Value contestations in development interventions: Community development and sustainable livelihoods approaches

Cultural Resilience—The Roles of Cultural Traditions in Sustaining Rural Livelihoods: A Case Study from Rural Kandyan Villages in Central Sri Lanka

“…It also refers to employment and income-generating activities, and seems to be synonymous with, and sometimes overlaps, concepts associated with terms such as employment and work. But, the concept of livelihood describes more complex and diverse strategies for living than what is meant by employment [12]. According to de Haan and Zoomers, livelihood is about individuals, households or groups making a living, attempting to meet their various consumption and economic necessities, coping with uncertainties, and responding to new opportunities [13].…”

Putting livelihoods thinking into practice: implications for development management

“…Recent critiques suggest that SLA is overly technocratic in both theory and practice and therefore at odds with desires to stimulate community driven development (Arce 2003;Brocklesby and Fisher 2003). This is a contradiction of the claims on which the SL principles are based: specifically that people are the starting point for development and that sustainable livelihoods will be created by working from their strengths.…”

“…Many development agencies also propose sets of recommendations for practical actions to create sustainable livelihoods. The concept of 'livelihoods' attempts to capture the complexity of ways of living as opposed to the narrower concept of 'employment' (Arce 2003), whereas specific SL principles evolved from debates over the need to create people-centred and learning processes in development. Conventional 'blue-print' approaches to management have been recognised for over twenty years as being ineffective in achieving socio-economic development goals (Bond and Hulme 1999;Rondinelli 1993;Thomas 1996).…”

How do places of origin influence access to mobility in the global age? An analysis of the influence of vulnerability and structural constraints on Senegalese translocal livelihood strategies

“…The sustainable livelihood approach fails to fully recognise the role of institutions and power structures on the micro and macro level. Access to sources of revenue is structured by social relationships, institutions, and organisations (De Haan and Zoomers, 2005) and therefore marked by property and power relations (Arce, 2003). At the studied communities, intra-household negotiations of livelihood strategies are marked by changing loyalties, diverging perceptions, and conflicting interests.…”