Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development

by Ian Scoones

Overview

The message of Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development is clear: livelihoods approaches are an essential lens on questions of rural development, but these need to be situated in a better understanding of political economy. The book looks at the role of social institutions and the politics of policy, as well as issues of identity, gender and generation. The relationships between sustainability and livelihoods are examined, and the book situates livelihoods analysis within a wider political economy of environmental and agrarian change. Four dimensions of a new politics of livelihoods are suggested: a politics of interests, individuals, knowledge and ecology. Together, these suggest new ways of conceptualizing rural and agrarian issues, with profound implications for both thinking and action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853398759
Publisher:	Practical Action Publishing
Publication date:	09/15/2015
Series:	Agrarian Change & Peasant Studies , #4
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Ian Scoones is co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex and joint convenor of the IDS-hosted Future Agricultures Consortium. He is an agricultural ecologist whose interdisciplinary research links the natural and social sciences.

Table of Contents

• : Series Editors’ Foreword
• : Author’s Preface
• : Livelihoods Perspectives: A Brief History
• : Livelihoods, Poverty and Wellbeing
• : Livelihoods Frameworks and Beyond
• : Access and Control: Institutions, Organizations and Policy
• : Livelihoods, the Environment and Sustainability
• : Livelihoods and Political Economy
• : Asking the Right Questions: An Extended Livelihoods Approach
• : Methods for Livelihoods Analysis
• : Bringing Politics Back In: New Challenges for Livelihoods Perspectives
• : References
• : Index

Editorial Reviews

This is an extraordinarily important book. Concise yet comprehensive, combining and drawing on the perspectives of many disciplines, accessible to all readers, professionally impeccable, and on top of all this, original in its analysis and extension into new fields, this book is a wonderful contribution to development thinking and action.

Robert Chambers

This is a book in perfect balance: immensely useful; it is also challenging; theoretically perceptive, it is wonderfully readable; historically informed, it also looks forward, proposing agendas for scholars and professionals alike.

Anthony Bebbington

In this uniquely comprehensive, lucid and valuable review of notions of sustainable livelihoods and their applications, Ian Scoones makes a potent argument for reinstating an expansive perspective on livelihoods, informed by the political economy of agrarian change.

Henry Bernstein

This is a book in perfect balance: immensely useful; it is also challenging; theoretically perceptive, it is wonderfully readable; historically informed, it also looks forward, proposing agendas for scholars and professionals alike.

In this uniquely comprehensive, lucid and valuable review of notions of sustainable livelihoods and their applications, Ian Scoones makes a potent argument for reinstating an expansive perspective on livelihoods, informed by the political economy of agrarian change.

This is an extraordinarily important book. Concise yet comprehensive, combining and drawing on the perspectives of many disciplines, accessible to all readers, professionally impeccable, and on top of all this, original in its analysis and extension into new fields, this book is a wonderful contribution to development thinking and action.

From the Publisher