9. Endpiece:The Politics ofLivelihoodOpportunityIan Scoones andW illiam Wolm er

1 Rethinking livelihoodsAs previous sections of this Bulletin have shown,the livelihoods of poor, rural people in southernAfrica are highly complex, often vulnerable andsubject to many uncertainties: biophysical,economic, institutional and political. Any neatprescriptions or models about livelihoods do notstand up for long. Yet, as we have seen, whether inrelation to wild resources, land or water and acrossthe countries, certain basic assumptions arerepeated. Despite the fact that these do notgenerally reflect empirical reality, they remainpervasive and influential in the framing of policy.

Thus the models used in policy often have deeplyembedded assumptions within them about howpeople do and want to live. This can frame policiesin particular ways, not always for the benefit ofpoor people. Words like “subsistence”,“agriculture”, “jobs” and “plots” and even “rural”need unpacking and interrogating. If the startingpoint is people’s actual, lived livelihoods, then theperspectives on policy can be very different to themainstream. For example, in Sangwe communalarea in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere in rural southernAfrica, people combine dryland farming withgardening, with small-scale business, with localpiece-work and occasional, periodic migration in ahighly complex portfolio of activities which arevaried by age, gender, wealth group and so on.Virtually no-one is a full-time farmer, with astandardised “economically viable” plot fromwhich all sources of livelihood are derived. And ifthey fit this picture at any time, it is no guaranteethat this will remain the case in the future or was soin the past. Thus agricultural policy and extensionrecommendations that assume a particular “model”farmer may be way off the mark.

Ways of thinking and framing policy debates arereinforced by sectoral and disciplinary approachesto research, policy and bureaucratic organisation.Rural development policies are plagued by suchnarrow sectoral thinking. However, a livelihoodsapproach opens this up, highlightingcomplementarities and sometimes basic trade-offsbetween different sectoral approaches.For example,credit provision in rural areas is very oftenassociated with particular delimited activities:agriculture (credit for inputs, for instance) or small-scale enterprise (credit for equipment etc.), forIDS Bulletin Vol 34 No 3 2003

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example. But this may hamper people’s scope andflexibility. As part-time farmers or part-timeentrepreneurs, people may not want the wholepackage, but may instead prefer to have a provisionof “credit for livelihoods”, where such resourcescould be deployed across an array of activitieswhich make up the current livelihood portfolio. Yet,despite the rhetoric of integrated planning, budgetsupport approaches, and poverty-focusedassessments (in the PRSP and NEPAD initiatives, forexample), there is little evidence of new, cross-sectoral, livelihoods-oriented approaches emerging,rather sectoral approaches are often replicated inpractice.

A livelihoods approach potentially allows us tochallenge the way we think about rural people anddevelopment options. Previous articles in thisBulletin have highlighted how this is needed insouthern Africa. Identifying the need to challengeconventional approaches is one thing, butoutlining what to do about it is quite another. Inthe last three articles (Part III), we have highlightedthree different, but not necessarily mutuallyexclusive, ways of framing rural developmentpolicy, each with very different implications forwhat should be done in the name of sustainablelivelihoods for rural development. The followingsection extracts the highlights of these findings andidentifies the key policy directions required if asustainable livelihoods approach is to become areality in southern Africa.

2 Policy directions?By summarising some of the key policy challengeshighlighted in the previous articles, four themes areidentified:

1. Redistribution as a prerequisite. External, donor-led interventions in southern Africa havefocused on a standardised reform agenda,without appreciating the historically inheritedstructural inequalities. Greater thinking needsto focus on real redistributive reforms,particularly in land, but also in other areas.Simplistic neo-liberal economic reform andliberalisation policies have been ineffective indelivering economic and livelihood benefits tothe poor across the region. Increasedinequalities have made things worse for many,

disrupting past livelihood practices andundermining forms of social security and safetynets. Land is perhaps the key livelihoodresource, even in areas where agriculture is notthe major source of livelihoods. This is becauseland can act as security, as a means to gainaccess to other livelihood options, and as alever for other forms of investment andlinkage. Land reform, including land tenurereform, is therefore central to ruraldevelopment policy.

2. The politics of the “free” market. Marketengagement is critical for rural livelihoods. Butmarkets are socially and politically embeddedinstitutions. Access to markets for the ruralpoor is highly differentiated, influenced by thedifferential market power of different players,high transaction and entry costs and so on.These broader features matter, if poor peopleare to benefit from a market economy, andalliances with the private sector. Conventionalapproaches link successful private investmentand entrepreneurship exclusively with privateproperty rights. But other forms of ownershipmay be just as viable at generating livelihoodopportunities, if effectively supported. Theobsession with private property as the onlyroute to success must be abandoned in favourof a variety of different approaches, backed bylegal and other supportive measures.

3. Multiple decentralisations. Different forms ofdecentralisation are occurring in parallel, andoften in ways that compete with each other.Administrative reform in sector programmes toallow for decentralised delivery of services maycompete with political reform allowing fordemocratic, decentralised local government.New political authorities with downwardaccountability to electorates may beundermined by decentralised service delivery(through line ministries, NGO or donorprojects etc.) which has upward accountabilityto the funder. More funds come down the linethan from local taxation, potentially furtherundermining the capacity and sustainability oflocal democratic institutions. Democraticdecentralisation is premised on a particularform of local democracy, which may situneasily alongside other forms of local

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authority, which gain legitimacy through otherroutes. The conflicts between new localgovernment authorities (councillors andcouncils) and “traditional” authorities (chiefsand headmen) are rife. In some settings party-related affiliations further influence the powerdynamics at a local level. Without resources,new elected authorities may quickly loselegitimacy, and fail to provide the developmentbenefits they claim. In practice multiple,parallel systems exist, with opportunities forconfusion, high transaction costs and conflict.Local government reform must therefore takeaccount of existing power and authoritysystems and not wish them away in thedevelopment of new systems of localgovernance.

4. Realising rights. Rights on paper and rights inpractice are two different things. A rights-baseddiscourse at the policy level does open uppossibilities for poor people to claim rights, butonly if the relevant support and capacity isthere. Otherwise intermediary organisationsand institutions tend to exclude, reinforcingexisting power relations and resource access.Indeed, a rights discourse may be used tosupport a continued neo-liberal approach toland reform, or as the basis for waterprivatisation (see articles in Part II). If a rights-based approach is to have an emancipatory,livelihoods-enhancing result, support for rightsclaiming, including the development ofmovements focused on livelihoods issues, willbe an important route for capacity developmentamong poor communities, although challengesof language, communication, information andorganisation are raised.

3 Sustaining livelihoods: politicalchallengesRedressing imbalances in market entry andengagement, making decentralisation really workto poor people’s advantage, and realising rightsincreasingly enshrined in progressive legislativeframeworks are huge political challenges. Insouthern Africa competitive party politics, as muchas it has been allowed to operate at all, has notreally managed to deal with such issues. In terms ofpolicies and programmes many parties appear not

hugely different, and politics is fought out in areaor ethnic-based contests, where histories andidentities are more important than substantivepolicy issues. Yet the opportunities to mobilisearound such questions as land access or waterrights by rural people may be being missed.Although some social movements, including theLand Campaign in Mozambique or the LandlessPeople’s Movement in South Africa, have had sometangible successes, such mobilisation can still easilybe bypassed by government. In Zimbabwe, it couldbe argued that the war veterans lobby constituted amovement for land reform which the governmentfound irresistible, although the degree to whichthis was actually orchestrated by the ruling partyfor political gain is a moot point. Overall, though,support for increasing rights claiming capacities,including mobilisation, political lobbying and civicorganisation, is perhaps a key priority for ruraldevelopment and livelihoods-focused efforts.

Only with such pressure exerted from outside theformal structures of political and developmentalinstitutions, will the knee-jerk response of marketsolutions, redistribution to the elite (at best) andconcessional safety nets for the poor be challenged.Yet political pragmatism suggests that compromisesand trade-offs will be part of the game, andstrategic alliances between elites and the poor maybe part of the picture in the struggle for improvinglivelihoods in marginal areas. Whether these arealliances between urban-based advocacygroups/NGOs and rural groups, or more directcommercial/entrepreneurial arrangements for jointventures, where recast patron-client arrangementsresult in a more equitable sharing of benefits, newalliances around a pluralist and activist politics forlivelihood improvement are an urgent priority.

Such a scenario, however, looks somewhatoptimistic, some even might say fanciful, under theprevailing conditions in southern Africa. InMozambique, extreme aid dependency, withconditionalities associated with HIPC debt reliefand poverty reduction strategies, ties governmentand with it a bureaucratic, political and businesselite, into a particular package of reforms. In SouthAfrica, the policy commitment to fiscal prudence inorder to attract foreign investment is supported bya strong political bloc of ruling politicians, anemergent and powerful black elite and big business

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and is unlikely to be swayed, even with growinggrassroots and union disquiet. And in Zimbabwe,the increasingly desperate despotic nationalism ofthe Mugabe regime has unleashed a combination ofeconomic meltdown and political violence thatmeans any chances of alternative voices being heardare, for the time being at least, extremely limited.

That said, the argument of the articles in thisBulletin is that donors, activists, governmentofficials, rural organisations, NGOs and others,should not abandon the search for a realistic, butpolitically sophisticated, sustainable livelihoodsapproach. In so doing, they should avoidsuccumbing to the beguiling assumptions and slickrhetoric of mainstream stances. Such perspectives,as we have seen, have not delivered sustainablelivelihoods for the poor in southern Africa. Indeed,it could be argued that they have made mattersworse. It is time for a change. Alternativeapproaches that encourage sustainable livelihoodsare inevitably going to be normative, political andhave to deal with power. They must also be realisticand rooted in an understanding of the history andcomplexities of real-life African political andadministrative systems.

Such an agenda, for example, would necessarilyhave to build on and transform, or at leastameliorate, forms of “patrimonialism” and“clientelism” in order to see through aredistributive agenda for the transfer of assets tothe poor. It would see elite-poor relationships,including “benevolent” forms of patronage, as a keydynamic and potentially a stimulus to economic

growth and a source of social security. It wouldencourage the organisation and mobilisation ofrural people around livelihoods issues, whetherland reform, HIV/AIDS drugs, or water access andfoster links to party-based democratic politics. Itwould abandon the artificial and misleadingseparation of public/private, state/non-state in bothanalysis and prescription. And finally, it wouldrecognise that state revenues, particularly of thelocal state, need to be generated in ways thatencourage forms of downward accountability,rather than reliance on donors or centralgovernment. Such an agenda, and clearly there ismuch more than this list of examples, wouldhopefully create a realistic, yet new and radicalpolitics of livelihood opportunity and would, inturn, begin to address some of the underlying anddeeply rooted origins of the contemporary crisis oflivelihoods in the region.

The details, out of necessity, would vary from placeto place, but avoiding assuming a neat, western-style liberal democracy as the template fordevelopment intervention is probably a goodstarting point. Simple, technical/managerial “goodgovernance” solutions, in the name of “sustainablelivelihoods”, or any other framework for thatmatter – just will not wash. As the livelihoods crisisof the region has become so dramatically andtragically apparent, now is the time to start thecritical thinking, the adventurous experimentationand the thorough reflection on the difficultlearning process that good development shouldalways be about.

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