Operationalizing agency in livelihoods research: smallholder farming livelihoods in southwest Ethiopia

Aisa O Manlosa

doi:10.5751/es-12887-270111

Abstract

Livelihoods are activities and practices in which social and environmental factors interlink, and they play a key role in achieving human well-being and environmental conservation. Livelihood analyses are therefore important to social-ecological systems research. With a few exceptions, however, the concept of agency has been largely missing in research applying the social-ecological systems approach. This is an important gap to address, because humans are not passive victims of broader sociopolitical trends and environmental changes, but rather play causative roles that shape history. This paper presents a conceptual framework that enables the explicit integration of agency into livelihood analyses, and is useful for examining the extent to which livelihoods enable people to be agents of their own well-being, and stewards of their environment. The framework has four pillars of agency: preconditions (referring to capital assets and resources, or CARs); processes (feedbacks and dynamics); power (the social and political fabrics, and relations in which livelihoods are embedded); and possibilities (the extent to which a present livelihood expands into future options, and builds the ability to act on options). The framework is then applied to a case study analyzing smallholder farming livelihoods and food security in southwest Ethiopia. The case study is based on empirical work involving quantitative survey, in-depth interviews, and focus-group discussions. This paper demonstrates the applicability of the framework to identifying agency constraints in smallholder farming, and helps determine areas where agency can be further strengthened. Beyond the case study, the framework may also be applied in other contexts and to other livelihood types. Its application can strengthen the contribution of livelihood analysis to social-ecological systems research by providing a way to operationalize and foreground agency.

Highlights

Sustainable livelihoods enable people to lift themselves out of poverty, meet their food and nutrition requirements, be agents for the improvement of their own and their households’ well-being, and be stewards of the environment on which they depend
The framework has four pillars of agency: preconditions; processes; power; and possibilities
The conceptual framework applies to various contexts, different types of livelihoods, and research focusing on various sustainability challenges, this case study was selected because (1) smallholder farming livelihoods directly depend on the environment and smallholders are directly affected by environmental changes (Williams et al 2018); (2) high levels of poverty and food insecurity are observed in smallholder farming households, in sub-Saharan Africa (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations et al 2020), where loss of biodiversity is a major concern; and (3) smallholder farming is a livelihood in which improvements in agency can have substantive effects on food security, other aspects of human well-being, and environmental stewardship (Chappell 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable livelihoods enable people to lift themselves out of poverty, meet their food and nutrition requirements, be agents for the improvement of their own and their households’ well-being, and be stewards of the environment on which they depend. Within the broader area of sustainability science, the socialecological systems (SES) approach focuses on the interlinkages of coupled human-environment systems (Folke 2006, Berkes et al 2008). A commonality between these topics is that they necessitate understanding interactions between the social and ecological dimensions of social-ecological systems. They involve examinations of how people, as individuals and as collectives, interact with, influence, and are influenced by their environments, in the process of going about their daily lives to pursue interlinked goals such as production of food, generation of income, actualization of identity, and reproduction of social relations and community life. Livelihood analysis remains relevant and has much to contribute to socialecological systems research (Shackleton et al 2021)

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Discussion

Conclusion