Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation

This article reviews the recent literature on diversification as a livelihood strategy of rural households in developing countries, with particular reference to sub‐Saharan Africa. Livelihood diversification is defined as the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in order to survive and to improve their standards of living. The determinants and effects of diversification in the areas of poverty, income distribution, farm output and gender are examined. Some policy inferences are summarised. The conclusion is reached that removal of constraints to, and expansion of opportunities for, diversification are desirable policy objectives because they give individuals and households more capabilities to improve livelihood security and to raise living standards.

Household strategies and rural livelihood diversification

This article argues that systematic comparative analyses of women's strategies and coping mechanisms lead to a more culturally and temporally grounded understanding of patriarchal systems than the unqualified, abstract notion of patriarchy encountered in contemporary feminist theory. Women strategize within a set of concrete constraints, which I identify as patriarchal bargains. Different forms of patriarchy present women with distinct “rules of the game” and call for different strategies to maximize security and optimize life options with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of oppression. Two systems of male dominance are contrasted: the sub-Saharan African pattern, in which the insecurities of polygyny are matched with areas of relative autonomy for women, and classic patriarchy, which is characteristic of South and East Asia as well as the Muslim Middle East. The article ends with an analysis of the conditions leading to the breakdown and transformation of patriarchal bargain...

Bargaining with patriarchy

Common Property Institutions and Sustainable Governance of Resources

Livelihoods perspectives have been central to rural development thinking and practice in the past decade But where do such perspectives come from, what are their conceptual roots, and what influences have shaped the way they have emerged? This paper offers an historical review of key moments in debates about rural livelihoods, identifying the tensions, ambiguities and challenges of such approaches A number of core challenges are identified, centred on the need to inject a more thorough-going political analysis into the centre of livelihoods perspectives This will enhance the capacity of livelihoods perspectives to address key lacunae in recent discussions, including questions of knowledge, politics, scale and dynamics

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03066150902820503

Livelihoods perspectives and rural development

The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts and expropriation of land beg for closer attention. More emphasis needs to be placed by analysts on who benefits and who loses from instances of ‘negotiability’ in access to land, an analysis that, in turn, needs to be situated in broader political economic and social changes taking place, particularly during the past thirty or so years. This requires a theoretical move away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability that, willy-nilly, ends by suggesting an open field, to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including commodification, structural adjustment, market liberalization and globalization) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2004.00080.x

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

Household food security and child nutrition: the interaction of income and gender of household head

Debates about resource allocation and development strategies in Africa tend to polarise between those who invoke theories justifying privatisation everywhere and those who cite failed projects and culturally specific understandings to question its feasibility in Africa. Adherents to these positions generally talk past one another. "Dividing the Commons" is a study of the political and cultural dynamics of privatisation of rangeland in southern Botswana that provides a way of advancing debate. At the centre of the book is an examination of syndicates, groups of cattlemen who own and manage boreholes (deep wells with motorised pumps), from the 1930s to 1994. Changes in herd and range management, increasing numbers of cattle and boreholes, and the contradiction between private water sources and a communal range have all combined to promote private claims to pastures. The Tribal Grazing Land Policy put into practice since the mid 1970s has intensified the shift to privatisation. Pauline E. Peters shows how the current grazing land policy, like the water development policies of the 1930s, is part of an historical process through which resources are allocated, wealth created or destroyed, and some interests promoted at the cost of others. At the heart of the dividing of the common range are struggles over meanings, cultural contestations over the definitions of property and the priority of rights. Peter's analysis provides the basis for a stringent critique of Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" thesis, one of the most influential paradigms of our time. She also demonstrates that the models used by analysts and policymakers to interpret or direct change in Botswana's range are just as much cultural and political products as are the practices and ideas of the Tswana cattlemen and syndicates. "Dividing the Commons" should be of interest to students and specialists of African studies, politics and political economy; development studies, pastoral resources management, and property relations; and the history and theory of anthropology.

Pauline E. Peters

Papers

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

Household food security and child nutrition: the interaction of income and gender of household head

Dividing The Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana

Challenges in Land Tenure and Land Reform in Africa: Anthropological Contributions

Conceptualizing the Household: Issues of Theory and Policy in Africa