Abstract
A large proportion of rural households, particularly in the dry land areas, representative for more than 10% of the world's land surface and up to 80% in Morocco, depend for their livelihoods on livestock. They exploit livestock's capacity to live in very harsh environments using herd-mobility at multiple scale level. Understanding the multiple contributions of livestock to the household and national economy raises complex research issues and challenges linked with the multitude of goods and services derived from livestock, their interactions with other family activities, and the local and national context. The objective of our research was therefore to analyse the diversity and assess the resilience of livelihood strategies of farming households oriented to livestock using a set of data collected in the dry land areas (oases and mountainous zones) of Morocco and discuss the livelihood outcome indicators. To achieve this, we have realized a cross-sectional analysis of livelihoods and adaptive capacity, to select a set of pertinent indicators. These indicators have been developed using an adapted version of the Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey (RHoMIS) toolkit for pastoral and agropastoral household systems. Our results highlight the critical importance of livelihood diversification (off-farm diversification, livestock diversification, and crop diversification) in building household resilience and the livelihood outcomes. While livelihood strategies undoubtedly contribute to livelihood outcomes, there is also a critical iterative process, i.e., livelihood outcomes also influence the livelihood strategies at the farming households. The present work proposes an aggregated indicator of livelihood outcomes allowing us to capture the heterogeneity of living conditions of agropastoral systems by considering the main drivers of this system, i.e., mobility, livestock species, and physiological stage composition of the herd. This approach could constitute a valuable contribution to help fill the knowledge gaps that do not allow policy makers in developing contextualized rural development policies and instruments in these very harsh environments.
Highlights
The concept of resilience has grown in importance extending from addressing the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses (Adger, 2000) and the capacity to “bouncing forward” [as described by Davoudi et al (2012)], up to understanding, managing, and governing complex integrated systems of people and nature [see the works of the Stockholm Resilience Center, such as Janssen and Ostrom (2006) or Folke (2016)]
Consistent with our sampling approach that focused on the analysis of the diversity of farming systems, we developed a household farm systems’ typology, using a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) on household asset variables and variables related to livelihood diversification and social management combined with the Ward method of hierarchical clustering (Ward, 1963) in each study site
We tried to understand the links between “capacity of actions” and “resource endowment” and the two livelihood outcome indicators based on “Progress out of Poverty Index R (PPI)” and “Viability.” For that, we developed a profile of resilience for each household type
Summary
The concept of resilience has grown in importance extending from addressing the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses (Adger, 2000) and the capacity to “bouncing forward” [as described by Davoudi et al (2012)], up to understanding, managing, and governing complex integrated systems of people and nature [see the works of the Stockholm Resilience Center, such as Janssen and Ostrom (2006) or Folke (2016)] In this resilience thinking, the main challenge is to capture the dynamics and capacity to survive (adaptability) and evolve (transformability) under contexts of local governance (Meuwissen et al, 2019). Resilience is viewed as a process more than as an outcome in facing perturbances
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