Development, 2016 ª 2016 Society for International Development 1011-6370/16 www.sidint.net/development/

Book Review

Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development Ian Scoones, Practical Action Publishing: Rugby, UK, 2015, ISBN 978-1853398759, 149 pages

Livelihoods, what people do to make a living, have been scrutinized for centuries. From Cobbett’s (1885) ‘actual observation of rural conditions’ in nineteenth-century England, to Marx’s (1894) classic studies of capitalisms’ metabolic (rural–urban) rift, to Polanyi’s attempt to comprehend ‘The Livelihood of Man’ (1977). The ability or inability to make a living has remained the core focus in understanding social, agrarian, and rural transformation, and is a long-standing preoccupation in International Development. In this book, (part of a series on agrarian change and peasant studies) Ian Scoones, a leading architect of what became renowned as the ‘sustainable livelihoods approach’ (SLA), sets out to revamp and revitalize livelihoods thinking and methods Scoones’ mission is to retune the mind-sets of researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners to the all-pervasive underlying frequency of global political economy. Failure to pick up on the way in which

political economy affects peoples livelihoods, he suggests, paints at best an incomplete picture, and at worst contributes to the waves of marginalization and dispossession of livelihoods and resources that globalized markets and finance can wreak. This book however goes beyond rhetoric and gets down to the practical nitty gritty of actually how to take these highly complex global dynamics and structural changes into account when assessing livelihoods at the local or community level. As Robert Chambers, famous for ‘Putting the Last First’ (1983) commends, this book should become an important guide for those in the field either as researchers or practitioners. Written over nine chapters, the book covers a lot of ground in relatively few pages, and so is concise and to the point. The first three chapters read as a primer for Scoones’ new livelihoods agenda and the core arguments which follow. They provide a brief yet thorough history of the theory, philosophy, and methods underpinning

Development (2016). doi:10.1057/s41301-016-0020-6

the analysis and measurement of livelihoods, rural–urban dynamics, poverty, and wellbeing. Chapter Three focuses specifically on the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA), a poverty assessment framework, which shot to development stardom in the 1990s, after being adopted by the UK Department for International Development (DfID), Oxfam, and a host of agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The SLA evolved from Scoones and colleagues attempt to design a ‘simple diagrammatic checklist aimed at structuring field-research’: Given a particular context (of policy setting, politics, history, agro-ecology and socio-economic conditions), what combination of livelihood resources (different kinds of capital) result in the ability to follow what combination of livelihood strategies (agricultural intensification, livelihood diversification and migration) with what outcomes? (Scoones, 1998: 3).

Despite recognizing some rather dubious research taken under the banner of SLA, some

Development: Book Review problematic iterations and a host of criticisms about its deterministic and economistic pitfalls (e.g. Fine, 2001), Scoones maintains the importance of livelihoods frameworks as a multimethod and multi-disciplinary heuristic. But only he argues in the words of Stirling (2007), if it is now ‘opened up’ and ‘broadened out,’ and that is exactly what he attempts to do in the final six chapters: ‘opening up’ by bringing politics, critique, and debate back in, and ‘broadening’ out by applying contextual, longitudinal analysis, triangulation of methods, and conceptualizations that bridge the theoretical divide between structure and agency. Chapter Four is an important chapter in the book opening up the black box of institutions, organizations, and policy processes. Rather than being overlooked as neutral arbiters of control, as in many livelihoods analyses, Scoones demonstrates how they function as ‘politically charged mediators’ of access and exclusion that determine how some policy spaces are ‘opened up,’ while others are ‘closed down’ (47). Scoones puts forward an analytical framework which helps capture and demystify the complexity of how policies are made, subtly alluding to its usefulness for not only understanding the status quo but for challenging and changing it (57). Drawing on the example of large-scale commercial agricultural policies, especially those which aim to ‘awaken the sleeping giant of Africa’ (Morris et al., 2009), Scoones reveals

the multi-scalar coalition of interests, actors, and organizations that come together in reinforcing a particular ‘expert-accredited’ narrative to show how power is mediated through the politics of knowledge. Dichotomous narratives have helped pit large-scale industry framed by notions of progress and efficiency against struggles for small-holder agriculture, agro-ecology, and local peoples’ land rights. Yet in reality, he contends that the picture is complex and the needs of a country are rarely a dichotomous either or. This wider politics of policy is far too often, he argues seen as ‘static, linear, or abstract,’ separated from the ‘subjective worlds’ of those affected. ‘In search of livelihoods people feel, think, reflect, seek and make meaning’ as part of a ‘deeply internalised social knowledge’ (54). A thorough livelihoods analysis needs to pay attention to both structure (in the Marxist sense) and agency (in a Foucauldian sense) at multiple scales of institutions, organizations, and policy. On a similar note, Chapter Five delves into the political ecology of knowledge, particularly the way in which the all-pervasive concept of ‘sustainability’ is understood, (over)applied, and co-opted by various interests. As he remarks, ‘everyone thinks they understand ‘sustainability,’ ‘[h]owever few actually do completely or in the same way’ (62). Scoones makes the case for reframing ‘sustainability’ and for extending the classic

definition of a sustainable livelihood outlined by Chambers and Conway (1992: 5) as ‘one which can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance it capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base,’ to one which reframes livelihood resources, strategies, capabilities, and outcomes as fundamentally facilitated or constrained by wider structural drivers. This really is the key message of the book; the socio-economic and ecological negotiation of forming a sustainable livelihood is, well, political. A message that is formalized, conceptualized, and methodologically strategized over the final four chapters. In Chapter Six, Scoones draws upon Marx’s dialectic (1973) or what he terms a ‘unity of the diverse,’ as a method which he argues allows us to ‘move from mere description to explanation’ (75). Livelihoods the world over, he contends, ‘are caught up in the crises of capitalism’ (80). Only by unifying the diversity of complex micro-dynamics of specific ecologies, localities, and cultural identities, the multiple interacting systems across multiple scales and geographies, within the broader macro-dynamics of historical and contemporary political economic transformation do we begin to see how ‘changes in commodity prices, shifts in terms of trade, financing of agricultural investments, and political deals far away’ have significant ripple effects and after-shocks on ‘the patterns of livelihoods in diverse localities’ (115).

Book Review Chapter Seven sets out to convince readers – bewildered by the complexity and immensity of the challenge – of its implementability. An extended ‘political economy’ livelihoods approach, he explains, must include six fundamental questions strategically placed at different intersections of the existing framework; who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with it? How do groups within society and the state interact with each other? And how are political changes shaped by ecologies (and vice versa)? He provides six case studies which explore these questions in different contexts to demonstrate how such an approach can tie common threads and identify emerging themes and differentiation. These questions, he asserts, also help capture urban–rural linkages, the ‘bri-

colage’ of individuals’ multiple livelihood identities, the winners and losers of market shifts, and the way in which these are globally and locally mediated. Chapter Eight offers more practical advice in terms of methodologies, types of surveys, analytical frames, and perspectives that could be combined to get to the political economic heart of livelihoods. This book demands researchers and practitioners shake themselves out of their disciplinary straight-jackets, challenge ‘audit culture,’ and lift their operational blinkers to take notice of the political economic system constructed in the interest of a powerful minority whose externalities implicate the majority (98). For too long, Scoones argues that the ‘experts’ have looked only at what people do and what is going on and failed to ask why. Politics, he adds, is cast aside,

leaving much development work ‘sanitized’ and core problems hidden (103). If livelihoods analyses, and indeed the sustainable development goals, are going to result in rights, freedoms, and wellbeing, it is vital, Scoones concludes, to bring politics back in! While Scoones does not radically ‘reinvent the wheel,’ he certainly redirects it and contributes an important, immensely useful, and comprehensive guide for those studying and working on sustainable livelihoods, rural development, political ecology, or agrarian political economy. The book is highly engaging and theoretically perceptive, and convincingly demonstrates why struggles for sustainable livelihoods must adopt a tactical, more importantly ‘practical’ politics. Compiled by Molly Bond

References Chambers, Robert (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First. London: Longman. Chambers, Robert and Gordon Conway (1992) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, IDS Discussion Paper 296. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Cobbett, William ([1885] 2001) Rural Rides. London: Penguin Classics. Fine, Ben (2001) Social Capital Versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium. Oxon: Routledge. Marx, Karl ([1894]1981) Capital, Volume Three. London: Penguin. Marx, Karl ([1939] 1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage. Morris, Michael L., Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize and Derek Byerlee (2009) Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant: Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications. Polanyi, Karl (1977) The Livelihood of Man. Massachusetts: Academic Press. Scoones, Ian (1998) ‘Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis’. IDS Working Paper 72. Brighton: Institute for Development Studies. Stirling, Andy (2007) A General Framework for Analysing Diversity in Science, Technology and Society, Journal of the Royal Society Interface 15(4): 707–19.