id21 viewpoints

Will the sustainable livelihoods approach regain its reputation?

The sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA) has served as a powerful tool and helped many development practitioners analyse rural development issues from a range of perspectives. A decade ago many development organisations placed SLA at the centre of their development programmes. Compared to the last decade, however, the application of SLA today has dwindled. Why is SLA not as prominent as it was a decade ago? What can be done to restore its reputation?

Key reasons for the apparent decline of SLA include:

• Rather than learning from previous and ongoing practical action, most researchers, policymakers and scholars usually prefer to focus on new emerging issues. This shift gradually prevented continuous learning and the subsequent amendment of SLA to fit new circumstances.
• When new approaches and/or frameworks are developed, awareness creation and/or debate about them are at the higher levels (for example, high profile people from governments, donor agencies, international non-governmental organisations and so on) with little involvement of development workers who work at the grassroots level. Consequently, knowledge and skills remain in those circles, despite the fact that grassroots staff mostly manage and run programme works. This practice has created a knowledge gap among practitioners, restricting a wider application of the approach.
• Power and the politics of donors and big international institutions also limit the application of SLA. For example, lack of multi-year assistance programme and a focus on short-term emergency projects compelled development actors (including local and international non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, government institutions and so on) not to focus on long-term development issues; this limited the application of the approach.
• In-depth livelihood analysis requires huge financial, time and multi-disciplinary trained personnel resources. Likewise, the problem analysis exercise delivers a lot of information, leading to confusion over what to prioritise.

However, I strongly believe that SLA can regain its reputation and continue to serve its purpose, provided the following points are taken into account:

• Knowledge gaps need to be addressed. Bridging the gap greatly contributes to building the capacity of grassroots staff and creates an opportunity for them to actively engage, contribute and exercise the approach widely.
• Practicability, recommendations and contributions on how to use a combination of different approaches have to be emphasised, because a single approach such as the SLA can not capture all elements.
• Given that a wide range of factors such as climate change, fair trade, the effects of globalisation, power and politics, governance issues and so on, affect rural households' livelihoods, developing an inclusive approach which can examine livelihood issues from different angles is very crucial.

Livelihoods cannot be sustainable as long as the factors listed above exist, and continue to challenge and make poor households more vulnerable. The very term 'sustainable' in the SLA would then come under question.

Tesfu Kahsay
Programme Support Manager, SC UK
Addis Ababa
Ethiopia

TesfuK@scuk.org.et

September 2009

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