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Theme on Sustainable Livelihoods (TSL)

About the TSL

What is the TSL?
What is the scope of the TSL?
Strategy
Major Themes
Tenets and Issues
Community-Based
Initiatives
Publications, Articles & Proposals
TSL Contacts
Links

About the TSL

What is the TSL?

The Theme on Sustainable Livelihoods (TSL) of CEESP is concerned with local aspects of environmental sustainability and community well being, in other words with community-based, equitable and sustainable management of natural resources, the generation of local wealth and the empowerment of local communities for their own social and cultural well-being.

The group was established to help develop environmental, economic and social policies in favour of sustainable livelihoods in different contexts and environments. It is a tenet of the Group that such policies need to be based on the real life experience of local communities, and accommodate their socio-cultural and ecological diversity.

The TSL thus aims to develop, achieve, support and demonstrate context-specific solutions to local environmental and livelihood problems and, from such experience, to draw appropriate lessons for policy.

What is the scope of the TSL?

TSL is hosted by CENESTA under the supervision of the CEESP Chairperson, Dr. Mohammed-Taghi Farvar. It is currently developing the following:

A network of concerned conservation and development professionals (including traditional community elders) and institutions (non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations) who will be involved in developing policy advice for the Union and beyond-on the basis of lessons learned from the field sites (see below). The network links with other existing sustainable livelihood networks including the ones promoted by the RING, SID, UNDP, CARE, UNEP and various bilateral institutions.

A network of field sites where local communities are experimenting with sustainable livelihood practices and concrete initiatives. With time, coverage will involve a wide variety of biomes, cultures and economic systems (traditional and modern) and a process of "learning by doing" in various components of sustainable livelihoods (animal husbandry and range management, fisheries, non-chemical management of agricultural production and pests, small scale industry, renewable energy production, consumptive and non-consumptive uses of wildlife, eco-tourism, community services, primary health and environmental care, etc. ).

Strategy

The work of the TSL in the field begins with identifying and contacting local communities that strive to meet their livelihood needs in environmentally friendly ways. Those communities are invited to join the CEESP SL network. Once they do, the TSL will help them to identify, understand and successfully tackle their key problems and opportunities. To this end, communities need to be well informed and aware about the many environmental, social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena that affect their life and the many ways in which their own actions affect their local environment. The first step of the sustainable livelihoods approach is thus to develop participatory insights into what a community knows and does-including especially its patrimony of local, traditional and indigenous knowledge and expertise in the management of natural resources, what challenges it faces and what opportunities are available to it. This understanding has to be oriented towards community empowerment, not the extraction of information for outside researchers.

The second step of the approach is based on the capacities of local communities to organise themselves on the basis of the understanding they manage to gain. In other words, the communities that wish to respond to the problems and opportunities they have identified, will be encouraged to structure themselves in equitable ways and to plan for action, asking for the help they need and, as much as possible, joining forces with other social actors. For instance, some communities may decide that their first need is to generate local wealth, and they thus could organise around a wealth-generating activity. Others may need to begin by solving a major problem-such as obtaining a reliable supply of potable water, or managing some major pests affecting their agricultural production. The TSL will facilitate, on a case-by-case basis, the establishment of effective partnerships, enabling the communities to act-learning practical and policy lessons together with the local communities in every step of the way.

The third step is to take action, with various degrees of external support, reflecting in an on-going way on results and consequences, and adjusting activities as appropriate. The method of choice is "participatory action research," i.e. a cycle of reflection-action-reflection controlled and decided by the communities themselves. This cycle will never be entirely perfect or "finished," but it will reveal a variety of insights of great relevance for local effective practice and the policies that may emerge from-and ultimately-enable and support it. The TSL will provide methodological support to the participatory action research.

The forth step is to reflect, among local and non-local actors, on the policy implications of the community-based successful practices, and to draw concrete recommendations and products from such reflections. The TSL will assist local communities to draw their own conclusions for future practice and supportive social conditions-policies included.

Major Themes

Some of the topics below are particularly important for sustainable livelihoods practice and policy, and will be dealt with in field sites, dedicated analyses and workshops.

Issue/ Theme	Brief Description
Eco-agriculture	Ecologically and socially sound agricultural production systems, based on the concept of agro-ecosystems, including the recently applied approaches to Integrated Participatory Production and Pest Management-IPPPM in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
Renewable energy	Most small-scale renewable energy projects for the South have been approached as a technology issue, resulting in failure even in very promising environments. Contrary to this, local communities can be involved as real partners in the definition of energy use problems and solutions, and in finding suitable technological designs with optimal social, ecological and cultural implications, especially for women.
Community based ecotourism	Appropriate local and national policies can result in strong community investment projects in ecotourism. A critical analysis of existing initiatives and exploration of opportunities is needed (Campfire in Zimbabwe, the wildlife management project in Pakistan, and the growing number of examples from East Africa and other regions).
Primary Health and Environmental Care	How participatory approaches in these crucial areas of need can be incorporated into sustainable livelihood projects in local communities. What is the role of the government in creating a supportive and enabling environment?
Habitat and housing	What is the role of this critical need in sustainable livelihood approaches?
Common property resource management and land tenure	The slipping of common property resource management systems into state or open access property on the one hand, and private property on the other is often at the root of natural resource degradation. A look at this issue from the sustainable livelihoods perspective will contribute to the understanding of land use and resource tenure policies.
Sustainable community investment funding	Findings and experiences of different communities around the world are confirming the important role of sustainable, community-based investment funding. These, often called sanduq systems, provide a powerful alternative to the individually oriented micro-credit systems that have resulted in the weakening of local communities in such places as Bangladesh (examples from the Grameen Bank, BRAC, PROSHOCA and thousands of other NGOs).
Rangeland ecology and management	Recent finding based on a couple of decades of field experiences, particularly in "non-equilibrium ecosystems", have shown that the traditional range management practices of nomadic pastoralists, including sophisticated systems such as hema, were much closer to a sustainable yield situation than the 'scientific' practices advocated by experts in more recent times. The TSL will look into this issue as an example of how national and international policies can be re-examined in the face of evidence from the field towards creating a supportive environment for sustainable livelihoods.
Sustainable use and valorisation of biodiversity	The issue of sustainable use has often been looked at only from the point of view of the utilised species. A more complex examination of the subject from social, cultural, traditional and livelihood perspectives will be undertaken by TSL.
Community protected areas for habitats and wildlife management	A great deal of debate has already taken place on this subject, including in the CEESP-WCPA joint Task Force on Local Communities and Protected Areas. The policy issues of a supportive legal and political environment enabling local communities to declare protected areas, often based on traditional and indigenous rights, will be examined from a livelihoods perspective. The issues of effective participation of local communities in the management of various types of state-declared protected areas will also be considered.
Watershed management	The life of many local communities depends on the variety of ecosystem and livelihood services that their watershed basins provide, including forests and rangelands, agro-ecosystems for crop production, irrigation and domestic water supply, recreation, and flood protection. TSL will study how sound watershed management (in both an ecological and social sense) can critically contribute to sustainable livelihoods. In particular, it will examine how collaborative management settings can provide more equitable, sustainable and mutually satisfactory relationships between upstream and downstream communities.

Tenets and Issues

The sustainable livelihoods approach is characterised by both a specific methodology and the concerns that shape its "content." In terms of methodology, context-specific, participatory initiatives take the place of the blueprint programmes of the past, and Participatory Action Research (PAR) and "Learning by Doing" substitute the top-down research approaches that used to see communities as the "objects" or "beneficiaries" but never as the sentient subjects of their own research and empowerment.

In terms of "content," sustainable livelihoods is concerned with both environmental influences on human life and human influences on the environment. On the one hand, the surroundings of a community should not harm its members and should provide for all their necessities of life. On the other, local communities and its people should be caretakers and not destroyers or pathogenic parasites of the planet and its ecosystems.

Sustainable livelihoods depend more on the quality of the relationship between human communities and ecosystems (the nature and "environment friendliness" of technology, the degree of use of traditional, indigenous and local resource management systems.) than on mere "numbers of people consuming resources." While sustainable livelihoods involve matters of international and national relevance, they also depend-in a fundamental way-on issues of local importance, in particular on finding local solutions to local environmental and survival problems.

In a strict sense, local environmental problems can be described as instances of environmental degradation limited to specific geographical and cultural contexts and negatively affecting local communities. Examples include lack of access to safe water for a particular village, deforestation and degradation of topsoil in a particular watershed, inappropriate disposal of waste in a particular human settlement or loss of biodiversity in an ecosystem. These problems have direct impacts on human well being and are, in themselves, a cause of poverty. They are also strictly dependent on who-locally and externally-has the power and capacity to take what action. At the roots of these problems may lie the lack of secure tenure to housing, inequitable distribution of land or access to other natural resources, use of inefficient technologies, destruction of indigenous, traditional and local natural resource management systems, poor knowledge of available resources or lack of basic services.

The example of recent changes in rangeland management systems is illustrative. National governments (whether state-socialist or market-oriented), international agencies and national and international experts alike, influenced by "scientific" assumptions, joined forces for decades to denigrate traditional rangeland management systems by nomadic pastoralists. The latter were described as backward, ineffective and destructive of rangelands. More recently, however, in the light of the past quarter of a century of technical experience in semi-arid lands, the local indigenous and traditional systems of rangeland management, including sophisticated arrangements such as community-based exclosures for rangeland regeneration (hema) have been re-legitimised. With time and experience, scientists learned that the pastoral nomads knew more about ecologically sound rangeland management-including more precise concepts of carrying capacity than most if not all scientists and decision makers who control policy. Unfortunately, much of the traditional and indigenous knowledge base, locked up in the age-old experience of councils of community elders, runs the risk of disappearing forever.

The equivalent of this trend has been happening in most major biomes and cultural groupings of the world, including in the humid tropics, mountain environments, marine and coastal zones, and in most agro-ecosystems, making imperative the thorough understanding of many endangered traditional livelihoods practices.

The merging of traditional and modern practices is also an important field of analysis for sustainable livelihoods. Innovative experiences can be identified in the use of renewable energies, in agro-forestry, in ecologically based agricultural production (for instance for Integrated Participatory Production and Pest Management systems-IPPPM), in community based ecotourism, in the devising of ways to use sustainably and adding value to biodiversity, in running community protected areas for habitat and wildlife management, in restoring traditional rangeland management systems, in managing and protecting watersheds, and others.

The TSL pursues community-based experiences hand in hand with the analysis of traditional as well as merged traditional/ modern practices for sustainable livelihoods. The work requires ecological analysis in addition to an understanding of political, economic and socio-cultural conditions.

Ultimately, the sustainable livelihoods approach is about millions of local communities living in prosperity and peace within their diverse ecosystems. It is an approach for the poor as well as the rich, for the South as well as the North, which becomes alive through the initiatives of the civil society-local communities, community-based organisations and non-governmental organisations contributing innovations and experiences in their own ways. The local focus, however, does not mean that governments do not have a role to play. On the contrary, governments can and should play an essential enabling role with supportive policies and conditions, while refraining from applying a heavy and arrogant hand. In addition, all communities can benefit immensely-and often cannot do without-a flow of information and know-how, and the political, legal, technical, cultural and financial support of other actors in society. In the best of cases, this support could be provided as part of clear collaboration agreements (for instance collaborative management initiatives for natural resources), and would directly relate to thorough analyses of traditional and modern livelihood approaches in specific ecosystems.

Community-Based Initiatives

In order to arrive at a broad series of field based experiences from which to draw lessons and ideas for policy, CEESP works with a number of community based initiatives, examples of which include the following:

Issue/ Theme	Brief Description
Community solidarity projects in the Kousseri region (Extreme-North Province, Cameroon)	Ten local communities in different ecological conditions, comprising a complex Sahelian set of ethnic groups and local agro-ecosystems near Lake Chad. The TSL is providing technical assistance in sustainable financing systems for community-based generation of wealth, in participatory action research for the non-chemical management of agricultural production and pests, in community involvement for water supply and sanitation schemes, etc. A local NGO is involved and provides on-going support and linkage with the TSL as appropriate.
Management of the Caspian Sturgeon (Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Azerbaijan)	The major Caspian sturgeon species are now highly threatened. Moratoriums and strict quotas have been proposed by a recent CITES meeting, and the Russian Federation has declared a ban on export of caviar and sturgeon in the second half of 2001. CENESTA, The TSL supporting organisation, has started work with local Caspian communities-beginning with the Iranian side of the Sea-to devise together ways of alleviating fishing pressure on natural sturgeon populations by practicing sturgeon culture as a sustainable livelihoods support activity. At least two of the Caspian states-the Russian Federation and Iran, have the technology of raising sturgeons outside the Sea, possibly using recycled seawater. Project proposals have been drafted and funding is being sought from the Caspian Environment Programme (CEP).
Preserving the social and natural wealth of Socotra Island (Yemen)	The Island of Socotra is one of the marvels of the world. In conjunction with the Yemeni Ministry of Tourism and Environment, the Yemeni Islands Promotion and Development Authority, and the Biodiversity Conservation Project executed by the UNOPS, the TSL is organising ways to support the local Socotri communities to apply their indigenous wisdom of natural resource management systems (INRMS) to conserving the unique endemic plant resources of the Island (of which nearly 300 have been identified so far), including through community-declared protected areas, and to the development of their community-based eco-tourism initiatives.
Sustainable fishing and community based eco-tourism in Galapagos Archipelago (Ecuador)	A process to establish institutions for the collaborative management of natural resources has been going on for the past four years on the Galapagos archipelago, dealing with a variety of conflicts in the management and sustainable use of natural resources. Local sustainable fishing and community-based eco-tourism-agreed upon within the collaborative management setting-will be analysed through participation of local stakeholders assisted by TSL members. Lessons for sustainable livelihoods in similar environments will be drawn in collaboration with the Galapagos Marine Protected Area, the Charles Darwin Foundation, the WWF, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Preserving the livelihoods of the Marsh Arabs (Mesopotamia)	Political and economic interests are threatening 5000-year-old unique ways of life in these ancient Mesopotamian wetlands. The original area of wetlands has now been drained to less than 10 percent, according to UNEP and satellite sources. In collaboration with other national and international actors, the TSL is seeking ways of working with the local communities to preserve their ancient ways of life and unique ecosystem.
Living with the Badia (Jordan)	Supported by the High Council of Scientific Research, a local initiative has succeeded in gathering a large amount of information, through both classical and participatory means, on the natural resources and problems of the Bedouin of the Badia (desert) of northern Jordan. TSL is planning to support the initiative in promoting aspects of sustainable livelihoods compatible with nature conservation.
Organic agriculture in the Cinque Terre National Park (Italy)	The Cinque Terre, with its stonewalls and vineyards on terraced slopes reaching down to the sea, is a World Heritage Site attempting to salvage and restore a unique landscape patrimony. Innovative solutions to the problems of local migration, uneconomic production of vineyards, and high costs of up-keep of the landscape need to be found. Today, any "citizen of the world" who agrees to abide by caring for the land and producing organic vineyards in the Park can take plots of 3000 square metres on a 20-year lease. The TSL will learn from this experience, which might be very relevant to other regions of the world.
Malmö renewable energy neighbourhood (Sweden)	The city of Malmö in Sweden has decided to experiment with a total renewable energy supply programme for an entire neighbourhood. Plans are well advanced for wind and solar energy for electric supply and for innovative means of domestic heating. This experience will be followed by the TSL to learn lessons in sustainable living for industrialised urban societies.
No-till agriculture in Madagascar	The Malagasy Association ANAE has been working on a wide scale with local communities introducing soil conservation practices and high-yield production of rice and other crops through natural ecological means. The TSL intends to have a two-way learning relationship whereby the approaches used in Madagascar can inform and guide other experiences in the tropical world, and the sustainable community-based financing (sanduq system) used elsewhere can be added to the local experiences in sustainable livelihoods.
Sustainable livelihood of Kurdish, Baluch, Luri and Caspian communities in Iran	Most valuable experiences in sustainable livelihoods have been demonstrated by about 20 community-based initiatives in several provinces of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The initiatives include sustainable and organic agriculture, non-chemical management of pests, renewable energy production and use, primary environmental care, innovative community based sustainable funding and investment mechanisms, and the revival and rehabilitation of indigenous natural resource management systems. The TSL is supporting these initiatives and will draw in due course some policy implications. More information is available from the website of the Centre for Sustainable Development (CENESTA), Iran, Area-based Development Project.
Traditional fishing communities in Banc d'Arguin (Mauritania)	The protected area of Banc d'Arguin is a long coastal strip inhabited by traditional fishing communities. The TSL is seeking to understand the conditions, problems and opportunities of these communities, which face, like many others in the world, the unfair competition of large boats and powerful connections in high places.
The wealth of the rural landscape (Switzerland)	A typical community in a manicured Jurassic landscape, supported by years of accumulated social capital, powerful national subsidies, zoning and learning by doing. A seemingly idyllic variety of livelihood approaches combines a diversity of crops, cattle raising, landscape and wildlife conservation, rural industries such as dairy and forest products, and managed agro-forestry. Inputs include organic fertilisers, high technology, a merging of traditional and modern know-how and the highest agricultural subsidies among industrialised countries. How sustainable is this? The TSL will work to understand this system, in partnership with a variety of local community members and institutions.