Livelihood

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are consistent with scenarios of human-induced climate changes as described in modelling studies (eg. IPCC, 1996; Rodgers et al., 2007) and hence, they likely represent manifestations of systemic change driven by emissions of greenhouse gases from twentieth –century industrialization.

Regional environmental change as represented by climate and weather variability, deforestation and land degradation are significant constraining factors in human development (Adger and Brooks, 2003). This is particularly so for the West African sub-region and northern Ghana. Dealing with the challenges of sub-regional environmental change in the search for livelihood sustainability is a major concern in policy debate at the regional level. These debates can draw on some historical experiences in adaptation as a means for dealing with environmental change. For instance, agriculture is a primary sector through which climate plays a role in economic development. In this arena, there is a long history of analysis of the adaptation of human societies to climate change in food production (Lamb, 1995; Adger and Brooks, 2003:23). However, sustainable adaptation rest on the contribution of a paradigm shift for understanding „natural disasters‟ and

„livelihood‟ interactions. This new perspective draws on vulnerability analysis. Some authors distinguish between social vulnerability⁵ on the one hand and biophysical vulnerability⁶ on the other hand. The former is examined later in my discussion in view of its appropriateness for this study.

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Appendini 2001; de Haan and Zoomers, 2005). In the ensuing discussion, I will first examine the livelihoods approach as an analytical framework because my analysis of local knowledge in livelihoods would relate to some basic tenets of this framework.

Thereafter, my discussion will centre on livelihood sustainability and livelihood activities/strategies as emergent concepts in modern livelihood studies that have a bearing on this study.

The pioneering work of Chambers and Conway (1991), Sustainable rural livelihoods:

practical concepts for the 21st century, made a significant contribution to the livelihoods approach in modern livelihood studies. Two decades after this pioneering work, the sustainable livelihood approach has become even more relevant in today‟s development discourses. This is because the central objective of livelihood has remained the “search for more effective methods to support people and communities in ways that are more meaningful to their daily lives and needs, as opposed to ready-made, interventionist instruments” (Appendini, 2001:24; in, de Haan and Zoomers, 2005:30). As a departure from earlier household studies that painted a rather pessimistic picture of exclusion and marginalization in the process and benefits of economic growth in the 1990s, modern livelihood perspectives adopted a more optimistic approach (de Haan and Zoomers, 2005). Drawing on earlier research on food security and agro-ecological sustainability, Chambers and Conway (1991; 1992) underscore the relevance of people‟s survival abilities through their livelihoods. A number of ways may determine these livelihoods: a) ascriptive livelihood largely predetermined by accident of birth. For example, a child may be born into a caste with assigned role as potters in India; b) gender as socially defined may also be an ascriptive determinant of livelihood activity; c) inherited livelihood activity through socialization and apprenticeship for instance as a cultivator with tools or pastoralist with animals. These livelihoods then turn to be perpetuated or handed down to subsequent generations through the creation of new households. A livelihood may be defined at different hierarchical levels but the household is the commonest descriptive level. A livelihood as a means of securing a living is a complex system with many interrelated parts and flows (Figure 1.1).

19 Figure 1.1: Components and flows in a livelihood

People

Tangible Assets Intangible Assets Source: Chambers and Conway (1991:7; 1992:10).

Household livelihood comprises four components: a) people, with their livelihood capabilities; b) activities, being what they do; c) assets, comprising their resources and stores (tangible) and their claims and access (intangibles) which provide the material and social means; and d) the gains or outputs, which is the living they gain from what they do (Figure 1.1). A description of livelihood assets in relation to the livelihood framework is presented in Table 1.2. In the livelihoods approach, “the core of a livelihood can be expressed as a living” (Chambers and Conway, 1992:9), and that the portfolio of tangible and intangible assets are the most complex in terms of components and relationships.

These tangible and intangible assets present the opportunities and at the same time constraints within which people construct and contrive a living, using physical labour, skills, knowledge, and creativity. These skills may have been acquired in the household as indigenous technical knowledge, or through apprenticeship, or more formally through education or extension services, or through experimentation and innovation.

Livelihood Capabilities

A Living

Stores and Resources

Claims and Access

20 Table 1.2: Livelihood assets and description

Component Description

Stores & resources Tangible assets of the household;

Stores include food stocks, stores of values such as jewellery, textiles and cash savings;

Resources include land, water, trees, and livestock. Also, farm equipment, tools, and domestic utensils;

Assets are often both stores and resources.

Claims & access Intangible assets of a household;

Claims are demands and appeals for material support or access often at times of stress or shock, or other contingencies. Such support may take many forms- food, implements, loans, gifts or work. Claims may be made on individuals, relatives, neighbours, chiefs, social groups or communities, NGOs, government or international community - programmes for drought relief or poverty alleviation. Often based on combinations of right, precedent, social convention, moral obligation and power;

Access is the opportunity (in practice) to use a resource, store or service or to obtain information, material technology, employment, food or income. Services include transport, education, health, shops and market.

Information includes extension services, radio, television, and news papers. Technology includes techniques for cultivation and new seed.

Employment and other income – earning activities include rights to common property resources (CPRs) such as fuel wood or grazing on state or communal lands.

Source: Derived from Chambers and Conway (1992:9-11)

Since the development of the original components and flows diagram (Figure 1.1), it has been adapted for advancing understanding on various aspects of rural livelihoods by many researchers (e.g., Scoones, 1998; Carney, 1998; Ellis, 2000; de Haan and Zoomers, 2005). However, livelihood is said to go beyond economic and material life objectives.

For instance, de Haan and Zoomers (2005; 32) observe that livelihood is not just about providing shelter, transacting money, securing food for consumption and exchange on the market place. It is also about ownership and circulation of information, management of skills and relationships. It is also about the affirmation of personal significance and group identity. Thus, the tasks of meeting obligations, security, identity and status and organizing time are as crucial to livelihood as food and shelter. Also, see Wallman (1984) and Appendini (2001). The point is not to say that material wellbeing is not important for livelihood sustainability, but that it includes non-material aspects of wellbeing central to sustainability. To illuminate this point further, “a person‟s assets, such as land, are not merely means with which he or she makes a living: they also give meaning to that

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person‟s world. Assets are not simply resources that people use in building livelihoods:

they are assets that give them the capability to be and to act. Assets should not be understood only as things that allow survival, adaptation and poverty alleviation: they are also the basis of agents‟ power to act and to reproduce, challenge or change the rules that govern the control, use and transformation of resources.” (Bebbington, 1999; in de Haan and Zoomers, 2005:32).

The birth of modern livelihood studies has given rise to a plethora of terminologies in the field. These include livelihood activities (eg., Chambers and Conway, 1992); livelihood strategies (eg., Zoomers, 1999; de Haan and Zoomers, 2005); livelihood styles (Arce and Hebinck, 2002; Noteboom, 2003); livelihood pathways (eg., Breusers, 2001; de Bruijn and van Dijk, 2003; Scoones and Wolmer, 2002); and livelihood trajectories (eg., Francis, 1992; de Haan and Zoomers, 2005). In the ensuing discussion, I will focus on livelihood activities and strategies because these are adequate, appropriate and have a relevant bearing on my empirical analysis. The rudimentary of all these terminologies is livelihood activities. Chambers and Conway describe rural livelihoods as comprising more often several activities. These activities can range from cultivation, herding, hunting, gathering, and reciprocal or wage labour, trading and hawking, artisanal work such as weaving and carving, processing, providing services in transport to fetching and carrying (Chambers and Conway, 1992). The study of livelihood activities serves as the basis for in-depth analysis of livelihoods. The use of „livelihood strategy‟ is often taken to refer to strategic behaviour in the ways people organize their livelihoods at the household level. For instance, contemporary livelihood studies emphasise the active involvement of people in responding to and enforcing change. By this focus, researchers are able to make it clear that people respond to opportunities and play active roles in achieving their livelihoods so that it makes sense to describe such behaviour strategic⁷ (de Haan and Zoomers, 2005). In this notion, the household was thought of as “a single

7Given emerging trends, de Haan and Zoomers (2005) have raised questions about the view of behaviour as strategic.

They cite several of these trends: incidences of intra-household differences; individualization of livelihoods; increasing diversification of livelihoods; and organization of livelihoods over multiple places as the basis for such a position.

These trends now show that individual and household goals may diverge so that the concept of household strategy is open to question.

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decision-making unit maximising its welfare subject to a range of income earning opportunities and set of resource constraints” (Ellis, 1998:12: in, Ibid: 38). Drawing on livelihood studies in the Andes, Zoomers identifies four categories of strategies:

accumulation, consolidation, compensatory and security. She does not consider these strategies as intentional or unintentional behaviour, but acknowledges structural component within them (Zoomers, 1999; de Haan and Zoomers, 2005).

Chambers and Conway also distinguish between environmental sustainable livelihood and socially sustainable livelihood. On the one hand, a livelihood is environmentally sustainable when it maintains the assets on which livelihood depends and further shows net beneficial multiplier effects on other livelihoods. On the other hand, a livelihood is socially sustainable when it demonstrates capability of coping and recovering from stress, shocks, and providing for future generations (Chambers and Conway, 1992). The relevance of sustainable livelihood derives from the objectives of the livelihood approach and the implications for research and policy. For the rich, environmental concerns are said to be paramount in the policy front. For the poor, building capabilities, improving equity and increasing social sustainability should dominate policy. In the research domain, the key questions are said to be a better understanding of “a)conditions for low human fertility, b) intensity, complexity and diversity in small-farming systems, c) the livelihood-intensity of local economies, and d) factors influencing migration”(Ibid.:iii).