Livelihoods as Intimate Government: Reframing the logic of livelihoods for development

Livelihoods approaches emerged from a broad range of efforts to understand how people live in particular places. They have since cohered into often instrumentally applied frameworks that rest on the broadly held assumption that livelihoods are principally about the management of one’s material circumstances. This assumption limits the explanatory power of livelihoods approaches by shifting a range of motivations for livelihoods decisions outside the analytic frame. This article extends efforts to recover a broader lens on livelihoods decisions and outcomes by conceptualising livelihoods as forms of intimate government, local efforts to shape conduct to definite, shifting, and sometimes contradictory material and social ends. By employing a Foucaultinspired analytics of government to the study of livelihoods in Ghana’s Central Region, the paper presents a systematic, implementable approach to the examination of livelihoods and their outcomes in light of this reframing, one where material outcomes are one of many possible ends of intimate government, instead of the end. By opening the analytic lens in this manner, we can explain a much wider set of livelihoods outcomes and decisions than possible under contemporary approaches. Within contemporary development studies and implementation, livelihoods analysis rests on an implicit assumption that livelihoods strategies are principally, if not exclusively, efforts to address material challenges to well-being. This reading is not a necessary part of livelihoods frameworks. It has been called into question, either explicitly or implicitly, in various studies of the complex, indeterminate local outcomes of development efforts. These studies, and many others, make it clear that livelihoods address social goals as well as material needs, and that livelihoods strategies are efforts to align these two often-contradictory arenas. However, this recognition has thus far lacked systematisation comparable to that of, for example, the sustainable livelihoods approach. This limits the reach and influence of these observations in the wider development community. Edward R Carr is in the Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29201, USA. Email: [email protected]. Third World Quarterly, Vol. 34, No.1, 2013, pp 77–108 ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/13/000077-32 2013 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2012.755012 77 D ow nl oa de d by [ E dw ar d R C ar r] a t 1 9: 49 0 1 Fe br ua ry 2 01 3 This paper extends existing efforts to understand livelihoods as more than means to material well-being by presenting case-study evidence from Ghana that illustrates how, above very low thresholds, social goals often trump material factors in livelihoods decision making. To tease out the systematic character of such decisions, the paper frames livelihoods as forms of what Agrawal calls intimate government, local efforts to shape conduct to definite, shifting, and sometimes contradictory material and social ends. Among these ends are a wide range of social goals that are not necessarily determined by (or even principally shaped by) efforts to address material circumstances. Unlike contemporary instrumental applications of livelihoods approaches, the approach I present here does not privilege any of these ends a priori. Instead, the approach requires the investigator to establish which ends carry weight in a particular context or decision, and to step back and ask the general question that originally inspired the livelihoods approach: how do people live in this place? Within such a framing, cases of livelihoods decision making in which various social factors trump the desire to seek greater material return no longer stand out as idiosyncratic outliers. Instead, they become analytically intelligible, enabling greater purchase on local decision-making and livelihoods pathways than possible under more instrumental livelihoods approaches. The first half of the paper is an extended literature review and theoretical discussion that accomplishes three goals. First, it highlights the capabilities and limitations of existing instrumental uses of livelihoods approaches. Second, it identifies a tendency in the development and governmentality literature to treat local social relations and contexts (including livelihoods) as governmentality’s other, rendering them legible only through interaction with larger projects of rule. Third, it moves beyond this treatment of ‘the local’ to build a general approach to livelihoods as forms of intimate government. In the second half of the paper I apply this approach to the analysis of livelihoods decision making in two villages in Ghana’s Central Region. In doing so, I am able to explain how observed limitations on overall opportunity within households, and the production of household-level gender inequality, are not unintended or unwanted consequences of efforts to meet basic material needs. Instead, they are integral to the alignment of a project of rule (narrowly read as the management of the uncertain economic and environmental context via men’s control over household resources) with the self-guidance of the ruled (the desired social and material outcomes of all members of these households). This alignment produces a complex intimate government in which all participants are embroiled, shaping the roles, strategies, and outcomes associated with livelihoods in these villages. Framing livelihoods as intimate government in this case renders a range of otherwise unintelligible livelihoods decisions and outcomes analytically legible, enabling greater potential understandings of both the current viability of livelihoods and likely future livelihoods pathways. These improved understandings are critical to the future of livelihoods approaches in development, as we are poised at a moment when locally specific, complex readings of livelihoods outcomes could take a place of importance in development programme design and evaluation. EDWARD R CARR 78 D ow nl oa de d by [ E dw ar d R C ar r] a t 1 9: 49 0 1 Fe br ua ry 2 01 3 Livelihoods in development As Scoones has demonstrated, what today we call ‘livelihoods approaches’ emerged from a long history of efforts to understand how people live in different places, including ‘village studies, household economics and gender analyses, farming systems research, agro-ecosystem analysis, rapid and participatory appraisal, studies of socio-environmental change, political ecology, sustainability science and resilience studies’. Scoones argues that, while these strands were woven into what we now call livelihoods approaches in the early 1990s, such approaches did not gain wide purchase until the emergence of a post-Washington Consensus policy context in the UK in the late 1990s. Development programmes and policies emerging in this context focused on poverty alleviation and local specificity, yet required systematic framings to support the design and evaluation of programmes and projects. The result was an approach to livelihoods as ‘the capabilities, assets (stores, resources, claims and access) and activities required for a means of living’. On one hand, this definition extended beyond income generation to holistically explore the many ways a person might make a living, and the viability of livelihoods in particular places at particular times. On the other hand, the need for systematisation in a programme and policy context led to an approach with a fundamental emphasis on the economic attributes of livelihoods, which were understood as mediated by social and institutional processes. While the literature on livelihoods in development is vast, and a full review is beyond the scope of this article, livelihoods analysis has some general characteristics. Livelihoods approaches generally frame livelihoods assets as belonging to one of five types of capital: natural, physical, human, financial or social (see Table 1). The analysis of the use of these livelihoods assets tends to follow a series of steps. For example, under the sustainable livelihoods approach, the evaluation of a particular livelihood’s viability begins with the establishment of the vulnerability context, the various economic, environmental, social, and political trends that might affect local livelihoods, the shocks that might occur in each of these realms, and the seasonality of the local environment and economy. The analysis proceeds to the impact of the vulnerability context on local forms of livelihoods capital, which allows the investigator to TABLE 1. The five livelihoods capitals and their definitions