The Greening of Aid

Sustainable livelihoods in practice

Czech Conroy, Miles Litvinoff

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134068692
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Économie
• Categoria: Économie du développement

The development of poor countries has so often meant the export of Northern technology for ambitious schemes designed to make money the latest giant dam, oil refinery, logging process or pesticide factory. But such 'aid' has frequently been ecologically destructive and its crippling cost has ended up making life immeasurably worse for those it was supposed to help.Using examples from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, this book shows there are forms of development that allow people to control their own resources while improving their condition and enhancing their environment. The 33 case studies from agriculture, fishing and industry were commissioned by the International Institute for Environment and Development from people closely involved in the projects, with overviews by Robert Chambers, John Michael Kramer, Marilyn Carr, David Butcher and Yves Cabannes.Originally published in 1988

PART 1

Sustainable Rural Livelihoods (1)

CHAPTER 1

Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: a Key Strategy for People, Environment and Development

ROBERT CHAMBERS

Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton

Until recently the debates on environment and development have been dominated by values which reflect the “first” biases of normal professionalism. These start with things rather than people, the rich rather than the poor, men rather than women and numbers rather than qualities. They bear the imprint of interests that are urban, industrial and central in location rather than rural, agricultural and peripheral. Poor rural children, women and men have been treated as residual not primary, as terminal problems not starting-points.

The report of the Advisory Panel on Food Security, Agriculture, Forestry and Environment to the World Commission on Environment and Development (Food 1000, 1987) reverses this normal view, arguing that analysis and policy should start at the other end, with the poor, especially the rural poor, with where they are, with what they have and with their needs and interests. In developing this theme, it presents sustainable livelihood security as an integrating concept (p. 3):

Livelihood is defined as adequate stocks and flows of food and cash to meet basic needs. Security refers to secure ownership of, or access to, resources and income-earning activities, including reserves and assets to offset risk, ease shocks and meet contingencies. Sustainable refers to the maintenance or enhancement of resource productivity on a long-term basis.

The report argues that there are both moral and practical imperatives for making sustainable livelihood security the focus for analysis and action; in the context of environmental development, these imperatives are not in conflict but mutually supporting.

That there is a moral imperative for putting poor people first few would dispute. The evidence of totally unacceptable deprivation and suffering is harder than ever for the affluent to escape. It ranges from Jan Breman’s (1985) descriptions of the awfulness of life for rural migrants in Gujarat, to Dominique Lapierre’s (1986) devastating book, City of Joy, about Calcutta, and the stark television images of the famine in Ethiopia and the Sahel.

From the point of view of environment and development, there are in addition powerful practical reasons for putting poor people first. In analysis which starts with environment and development, population pressure on resources is a central problem. The World Bank’s (1986) estimates of the rise in population over a mere 16 years are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Estimated population growth in low-and middle-income countries, 1984–2000(total population in millions)

	1984	2000	Percentage increase in 16 years
Sub-Saharan Africa	406	665	64
India	749	994	33
China	1,029	1,245	21
Other low-income	328	476	45
Other middle-income	1,040	1,427	37
Totals	3,180	5,224	37
Totals without China	2,781	3,979	43

Source: World Bank, 1986, p. 228

Without China, the populations of middle- and low-income countries are thus estimated to increase by 43 per cent from 1984 to the end of the century, and in Sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 64 per cent. Some four-fifths of the populations of most of the countries concerned are rural. The pressure on urban livelihoods, services and environments is often already intense, and much of the increase will have to be supported in rural areas.

A common pattern in many parts of the world, rarely picked up by conventional statistics, is a crisis of livelihoods generated by increasing rural populations, and by social and political trends such as concentration of ownership. Poor people respond to this through intensification of agriculture and diversification of remunerative activities, through greater exploitation of remaining common property resources (CPRs) and through migration.

The case studies in this part of the book and this overview chapter are mainly-concerned with resource-poor conditions. These include most of Sub-Saharan Africa and the hinterlands and remote areas of Asia and Latin America, and forests. Both resource-poor lands and forests are exploited by urban, commercial and rich-country interests as well as by the poor, and often in non-sustainable ways. It is convenient to blame the poor for deforestation, degradation of fragile soils, overgrazing, erosion and “desertification”. In fact, they are often victims in the scramble to exploit public and common resources in which the rich and powerful get in first.

The case for making sustainable livelihood security central for environment and development strategies is reinforced by the need to offset such pressures on resources both from the commercial and rich and from the poor. More and better sustainable livelihoods in areas of high potential can reduce pressures elsewhere from outmigration by the poor. More important, and less well recognized, sustainable livelihoods in those resource-poor and forest areas are ecological and political safeguards against pillage and degradation by commercial interests and the rich. Contrary to popular professional prejudice, there is mounting evidence that when poor people have secure rights and adequate stocks of assets to deal with contingencies, they tend to take a long view, holding on tenaciously to land, protecting and saving trees and seeking to provide for their children. In this respect, their time perspective is longer than that of commercial interests concerned with early profits from capital, or of conventional development projects concerned with internal rates of return. Secure tenure and rights to resources and adequate livelihoods are prerequisites for good husbandry and sustainable management. Moreover, sustainable livelihood security is a precondition for a stable human population in the long term; for only when livelihoods are secure does it become rational for poor people to limit family size. Enabling poor people to gain secure and sustainable livelihoods in resource-poor and forest areas is, thus, the surest protection for the environment. The poor are not the problem; they are the solution.

The case studies

The five cases in this part of the book are all considered to be successful, although the case study authors are in general commendably self-critical, having mostly been personally involved. A comparative evaluation of performance, whatever criteria, would be difficult without extensive field visits. Rather than to evaluate, the purpose in this paper is to draw out lessons from the experiences gained and reported, supplemented from other sources.

The five cases are all based on initiatives in which NGOs (non-governmental organizations) played a major part. Two of them are geographically limited projects, and three are geographically extensive programmes, although they started on a smaller scale.

The two geographically limited projects are both village-sized. Sukhomajri/ Nada (Case Study 2) is an experiment in sustainable development with equity, limited to two villages in the Himalayan foothills of India; and Tin Aicha (Case Study 4) is a settlement of some 200 families of former nomads who now appear well established on the shores of Lake Faguibine in Northern Mali. Both set themselves difficult tasks; Sukhomajri/Nada began as a soil and water conservation project which expanded its objectives to encompass equitable resource management including social fencing of degraded forest land, a stake in new village resources for all villagers and sustainable livelihoods for the poorest. Tin Aicha sought to enable destitute nomads with no previous experience of cultivation to take up a settled agriculture which they despised, and create a new community from people with different origins. Both were, in the terms of their objectives, successful. Both received the intensive attention of committed senior staff with a high degree of staff continuity over the years. Both generate lessons for development and have influenced thinking and practice. Neither has been fully replicated.

The three programmes present a contrast in scale. The Lampang Applied Nutrition Program in Northern Thailand (Case Study 1), the Baudha-Bahunipati Family Welfare Project in Nepal (Case Study 3) and the Guinope Integrated Development Program in Honduras (Case Study 5) all cover wider geographical areas. Each has a larger and more dispersed staff. None has attempted as radical or difficult a transformation as Sukhomajri/Nada or Tin Aicha. Each includes elements of health and agriculture. Lampang and Guinope drew on experience gained by their organizations elsewhere and have followed tested approaches and procedures. All three have expanded their geographical areas over time and deepened the range of their activities. And all three appear replicable in certain respects.

The case studies provide the basis for four discussions. These concern, first, the bio-economic potential for sustainable livelihoods in resource-poor and forest environments; second, issues in the management of common property and private property resources; third, major practical lessons; and fourth, questions of scale and wider impact of NGO projects.

The bio-economic potential for sustainable livelihoods

One possible inference from the case studies is that the unrealized potential for sustainable livelihoods is considerable even, or especially, in environments which are resource-poor, degraded and marginal. This inference would be based particularly on Sukhomajri/Nada, Guinope and another case study (No. 9), the Yatenga Soil and Water Conservation Project in Burkina Faso. Let us consider these in turn.

Sukhomajri/Nada was under forest in the nineteenth century, but this was cut down. Under the degraded conditions before the project, each hectare of hillside was yielding 400 tons of silt per annum. Had these conditions persisted, the small dams built for conservation at the start of the project would have silted up in a few years. But with social fencing protecting the catchment there was a chance of sustaining the new system, even if some desilting was still needed. The advent of irrigation from small dams, with grass planting and protection in the catchment and other measures, led to increases in production in Sukhomajri which ranged from doubling to quadrupling earlier levels.

Similarly in Nada the poor farmers were enabled to multiply their wheat yields more than threefold. Earlier, 70 ha of hillside had been needed to feed one head of cattle, but growing bhabbar grass for ropemaking generated a potential income from only one hectare of Rs 20,000 ($I,500) per annum. The earlier regime was not sustainable and could not provide adequate livelihoods for the villagers; the new regime promises sustainable livelihoods at higher levels, and support for more than the present population.

The Guinope programme similarly, but without irrigation, enabled farmers to make a spectacular jump in production in the first year. Yields of maize which had been around 400 kg/ha often increased by three or four times through simple measures such as small drainage ditches plus either chicken manure or chemical fertilizer or both, and later with green manure. Wages, stagnating elsewhere, rose.

In Yatenga in Burkina Faso water harvesting on eroded lands led to major though less spectacular increases in yield. In four successive years (1981–4) the yields of treated plots (with contour rock bunds and other physical and management changes) compared with controls were on average 50 per cent higher.

It is important to ask whether Sukhomajri/Nada, Guinope and Yatenga are exceptional. Are these examples where the unrealized potential for sustainable livelihoods has been unusually high?

In answering this, the Sukhomajri/Nada experience must be qualified in two respects. First, institutionally, it received exceptionally intense, sensitive and sustained external support. This was probably necessary to offset and contain social and political inequalities in Nada, while Sukhomajri was unusual in being a single-caste village. It remains to be seen whether the rights and management systems established can survive without continued external support, and whether parts or all of the approach can be extended on any scale. Second, ecologically, there is the question of whether the irrigation systems are sustainable in the long term.

The Guinope and Yatenga experiences raise a different question. Both appear institutionally and ecologically sustainable. The question is whether their environments are atypical, with large gaps between potential and performance and with relatively easy ways those gaps could be closed. The Yatenga rock bunds are spreading in physically and socially similar areas, but an attempt to transplant the technology to a different environment in Mauritania ran into difficulties. With World Neighbors, the approach described by Bunch (1985) is to identify a very limited number of innovations, preferably one or two, that respond to the limiting factor in local production – in the case of Guinope, soil quality. The question is whether World Neighbors manages to choose places to work where, exceptionally, this approach can succeed, avoiding others where it would not, or whether the approach is applicable in most or all resource-poor farming conditions. Clearly, though, in some conditions quite simple low-cost changes can transform resource-poor agriculture, sharply reducing risk and lifting production on to a higher plateau.

There are grounds for a working hypothesis that in much of the arid, semi-arid and perhaps semi-humid Third World the bio-economic potential is orders of magnitude higher than is being achieved. In India as many as 100 million hectares of degraded land have been estimated to be producing less than 20 per cent of their dry-weight biological potential (Bentley, 1984, p.1). Even bad land can, through trees, provide poor people with an accumulation of wealth, giving them the basis for a better livelihood. An example is Midnapore District (population 7 million) in West Bengal. There, landless families have planted eucalyptus on degraded land allocated to them as part of a land reform. This is now producing wealth which most of them have used to buy irrigated land on which they can grow three crops a year, establishing them with the makings of sustainble livelihoods from agriculture. To the evidence of Guinope, Sukhomajri/Nada and Yatenga can be added other examples. At Kondoa, in Central Tanzania, a remarkable ecological discovery followed exclusion of livestock (Ostberg, 1986). In the Fuel and Fodder Project in Machakos District, Kenya, green oases have been produced by uprooting bush and using it to fence barren lateritic land, bulldozer-ripping that leaves hard surfaces as micro-catchments and planting trees in the rips (Bailey, Bottrall and Chambers, 1985).

Paradoxically, degradation is an opportunity for the poor, if it can be they who command and develop the degraded resources. The 35 million ha of degraded forest land in India are one such opportunity. Had the Forest Department protected it, and were it covered in a fine stand of trees, the practical potential for the poor would be less. As it is, the potential is immense for them to plant and own trees where few or none grow now, and to have them as savings banks and insurance to back their livelihood strategies, enabling them to get out of debt and to acquire other assets (Chambers and Leach, 1987). Environments with low productivity, but with high potential from water harvesting, agroforestry and green manuring, present a massive opportunity precisely because their current productivity is so low. The issue is whether governments and voluntary agencies have the imagination, will and resources to enable the poorer to realize and benefit from those potentials.

Sustainable livelihoods and common property resources

For the rural poor to realize sustainable livelihoods from the bio-economic potential of resource-poor environments requires a combination of incentives, technology and management. These questions touch on issues of policing, access, management and privatization of common property resources (forests, common pasture, rivers, bodies of water, etc.).

Basic to the discussion is an understanding of how poorer rural people contrive livelihoods. Some are locked into a single enterprise or life support, for example, full-time employees, bonded labourers, outworkers and single-species pastoral-ists. Most, though, rely on a diverse repertoire of resources and activities. In these, common property resources (CPRs) often play an important part, particularly in times of stress. The case studies of individuals at Tin Aicha bear this out. Water is one such resource, wood another, and grazing, browse and tree fodders yet others. But the pressures on CPRs, and their degradation, are a commonplace. Many of these pressures come from commercial interests, corrupt officials and politicians and those who are better off and more influential, especially in cutting and appropriating the wealth of trees in forests and in enclosing and...