A sustainable livelihoods framework for the 21st century

Natarajan, Nithya; Newsham, Andrew; Rigg, Jonathan; Suhardiman, Diana

Abstract

This paper proposes a reformulation of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) fit for the 21st century. The article explores the rise and usage of the original SLF, highlighting how its popularity among development practitioners emerged both from its practical focus, and its depoliticization of wider shifts in the development landscape at the time. Distilling the various critiques that have emerged around the use of the SLF and sustainable livelihoods approaches, the article highlights problems of theory, method, scale, historical conceptualisation, politics, and debates on decolonising knowledge. It further explores two key shifts in the global development landscape that characterise the 21st century, namely the impacts of climate change on rural livelihoods, and the shifts wrought by globalisation, before highlighting the structural and relational turns in critical development literature. In speaking to both historical critiques and more recent debates, we present a SLF for the 21st century, foregrounding a structural, spatially-disaggregated, dynamic and ecologically-coherent approach to framing rural livelihoods. We offer a framework and not an approach, hoping that that our SLF leaves open the possibility for different theoretical traditions to better work with emerging rural livelihoods.

Citation

Natarajan, N., Newsham, A., Rigg, J., & Suhardiman, D. (2022). A sustainable livelihoods framework for the 21st century. World Development, 155, Article 105898. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105898

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 16, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Mar 28, 2022
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Apr 19, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 1, 2022
• Journal: World Development
• Print ISSN: 0305-750X
• Electronic ISSN: 1873-5991
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 155
• Article Number: 105898
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105898
• Keywords: Livelihoods, Development, Sustainability, Relational
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X22000882