A theoretical and analytical framework to the inquiry of sustainable land management practices

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical and analytical framework by explaining the sustainable livelihoods framework and farming system model from a sustainable point of view. The author studied over 200 publications downloaded using the electronic database search of EBSCO through UNISA online library in June 2018. Keyword combinations of ‘land’, ‘tenure’ and ‘sustainable use’ were used to search for peer-reviewed journal articles published in English from January 1980 to May 2018. The article examines most relevant literature to consolidate the necessary theoretical and analytical foundation in analysing individual and group motivations towards sustainable land management practices. The literature review affirmed that a comprehensive theoretical and analytical framework is scant to empirically analyze the determinants of sustainable land management practices. To partially fill this knowledge gap, the paper provided a generic analytical framework that gives insight not only on pre-decisional processes, but also on post-decisional processes of continued and sustained use of conservation technologies. The analytical framework is developed by combining the sustainable livelihoods framework with the farming system model. It is concluded that the economic theory of property rights may not be adequate as a model to guide land tenure studies and policy. It is recommended that a holistic approach and comprehensive analytical framework is vital for research and development endeavours to ensure sustainable land management practices.

Implementing an mHealth app to combat hypertension in India's vulnerable populations

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand how to build and implement information and communication technology (i.e. ICT) to help vulnerable people when significant social, cultural and economic barriers exist between the stakeholders.Design/methodology/approachThe authors followed an action research approach to design and implement a mobile health hypertension education application to help India's most vulnerable populations. The authors used interpretive analysis, guided by the sustainable livelihoods framework, to uncover key findings.FindingsSuccessfully implementing information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) requires understanding that all stakeholders (i.e. donors, facilitators and the beneficiaries) have important assets to contribute. Facilitators play an important role in connecting donors to the beneficiaries and fostering cultural humility in donors so that the donors will understand the role beneficiaries play in success. Stakeholders may use the ICT4D in unintended ways that both improve the people's health and increase some beneficiaries' financial livelihood.Research limitations/implicationsThis research expands the definition of information systems success when implementing ICT4D in resource-constrained environments. Success is more than creating an mHealth app that was easy for beneficiaries to use and where they learned based on a pre- and post-test statistical analysis. Success involved development in all the stakeholders impacted by the social innovation collaboration. For the beneficiary community, success included getting screened for noncommunicable diseases as a first step toward treatment. For the facilitator, success involved more resources for their community health program. Amongst the donors, success was a change in perspective and learning cultural humility.Practical implicationsAlthough universities encourage faculty to work in interdisciplinary research teams to address serious world problems, university researchers may have to exert considerable effort to secure contracts, approvals and payments. Unfortunately, universities may not reward this effort to build ICT4D and continue to evaluate faculty based on journal publications. When universities undertake social innovation collaborations, administrators should ensure responsive and flexible university processes as well as appropriate academic reward structures are in place. This need is heightened when collaborations involve international partners with limited resources and time needed to build relationships and understanding across cultures.Social implicationsThis study discovered the importance of fostering cultural humility as a way of avoiding potential conflicts that may arise from cultural and power differences. Cultural humility moves the focus of donor-beneficiary relationships away from getting comfortable with “them” to taking actions that develop relationships and address vulnerabilities (Fisher-Borne et al., 2015). This research shows how the facilitator helped the donor develop cultural humility by involving the donor in various initiatives with the beneficiary community including allowing the donor to live in a dormitory at the hospital, work in an urban slum and visit health screening campus.Originality/valueThis study (1) extends the ICT4D literature by incorporating cultural humility into the sustainable livelihoods framework, (2) provides a contextual understanding of developing cultural humility in ICT4D projects with a complex group of stakeholders and (3) describes how facilitators become a catalyst for change and a bridge to the community. The culturally humble approach suggests revising the livelihood framework to eliminate words like “the poor” to describe beneficiaries.

Nested Scales of Sustainable Livelihoods: Gendered Perspectives on Small-Scale Dairy Development in Kenya

The sustainability of rural development programs has often been conceptualized through the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, or SLF. This article utilizes the SLF to examine the outcomes of small-scale dairy development in western Kenya and thus connect local perspectives on livelihoods with broader ideas of sustainable livelihoods. Drawing on individual interviews conducted with farmers in three dairy development sites in western Kenya, it examines compatibilities and contradictions between productivity and sustainability, and how gender becomes a vantage point from which the links between micro- and macro-sites, or nested scales of sustainable livelihoods, become visible. Three main kinds of benefits related to dairy development are identified by respondents: increase in income, access to market, and ability to keep improved cattle. In conjunction with these benefits, respondents identified problems related to women’s independent access to income, wider community consumption of milk, and lack of infrastructure, respectively. This study thus shows that while income and productivity is prized by all respondents, gender enables this broader goal to be viewed in more nuanced terms—not only within the household, but also through links between the household and the wider community and state. Gender thus becomes salient across the nested scales of sustainable livelihoods and provides insights into how a more encompassing notion of sustainable livelihoods can be implemented.

Broken promises: a rights-based analysis of marginalised livelihoods and experiences of food insecurity in large-scale land investments in Tanzania

Proponents of large-scale land investments (LSLI) still promote them as a development opportunity, which can lead, among other benefits, to job creation and enhanced food security for local communities. However, there is increasing evidence that these investments often deprive affected communities of their access to land, with multiple negative impacts on livelihoods, food security and on the environment. This paper relies on empirical data to present an analysis of LSLI and food (in)security – crucially at the level of individuals in two villages in the Ruvuma region, Tanzania, over 10 years after the acquisition of village land within the Southern African Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). We introduce an innovative framework that permits an integration of a rights-based approach with the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to explore smallholders’ livelihoods and experiences of food insecurity. Our paper demonstrates how this integration, along with attention we have given to the FAO’s PANTHER principles, adds the missing yet crucial dimension of accountability on the part of national governments as duty bearers. Our findings show that in the case of these two villages, the human rights principles of participation, accountability, transparency and empowerment are severely undermined, with women bearing the brunt in all these domains. This overall state of affairs is, we argue, due to inadequate monitoring and evaluation of LSLI processes themselves and low levels of commitment on the part of institutions in Tanzania to monitor the promises made by investors. This in turn demonstrates an accountability deficit on the part of duty-bearers within LSLIs, and limited capacity of affected community members to claim their rights. Individual food insecurity experience in the two communities correlates, among other characteristics, with lack of land ownership, employment and income-generating activities. The rights-based livelihoods framework applied in this study points to serious deficiencies in the LSLI model as presently endorsed in SAGCOT, and emphasises the fact that access to land in Tanzania is a precondition for the realisation of the right to adequate food and thus a critical requirement for achieving and maintaining food and nutrition security. We conclude by arguing that progressive coalitions within and beyond national states must devise policies and institutions that empower individuals and civil society actors to make demands on their governments to respect, protect and fulfil their obligations regarding the legally enforceable right to food.

A theoretical and analytical framework to the inquiry of sustainable land management practices

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical and analytical framework by explaining the sustainable livelihoods framework and farming system model from a sustainable point of view. The author studied over 200 publications downloaded using the electronic database search of EBSCO through UNISA online library in June 2018. Keyword combinations of ‘land’, ‘tenure’ and ‘sustainable use’ were used to search for peer-reviewed journal articles published in English from January 1980 to May 2018. The article examines most relevant literature to consolidate the necessary theoretical and analytical foundation in analysing individual and group motivations towards sustainable land management practices. The literature review affirmed that a comprehensive theoretical and analytical framework is scant to empirically analyze the determinants of sustainable land management practices. To partially fill this knowledge gap, the paper provided a generic analytical framework that gives insight not only on pre-decisional processes, but also on post-decisional processes of continued and sustained use of conservation technologies. The analytical framework is developed by combining the sustainable livelihoods framework with the farming system model. It is concluded that the economic theory of property rights may not be adequate as a model to guide land tenure studies and policy. It is recommended that a holistic approach and comprehensive analytical framework is vital for research and development endeavours to ensure sustainable land management practices.

Shielding Rural Migrants from Unemployment-Induced Poverty: The Informal Prickly Pear Market

ABSTRACT This study highlighted the role that an informal market plays in shielding unemployed rural migrants in urban areas from unemployment-induced poverty using the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) informal Prickly Pear Market as a case study. The purpose of this study was to show how earnings from self-employment or informal employment can be effective in reducing poverty. The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework was used as the theoretical basis for unpacking the household socioeconomic factors that influenced the informal prickly pear marketers’ decision to engage in the market. The study found that despite the prickly pear’s short-term availability, the income was channelled towards school supplies and sustained households during the month in addition to social grants, especially after the grant income had finished. The study aimed to revive interest in the Opuntia ficus-indica species, as one of the ways by which poverty can be reduced in the Eastern Cape.

Impact of aquaculture extension and training on livelihoods of the poor in Bangladesh - FTEP-II.

This case study describes an application of the sustainable livelihoods model as used by the Department for International Development, DFID, to a fisheries and aquaculture extension project in Bangladesh. Use of the livelihoods framework provided advisers, managers and national counterparts with a better understanding of the complexity of the poverty of the primary beneficiaries of the project (principally poor fish farmers and their families) and how the project interventions impacted their lives. Project impacts in terms of poverty targeting (impact on livelihoods assets), livelihoods strategies, policies institutions and processes and access and influence are described. Key issues in relation to the provision of extension services are presented.

Socio-economic Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Smallholder Livelihoods in Zimbabwe

The article revisits previous viruses such as Ebola to extrapolate the socio-economic implications of the COVID-19. Using secondary sources and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) to guide understanding, the article argues that unless measures are put in place to safeguard smallholder activities in Zimbabwe, COVID-19 has the potential to reproduce the same catastrophic implications created by Ebola in West African countries where peasant food systems where shattered and livelihoods strategies maimed. With a perceptible withdrawal of the government from small-scale farming towards large-scale capital intensive operations, smallholders could now be even more vulnerable. The article concludes that social assistance should now be intensified to protect its vulnerable population from the ravages of COVID-19.