Capitals and Capabilities: A Framework for Analyzing Peasant Viability, Rural Livelihoods and Poverty

Abstract

On the basis of themes emerging in current debates on rural development in Latin America, this paper develops an analytical framework for analyzing rural livelihoods in terms of their sustainability and their implications for rural poverty. The framework argues that our analyses of rural livelihoods need to understand them in terms of: (a) people’s access to five types of capital asset; (b) the ways in which they combine and transform those assets in the building of livelihoods that as far as possible meet their material and their experiential needs; (c) the ways in which people are able to expand their asset bases through engaging with other actors through relationships governed by the logics of the state, market and civil society; and (d) the ways in which they are able to deploy and enhance their capabilities both to make living more meaningful and to change the dominant rules and relationships governing the ways in which resources are controlled, distributed and transformed in society. Particular attention is paid to the importance of social capital as an asset through which people are able to widen their access to resources and other actors.

Introduction

This paper is a response to the disappointing effects of development interventions in the high Andes and other such “marginal” environments Zoomers, 1998, Van Niekerk, 1997. It is not, though, an inquiry into why those impacts have been so limited; it is instead an effort to develop a framework that broadens our conception of rural livelihoods in such a way that may help rethink the nature, location and content of interventions so that they are more consonant with the diverse ways in which people make a living and build their worlds. As Zoomers (1998) has recently suggested for the Andes, and as Scott (1998) has argued more generally, one important reason projects fail is probably that they simply misperceive the way people get by and get things done. In particular, I want to suggest that a large part of the problem is that interventions work with ways of seeing the world that continue to crunch rural livelihoods into the category of agricultural and natural resource-based strategies. Even sophisticated frameworks aiming to analyze rural resource use emphasize access to environmental resources and ultimately convey an image of rural people making their living from natural resources (Leach, Mearns and Scoones, 1998, p. 7).¹

This paper is therefore an attempt to build a framework that approaches rural livelihoods and poverty without automatically linking their analysis to agriculture or natural resources. In developing its case, the paper builds on recent writing on environmental entitlements Leach et al., 1998, Leach et al., 1998 as well as the wider literature on access to resources Africa, 1989, Bryant, 1992, Ribot, 1998. It aims to develop these frameworks further in several ways. In the remainder of this introduction let me anticipate these different elaborations.

First, I argue that it is important to have a wide conception of the resources that people need to access in the process of composing a livelihood, perhaps especially in a context where peoples’ livelihoods shift from being directly based on natural resources, to livelihoods based on a range of assets, income sources and product and labor markets.² This leads me to consider livelihoods in terms of access to five types of “capital” asset³—produced, human, natural, social and cultural capital (cf. Bebbington et al., 1997, Bebbington, 1997, Scoones, 1998, Carney, 1998). This conceptualization has a related benefit, perhaps more potential than so far real, of conceiving livelihood sustainability within a framework that could also be used for thinking of regional and national sustainability (cf. World Bank, 1996, World Bank, 1997), thus suggesting elements of a framework that could link levels of analysis in research and practice addressing the relationship between environment, society and development (cf. Blaikie, 1989, Blaikie, 1985).

Second, the paper suggests that we need a framework that bridges the more materialist (cf. World Bank, 1990) and the more hermeneutic and actor-centered (cf. Chambers, 1987, Scoones and Thompson, 1994) notions of poverty and livelihood.⁴ We therefore require a notion of access to resources that helps us not only understand the way in which people deal with poverty in a material sense (by making a living), but also the ways in which: their perceptions of well-being and poverty are related to their livelihood choices and strategies; and the capacities that they possess both to add to their quality of life and also enhance their capabilities to confront the social conditions that produce poverty. In the framework advanced here, then:

• (a) peoples’ assets are not merely means through which they make a living: they also give meaning to the person’s world. This is not to fall into the trap of voluntarism, for of course a person’s assets are in large part determined by the structures and logics at work in economic and political spheres (see below). They are, however, also—to some extent—both reflections and components of the meaning the person has tried to create through their livelihood strategies. This meaning will then be one of several influences in subsequent decisions people make about their livelihood strategies;

• (b) assets—or what I call capitals in this framework—are not simply resources that people use in building livelihoods: they are assets that give them the capability to be and to act. Sen (1997) has noted that the possession of human capital not only means people produce more, and more efficiently; it also gives them the capability to engage more fruitfully and meaningfully with the world, and most importantly the capability to change the world. The same is also true, in other ways, for the other types of capital. The framework thus understands these assets not only as things that allow survival, adaptation and poverty alleviation: they are also the basis of agents’ power to act and to reproduce, challenge or change the rules that govern the control, use and transformation of resources (cf. Giddens, 1979).

In some sense, this framework thus sees assets as vehicles for instrumental action (making a living), hermeneutic action (making living meaningful) and emancipatory action (challenging the structures under which one makes a living) (cf. Habermas, 1971).

Third, and critically, to conceive of livelihoods as partly dependent upon households’ social capital offers a more integrated framework for thinking about access to resources. Indeed, seen this way, the distinction between access and resources breaks down,⁵ because access becomes perhaps the most critical resource of all if people are to build sustainable, poverty alleviating rural livelihoods.

Fourth, it is important that a framework understanding poverty in terms of assets also incorporates an analysis of the economic, social and political relationships that create poverty and wealth, but in such a way that (i) understands these relationships as potentially contingent and subject to re-negotiation, and (ii) links this contingency to the capabilities that people have as a result of the assets at their disposal. Assets are thus as much implicated in empowerment and change, as they are in survival and “getting by.”⁶ It is in this sense that access and social capital are central elements to the framework. They are the concepts for analyzing the relationships and transactions between the members of a rural household and other actors—relationships mediated by the logics of the state, the market and civil society. As rural people try and access resources they do so through engaging in relationships with other actors who are both present but more often than not usually absent from the day-to-day activities of rural people. Indeed access to other actors is conceptually prior to access to material resources in the determination of livelihood strategies, for such relationships become almost sine qua non mechanisms through which resources are distributed and claimed, and through which the broader social, political and market logics governing the control, use and transformation of resources are either reproduced or changed.

The social capital debate helps develop this aspect of the framework, for it helps us understand how actors engage with other actors in the spheres of market, state and civil society in order to gain access to resources, to influence the de jure rules of access in a society, or to turn their assets into commodity bundles (cf. Sen, 1981, Evans, 1996). Building on this debate, the paper also argues that we ought not automatically link the access question to the notion of “conflict over access” (Bryant, 1992, pp. 21–24)—not for reasons of linguistic tone, but rather for reasons of empirical balance, for indeed, there may be as much initiative and collaboration in widening access as there is conflict in the process of securing it. It is therefore important to develop frameworks that capture all these dimensions of access, and not only the conflictual—they must capture both the dynamics of conflict emphasized by Leach, Mearns and Scoones (1998), and those of cooperation emphasized more by authors such as Evans (1996) and Tendler (1997).

Most of the paper elaborates these different aspects of the framework. In developing its arguments, the geographic focus of much of the discussion and many of the examples is the Andean region. The themes are, though, of far wider relevance for thinking about sustainable rural livelihoods and economies. First, the paper reviews the changing ways in which rural livelihoods and poverty have been debated and analyzed. The debates on rural livelihoods have—perhaps more implicitly than explicitly—come to demonstrate how the resolution of access to resources and institutional spheres is critical in determining the relative viability and sustainability of livelihoods, thus justifying a conception of livelihoods rooted in a notion of access. Second, I present the basic elements of the capitals framework, and then suggest several ways in which this framework could usefully be developed. The final section focuses on one of the five capitals in particular, suggesting ways in which the concept of social capital might help us elaborate the relationship between access, institutions and livelihood.