This paper examines social and economic issues pertaining to the micro-irrigation technology based livelihoods of smallholders in villages of Nepal and India. The paper therefore aims to help in policy making by bringing in the ignored micro perspectives. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied to generate data on livelihoods of respondents. The paper concludes that in order to a...

From the perspective of local livelihoods this paper explores the complex interactions between wildlife, livestock and people, and options for integrated wildlife and livestock management in the semi-arid rangelands of eastern Africa. The paper draws on the sustainable livelihoods approach which explicitly considers whether households have access to the assets required to engage in an activity,...

Kenyan farmers’ livelihoods are closely linked to climate conditions. Almost three-quarters of the labor force depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and almost all farmers depend on timely and adequate rainfall for crop production and husbandry, as only 2 percent of cultivated area is equipped for irrigation. Thus, climate variability and change will have an increasing impact on agricult...

Aquatic agricultural systems in developing countries face increasing competition from multiple stakeholders over rights to access and use natural resources, land, water, wetlands, and fisheries, essential to rural livelihoods. A key implication is the need to strengthen governance to enable equitable decision making amidst competition that spans sectors and scales, building capacities for resil...

The paper uses the experiences of selected rural communities in the Offinso Forest District of Ghana to demonstrate how the Modified Taungya System (MTS) as a decentralized forest governance strategy enhances the resilience of local people to escape poverty through enhanced livelihoods and simultaneously restores degraded forest resources. The underpinning objective of the study was to ascertai...

A number of recent approaches to sustainable development, such as the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, are genuinely transdisciplinary as they are produced, disseminated and applied in the borderland between research, policy, and practice. Human Ecology has the capacity to contribute to a better understanding and a critical evaluation of such new approaches, but is currently lacking the tools ...

As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, this article highlights four ke...

In a previous paper [McCusker, B., Carr, E.R., 2006. The co-production of livelihoods and land use change: Case studies from South Africa and Ghana. Geoforum 37 (5), 790–804], we argued that land use and livelihoods could best be understood as co-produced, where land use and livelihoods are not separate objects of knowledge related to one another through abstract processes, but different manife...

The economics and livelihoods impacts of stand-alone, small-scale (less than 2 kW) renewable energy technologies for rural electrification are assessed using a representative sample of 531 rural households in three provinces of Western China. Over 20 small wind, photovoltaic (PV) and wind–PV hybrid configurations were evaluated for their potential to meet local electricity needs. The assessment...