Sustainable livelihoods in practice: early applications of concepts in rural areas

What is poverty – and how it can best be addressed – are central questions at conceptual and practical levels in international development. Increased donor commitment to tackling poverty has made the search for answers more urgent. This paper outlines a new approach to poverty alleviation – sustainable livelihoods – setting out its basic concepts and drawing lessons from early experience. The approach is being pursued by, amongst others, the UK Department for International Development (DFID)

Policy conclusions:

Early experience in implementing an sustainable livelihoods approach suggests that it:

• helps to bring together different perspectives on poverty and integrate the contributions to eliminating that poverty that different skills and sectors can make, in for instance designing projects and programmes, sector analysis and monitoring
• makes explicit the choices and possible trade-offs in planning and executing different development activities
• helps to identify the underlying contraints to improved livelihoods and the means of overcoming these
• helps to link improved micro-level understanding of poverty into policy and institutional change processes.

Practical difficulties remain in:

• understanding how conflict over access to resources impinges on livelihood choices, and what can be done to address this
• developing cost effective modes of livelihood analysis that ensure that the needs of the poorest are prioritised
• identifying appropriate in-country partners, and developing collaborative approaches to understanding the complexity of poverty and integrating that understanding into a common livelihoods frame
• understanding how, in practice, to handle trade-offs, for instance between local pressures (e.g. for increased short-term income or better infrastructure) and wider concerns about resource sustainability and national-level policy considerations.

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A fuller version of this paper is available as a DFID issues paper at http://www.ids.ac.uk/livelihoods/nrcadc.pdf