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1992 could be named
as the starting year of the livelihood focus in development
cooperation. The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development
put sustainable development firmly on the international agenda.
In the same year Chambers and Conway published a paper, stating
that analysis of rural production, employment and income up
to date do not take into account the complex realities of
rural life. Subsequently, the previous emphasis on technologies,
resources and organisations shifted to a focus on rural households
and their various functionalities. The concept of 'sustainable
livelihood' emerged and organisations on the forefront of
development like UNDP, FAO, DFID lead the debate and promoted
new definitions and approaches. The central focus should be
on people and their needs and perceptions. Some of the approaches
which emerged in the subsequent research are summarized here.
[See also www.livelihoods.org
]
The
UNDP Sustainable Livelihood Approach
Within
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) the sustainable
livelihoods agenda is part of the organisation's overall sustainable
human development (SHD) mandate that was adopted in 1995.
This includes: poverty eradication, employment and sustainable
livelihoods, gender, protection and regeneration of the environment,
and governance. In this context, the SL approach is one way
of achieving poverty reduction, though there are also other
strategies being pursued within the organisation (e.g. macroeconomic
growth, community development, community-based natural resource
management, etc.).
Core
emphasis and definitions
As
one of UNDP's five corporate mandates, sustainable livelihoods
offers both a conceptual and programming framework for poverty
reduction in a sustainable manner. Conceptually, 'livelihoods'
denotes the means, activities, entitlements and assets by
which people make a living. Assets, are defined as: natural/biological
(i.e. land, water, common-property resources, flora, fauna);
social (i.e. community, family, social networks); political
(i.e. participation, empowerment - sometimes included in the
'social' category); human (i.e. education, labour, health,
nutrition); physical (i.e. roads, clinics, markets, schools,
bridges); and economic (i.e., jobs, savings, credit). The
sustainability of livelihoods becomes a function of how men
and women utilise asset portfolios on both a short and long-term
basis. Sustainable livelihoods are those that are:
·
able to cope with and recover from shocks and
stresses (such as drought, civil war, policy failure) through
adaptive and coping strategies;
·
economically effective;
·
ecologically sound, ensuring that livelihood activities
do not irreversibly degrade natural resources within a given
ecosystem; and
·
socially equitable, which suggests that promotion of livelihood
opportunities for one group should not foreclose options
for other groups, either now or in the future.
Within UNDP, SL
brings together the issues of poverty, governance and environment.
UNDP employs an asset-based approach and stresses the need
to understand adaptive and coping strategies in order to analyse
use of different types of assets. Other key emphases of UNDP
are:
·
that the focus should be on strengths, as opposed to needs
·
that macro-micro links should be taken into consideration
and actively supported; and
·
that sustainability (as defined in the four bullet points
above) is constantly assessed and supported.
Unlike the other
agencies covered in this review, UNDP explicitly focuses on
the importance of technology as a means to help people rise
out of poverty. One of the five stages in its livelihoods
approach is to conduct a participatory assessment of technological
options that could help improve the productivity of assets.
(Where such assessment shows that indigenous technologies
are very effective, UNDP's goal would be to ensure that these
are adequately understood and promoted by government or non-governmental
agencies that work with local people.)
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