International development policy has come to a consensus that environment-poverty linkages are critical in determining development outcomes. Poor people in developing countries are particularly dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services for their livelihoods. Increasingly the poor live in areas of high ecological vulnerability and relatively low levels of resource productivity. The position of the poor at such ecological margins, as well as a low level of access and rights over productive natural resources, is a major factor contributing to rural poverty. Much of the extensive debate over poverty in the last decade has in fact turned around the question of how poverty, vulnerability, livelihoods and access to resources are linked. The following concepts and definitions have become widely accepted points of reference in these debates about development.
Poverty
There continues to be much debate about how poverty should be defined, but it is increasingly accepted that poverty is not just a lack of material necessities, assets and income. The notion of poverty has been broadened to include a deprivation in capabilities, voice and power that contribute towards a lack of well-being.
Livelihoods
'A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base' (Chambers and Conway, 1992).
Vulnerability
Vulnerability refers to the external environment in which people pursue their livelihoods and their exposure (risk) to the negative effects of the external environment, as well as their resilience in resisting and recovering from external shocks and trends.
Access to resources
Vulnerability is closely linked to access to resources (capital assets) because these are a principal means by which people reduce their vulnerability. It is the access to resources, assets and entitlements that together give people the capabilities to pursue livelihood strategies that may have direct material as well as more individually subjective objectives.
Concerns over the sustainability of natural resource use are not new; however the last decade has seen significant changes in the approach to questions of access to resources and its links to poverty. Central to the changed approach - as the concepts described above suggest - is a people-centered focus and a dynamic view of well-being based on a recognition of the vulnerability dimension of deprivation and poverty. Both in theory and practice approaches to the issue of poverty-environment linkages now tend to start with a consideration of how people themselves define poverty and the assets they draw on in pursuing their livelihood strategies. Questions of what role access to natural capital plays in local livelihood strategies now tend to be seen in dynamic interrelation with how other capital assets, such as social, physical, human and financial assets are used.
This change in the conceptualization of poverty, vulnerability and livelihoods in relation to access to natural resources can be partly attributed to:
Emerging empirical evidence on the nature of poverty-environment linkages and the types of livelihood strategies adopted by the poor.
Related changes in theories on poverty-environment linkages
The international policy environment and the new poverty reduction agenda
Rural poverty has been accepted as both a major cause and result of degraded soils, vegetation, forests, water and natural habitats. The importance of environment-poverty links for the natural resource, health and vulnerability dimensions of the livelihoods of the poor is evident in empirical research (refs). Environmental factors are responsible for almost a quarter of the entire disease burden of developing countries; unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and waste disposal, and air pollution are a major problem for the poor (DfiD, 2001). Rapid deforestation and biodiversity losses are depriving people of valuable forest resources, such as fuelwood, food and medicine. Soil degradation is a major threat to the livelihoods of 1 billion people, mostly the poor who are more likely to live in degraded or fragile areas. Projections of rural population growth, agricultural expansion and intensification and poverty in the next few decades suggest a potentially serious conflict between natural resource sustainability and poverty in rural areas (Pinstrup-Andersen et al., 1997; Scherr, 1997).
Research has made clear that not only do the rural poor rely heavily on natural resources; they also increasingly live in areas of high ecological vulnerability and relatively low levels of resource productivity such as subtropical drylands or steel mountain slopes. Estimates indicate that if current trends persist, by 2020 more than 800 million people could be living on marginal lands (Hazell and Garrett, 1996). Insecurity, risk and vulnerability to environmental stresses and shocks are thus one of the key concerns of poor people. The Red Cross estimates that 1998 was the first year in which the number of refugees from environmental disasters exceeded those displaced as a result of war (ICRC, 1999). Direct conflict - including wars - over natural resources also contribute to the livelihood insecurity of the rural poor as they have the least resources to cope with loss and recover from conflict.
The important role that natural resources play in the livelihood strategies of the rural poor has been confirmed in a number of participatory poverty assessments that set out to consider the issue from the perspective of the poor themselves. 'Well-being was strongly related to the environment in terms of health, security, peace of mind; pleasant and hygienic physical surroundings; safe and clean energy supplies appropriate to the climate and seasons; decent low density housing free from overcrowding and built on safe ground free from flooding and other environmental hazards. People in rural areas placed emphasis on access and control over natural resources particularly in relation to food security and agricultural production' (DfID 2001:16).
There is nothing particularly novel in this broad picture on poverty-environment linkages. However there are some new trends in these linkages captured in both quantitative research and the accounts people themselves provide of their experience. These trends are of increasing globalization; insecurity and risk; diversification of livelihood strategies; a shifting network of social capital that it is difficult to continue to label as 'community'; and a mediation of livelihood strategies by a complex and varied institutional environment. Section 3 will consider in more detail the evidence as it relates to various natural resource sectors and socio-economic circumstances. The following is a brief overview of the character of these trends in poverty-environment linkages.
The rural poor have, almost by definition, always been exposed to a certain amount of risk and employed complex livelihood strategies in anticipation of ecological and seasonal variation and environmentally risk-prone environments. These strategies are increasingly being caught up with global processes of change over which the rural poor have neither control nor the information necessary to anticipate how they will be affected. International trade and related agreements now link the rural poor with markets and natural resources are linked to international commodity chains and global capital flows. Rapid technological change - for instance in biotechnology and natural resource extraction - has gone hand in hand with both the spread of environmental risk and unprecedented social upheaval. Programs of structural economic reform, privatization and decentralization - now often in the form of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers - interact with the local processes that shape people's lives.
Environmental resource management is becoming increasingly globalised as international conventions, laws and structures seek to regulate the terms on which people access natural resources. New regulations on intellectual property rights, protocols for biosafety and genetically modified foods as well as earlier initiatives on forests, desertification, biodiversity etc., constitute a complex globalised institutional environment for natural resource management. Harmonization of these environmental standards and agreements has become a major preoccupation of international agencies; these global measures have trickled down into national action plans and poverty reduction strategies. Global initiatives for environmental resource management have also led to widespread programs for the devolution of natural resource management arrangements to local communities. These initiatives are based on the belief that community based natural resource management can build on traditional practices and knowledge in providing sustainable and locally specific management. They are also founded in the global trend towards privatization and the transfer of funds and responsibilities out of large state machineries.
These trends towards both globalization and localization have contributed towards the uncertainty with which people exercise their livelihood strategies. The evidence on devolution of control over natural resources - although not conclusive - indicates that such programs in fact often increase local insecurity as newly devolved structures and power relations are added to existing local arrangements. 'Increasingly the institutional arrangements mediating access to resources for poor people must be understood as part of a complex set of arrangements linking local and global arenas' (Mehta et al., 2000:9). The result is that conventional theoretical divides between local and global, formal and informal, have become somewhat redundant in providing an explanation of the institutional arrangements through which people make and sustain their livelihoods (Mehta et al., 2000:10).
Recent studies have drawn attention to the enormous diversity of livelihood strategies at every level - within geographic regions, acrosss sectors, within households and over time. Amidst high levels of material uncertainty and risk, rural populations have become more occupationally flexible, spatially mobile and increasingly dependent on non-agricultural income generating activities. Although farming is still an important activity it is increasingly unable to provide a sufficient means of survival in rural areas. The diversification of livelihood strategies is a rapid process and shows no signs of abating. In the late 1980s and early 1990s research in Southern Africa estimated that 40% of rural household income was derived from non-farm sources (Ellis, 1998; Reardon 1998). Research in the late 1990s has estimated that this figure now lies between 55-80% and is proceeding apace. In South Asia roughly 60% of rural household income is from non-farm sources (Ellis, 1999).
Diversification is, by definition, a complex process and there is still much research to be done to understand why it is happening and what affect it is having on rural poverty and natural resource management. 'Livelihood diversity results in complex interactions with poverty, income distribution, farm productivity, environmental conservation and gender relations that are not straightforward and sometimes counter-intuitive and be contradictory between alternative pieces of case study evidence' (Ellis 1999:2). In general, it is clear that the international economic environment and structural adjustment programs have hastened de-agrarianization, implicit in the market's search for optimised returns on investment (Bryceson 2000:3). The declining productivity of natural resources has also been isolated as a key factor pushing people out of agriculture and into non-farm based activities. Further trends that can be isolated for a thumb-nail sketch are that it is often the very poor and the relatively rich who for different reasons are most prone to diversify their livelihood strategies.
The details of the diversification process will be returned to in section 3. What is important for this overview of the links between poverty, vulnerability, livelihoods and access to natural resources is that diversification is recognised as central to these linkages. Diversification has moved from being a footnote in rural development - a process that happened at the boundaries - to being acknowledged as a mainstream process. Bebbington has argued that the problem of rural development strategies is that they are always behind the times and 'continue to crunch rural livelihoods into the category of agricultural and natural resource based strategies'
Further, it is acknowledged, for the first time in fifty years of debate over rural development that agriculture will not be able to support the rural population and that diversification is therefore inevitable. In that sense diversification is positive and evidence shows that it is not necessarily a survival strategy but also one that can lead to accumulation of capital assets and conservation of natural resources. Diversification can assist households to insulate themselves from environmental and economic shocks, trends and seasonality; in other words to be less vulnerable. Access to natural resources remains critical, sometimes even more so as a result; but the linkages between access to natural resources and livelihoods are more complex than had previously been taken into account.
The environmental discourse has for long appreciated the importance of institutions in mediating the relations between society and the environment. Recent work on poverty-environment linkages has pointed to the importance of understanding both communities and institutions as embedded in site-specific social and political relations. An understanding of natural resource management dynamics in a particular location, it is argued, requires an appreciation that institutions governing access to natural resources are sites of social interaction, negotiation and contestation. Bebbington points out that in fact there should be no distinction between access and the resources themselves because access is the most important resource determining the capacity of people to build sustainable poverty alleviating rural livelihoods. 'Indeed access to other actors is conceptually prior to access to material resources in the determination of livelihood strategies, for such relationships become sine qua non mechanisms through which resources are distributed and claimed, and through which the broader social, political and market logics governing the control, use and transformation of resources are either reproduced or changed' (Bebbington 1999:6).
Whilst institutions, in their broadest sense, have become a central starting point in the exploration of poverty-environment linkages; the notion of communities has declined in importance. The community has for long been at the core of development planning as a justification, mechanism and objective. The link between communities and natural resource management has been seen in a generally positive light; it was assumed that given some adjustment and negotiation, communities were the ideal unit to which to devolve control over natural resources. These assumptions are now being held up to the light again. Whilst it has for long been appreciated that communities are heterogenous and characterised by unequal power relations, it was considered that these did not compromise the essential unity of the community. The emphasis is now arguably the reverse; that the existence of a community in relation to a particular natural resource cannot be assumed but should first be established.
New empirical evidence on the nature of poverty-environment linkages, as described above, has contributed towards changing perspectives on poverty, vulnerability and livelihoods. Previously accepted starting points in the poverty-environment discourse are now being dismissed as 'environmental myths' and viewpoints that have dominated the discourse have been labeled 'environmental wisdoms' (Leach et al.,1998) and 'development narratives' (Roe, 1991). In other words, the facts and theories that have dominated the discourse on access to natural resources for the previous two decades have been largely jettisoned as either factually inaccurate or not helpful for a consideration of future rural development strategies.
Two environmental narratives in particular occupied polar extremes of the debate over poverty-environment linkages. One position was centrally concerned with demographic issues and the carrying capacity of the resource base and argued that there was a mutually reinforcing negative vicious circle between environmental degradation and poverty for which state intervention was required. The other polar extreme agreed that whilst there was a negative association between poverty and environmental degradation, this was caused by state interference in local resource management practices. Sustainable development had in fact been a past reality and could only be achieved again if local communities were given back rights and control over natural resources.
It is now more generally accepted that the conditions under which the poor can manage natural resources are contingent on internal and wider institutional structures, as well as on the specific character of the natural resources themselves. Perhaps for the first time in modern development planning there are no dominant environmental narratives. Environmental facts are treated with caution and it is appreciated that data on the environment can be flawed and based on dubious scholarship. Ekbom and Bojo (1999) reviewed the literature in relation to nine common hypothesis about poverty-environment linkages and found that they were not well supported by empirical evidence. There is in general a heightened awareness about the political process through which particular environmental 'problems' become issues of social concern and policy development. The exposure of environmental wisdoms - which used to be an intellectual pursuit on the fringe - has now become an accepted part of mainstream thinking on natural resources (DfID 2001); DfID, EC, UNDP, World Bank 2002).
The final change in the conceptualization of poverty, vulnerability and livelihoods in relation to access to natural resources can be attributed to the international policy environment and the new poverty reduction agenda. The new agenda is characterised by a lack of direction and the lack of a narrative for rural development. It is generally accepted that agriculture alone does not have the capacity to be the engine of rural growth; a position that represents a turn-around from the paradigm since the 1950s. Donors have appreciated the challenges to development planning posed by forces such as diversification and globalization The consensus is that a broader multi-sectoral approach to rural development is needed that builds on local empowerment, risk mitigation and social protection. The environment - and access to natural resources for the rural poor - is recognised as being of central importance in the new poverty agenda. Planning mechanisms for national development strategies such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Medium-Terms Expenditure Frameworks (MTEFs) and Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps) have all made concerted efforts to mainstream environmental issues.
Despite these concerted efforts serious obstacles continue to impede the integration of environmental issues into the new poverty agenda. On a conceptual level, the rapid pace of globalization, diversification and natural resource degradation has left national governments and donors uncertain of what is actually happening. The lack of a narrative, whilst perhaps enabling an unbiased approach to each 'development situation', makes planning difficult at a strategic level. On a practical level, it is difficult to reconcile the participatory processes and broad, multi-level approaches that have been isolated as important with respect to the environment, with the logistical details of planned development interventions (Farrington and Lomax 2002).
Inevitably there is a connection between the perception of rural development issues and the policies and methodologies employed to address these issues. So it is that SLA emerged in the context of an increasingly complex rural reality and has evolved with the objective of providing a practical and effective means to make sense of this complexity and a pragmatic and people-centered means to identify development interventions. The SLA directly acknowledges the issues in current thinking on poverty, vulnerability and livelihoods raised in this section. To recap, the main points are:
Recognition of an increasingly complex rural reality with globalization, localization and diversification affecting the livelihood strategies of the rural poor and their ANR on an unprecedented scale.
Much certainly needs to be done to rethink the rural development agenda and to consider practical ways forward. The test of the SLA will be in how effective it is not just for responding to these issues but for making sense of the complexity described and enabling the development of practical strategies to address these.
