2.7 Participatory forestry and poverty alleviation
2.7.2 The Sustainable Rural Livelihood Framework
A livelihood framework is a tool used to analyze and improve our understanding of rural livelihoods. It is expected that the framework will serve to:
• Define the scope of and provide the analytic basis for livelihood analysis;
• Help those concerned with supporting the SRL to understand and manage the complexity of the rural livelihoods;
• Become a shared point of reference for all concerned with supporting livelihoods, enabling the complementarity of contributions and the trade-offs between outcomes to be assessed; and
• Provide the basis for the development of a set of concrete intermediate objectives.
(Carney, 1998)
The capital assets that form part of the livelihood strategies and all the related structures and processes involved in the analysis of the sustainability of rural livelihoods are described in the framework diagram below.
46
,-: *i. *-i ..-,
Figure 2.1 The Department for International Development's (DFID) framework for Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA)
N . Natural C*>rtBi
S » Sadal Capital P « Physical Cap^al
LIVELIHOOD ASSETS TRAHSF0HRBN6 STRUCTURES*
paocesses
-Laws - Poto««
•Culufe
• InsMuftons PROCESSES
LtVgtMOOO STRATEGIES
I
UVEUHOOO OUTCOMES
Mora tncaaw Reduced
More sustamable
Source: Farrington e/ a/ (1999)
The capital assets upon which individuals and households draw for their livelihoods are categorized into five groups. These are natural capital, economic or financial capital, human capital, physical capital and social capital. Access to assets is a critical factor in strengthening poor people's livelihoods. According to Arnold and Bird (1999), tackling inequitable and insecure access to forest goods and services, and those assets that will encourage sustainable management, is the most important action needed to reduce poverty and improve forest condition. A brief description and importance of each asset is presented below.
47
Table 2.1 Improving access to Capital Assets Asset
Human capital: The skills, knowledge, ability to labour and good health that enable people to pursue different livelihood strategies.
Social capital: The relationships of trust and reciprocity that support cooperative action, the membership of informal and formal groups, and the networks that increase people's ability to work together and access institutions and organizations.
Natural capital: Natural resources stocks from which resource flows and services useful for livelihoods are derived.
Physical capital: The basic infrastructure and producer goods needed to support livelihoods, for example, affordable transport, water supply and sanitation, shelter.
Financial capital: The financial resources available to the poor, including available stocks (savings, credit provision) and regular inflows of money (e.g. remittances).
Importance
Provides people with the capability to effect change - to debate, negotiate and influence the way forests are managed. Allows poor people to access other forms of assets - including the natural capital represented by forest resources.
Networks and relationships tend to be the mechanisms through which benefits are distributed and by which decisions on control and use of resources are made.
Forest resource based activities such as those described above, as well as the environmental services forests provide. Natural capital also includes farming, fishing, mineral extraction, clean air etc. all of which provide food and services vital to livelihoods.
Inadequate access to physical capital can have profound deleterious effects on human health, education, income generation opportunities and productivity. For example, if excessive time is spent gathering wood for fuel, potential productivity is substantially reduced.
Allows poor people to convert other types of assets to directly achieve a livelihood outcome (e.g. for purchasing food) and for political influence.
Source: Arnold and Bird (1999)
48
ff
According to Warner (2002), a range of assets is needed to achieve positive livelihood outcomes, no single category of assets sufficiently provides all the many and varied livelihood outcomes that people seek. In contrast to the traditional, narrow thinking about poverty and basic needs of the poor, the capital assets present a multidimensional view about poverty (Allison and Horemans, 2006). This view tends to accommodate most of the aspects that are significant in an analysis of the livelihood systems of the poor and in sustaining any development intervention. A learning experience with the SLA is that it promotes the idea that it is important that any development intervention does not only look at its primary objective, but should also consider other areas and issues that might hinder or enhance the sustainability of the livelihood systems of the poor. Therefore according to Eade and Williams (1995), this means that the sustainability of any development intervention rests on the understanding of the livelihoods systems and strategies in which people are already engaged, the problems which they face, and the ways in which they are adapting to changing environmental and economic conditions.
Given the brief description of the sustainable livelihood framework above, one can perhaps deduce that there is a direct link that exists between the SLA and the manner in which contemporary forestry is conceptualized. Firstly, it has been highlighted above that contemporary forestry policies and practices embrace the idea of promoting rural livelihoods within the prospect of managing forest resources (for example, Angelsen and Wunder, 2003; Arnold, 1998; Arnold, 2001; Bass et al, 2004;
Kaimowitz, 2003; Scherr et al, 2002; Shackleton and Shackleton, 2004; Warner, 2002). Secondly, the sustainable livelihood approach seeks to open opportunities for the poor to escape the poverty trap while monitoring the assets, processes and institutions that determine the sustainability of rural livelihoods. In this regard, the SLA appears to be a relevant tool that could effectively address the concerns for rural livelihoods and management priorities within the forest sector while opening a space to identify the opportunities and constraints that determine sustainability in the link between people and forests and their related activities. In communal areas therefore, the SLA could be applied in the interventions for community forestry to monitor the opportunities and constraints that could be influenced by the internal conditions wherein the various capital assets and their impact on the projects are examined.
Furthermore the opportunities and constraints in forest livelihoods could also be 49
influenced by external factors such as government or private structures and perhaps a number of processes.