. Carney 1999); a collection of papers from the DfID Natural Resources Advisors Conference which played a key role in forming the SLA.
Sustainable Rural Livelihood: Lessons from Early Experience (Ashley and Carney 1999).
Section 1 will examine current debates around poverty, vulnerability and livelihood issues related to access to natural resources. Section 2 will describe the main features of the sustainable livelihoods approaches and relate them to current thinking about access to natural resources. Section 3 will describe and categorise the different types of problems and opportunities that the rural poor face with respect to access to natural resources. Section 4 will assess the extent to which an 'SLA perspective' can assist in better understanding the problems and opportunities described in 3 and in developing strategies for addressing them. Concrete examples of strategies that have been tried or proposed in which the goal of enhancing access to natural resources has explicitly been linked to supporting sustainable livelihoods are given in sections 3 and 4.
