Changing Livelihoods: The Free State, 1990s

Abstract

The paradigm of ‘Sustainable Rural Livelihoods’ or ‘Sustainable Livelihoods’ has rapidly developed a significant influence on the way in which research projects on poverty and livelihoods are conceived and carried out. In Britain, this impetus is associated largely with the research funding initiatives of the Department for International Development (DfID) since New Labour's coming to power in May 1997. In the first section of this paper I offer a provisional reaction to the ‘Sustainable Livelihoods’ paradigm advocated by DfID, in the light firstly of my own experience of investigation of changing livelihoods in the Free State through the 1990s, and secondly of the key objectives of a project undertaken in South Africa entitled ‘Multiple Livelihoods and Social Change’, itself funded by DfID's Economic and Social Committee for Overseas Research (ESCOR). In the second section I discuss two recent examples of household survey work carried out in the Free State, and comment on the problems that arise in relation to understanding changing livelihoods in practice. In the third and longest section I present a series of four case studies, each illustrative of significant changes of livelihood in the Free State during the 1990s. They are dense and detailed and, I would suggest, representative in an extremely loose sense — though not, of course, in any strict sense. The argument is that detailed vignettes of this kind are a very valuable supplement to — indeed they are often an essential alternative to — the combination of participatory methods and more or less small-scale sample surveys that are otherwise advocated as ‘likely to prove the most cost-effective means of determining the livelihood strategies of rural households’ (Ellis 1998:57). The purpose of this paper is to stimulate discussion of why this should be so.