This dissertation explores the relationship between land tenure and livelihoods in pre-Saharan Morocco as an ethical struggle over subsistence rights and the definition of community. Research in an oasis valley of southern Morocco indicated how changing land use practices framed contestations over community, political authority, and social hierarchies. The dissertation specifically examines the extension of settlement and cultivation from the oasis into the arid steppe. The research methodology contextualizes household decision-making around land use and livelihood strategies within the framework of land tenure regimes and other regional, national, and global processes. Households with the resources and prestige to navigate customary tenure regimes in their favor used these institutions to facilitate land acquisition and investments in commercial agricultural production. Rather than push for capitalist land markets, they invoked a discourse of communalism in support of customary regimes. In contrast, marginalized families without access to land mobilized to divide collective lands and secure individual freehold tenure. This complicates a prominent critique in agrarian studies that privatization signals the immersion of peripheral lands into neoliberal tenure regimes. The research shows that in southern Morocco, resistance to communal tenure regimes favoring elites was rooted in a discourse of subsistence rights and ethical claims to membership in a just community rather than a simple acquiescence to the power of neoliberal property relations. The dissertation therefore explores the shifting fault lines of social differentiation and the political and cultural embeddedness of land in processes of "repeasantization," the resurgence of rural peasantries in the context of the growing industrialization of global food production. The research draws on cultural anthropology, geography, and political economy to explore an understudied issue in the anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: the economic and environmental dimensions of agrarian livelihoods and rural social dynamics from a critical theoretical perspective.

Rural households in the West African Sahel have developed livelihood systems that allow them to survive in one of the most challenging social-ecological systems on Earth. These households have experienced environmental shocks including droughts, floods, and extreme heat for hundreds of years, and have well-established coping and adaptation mechanisms that allow them to recover from all but the most severe shocks. Climate change, particularly increased climatic variability, may stress Sahelian livelihood systems to the point that households must deploy a new set of coping and adaptation strategies in order to survive. This research, conducted as three interrelated mixed-method studies, explores the coping and adaptation strategies used by Tuareg transhumant pastoralists in Niger starting with the deep drought of 1968-1974.The first study involves rural households in the Tahoua Region of central Niger. These households have adapted to climate change and other livelihood stressors primarily by diversifying their assets, utilizing new technologies, and reducing the length of their annual transhumance. While there are donor-funded programs designed to assist rural households with adaptation to climate change, the households in this study have not been the beneficiaries of such programs. The second study attempts to disentangle climate shocks from other factors driving rural-urban migration while also exploring which households migrate to urban areas, and why. Climate change is perceived as the main factor driving rural-urban migration, as well as other livelihood changes. Household-level preferences, management skills, and luck played a greater role that asset endowments in determining which households would migrate to urban areas. The third study focused on livelihood strategies of households that had migrated to, and settled in, urban areas. These households worked hard to maintain social capital with their rural kin while also building social capital in their new urban environment. Social capital with expatriates and urban elites was an important element of urban households' asset endowment. Urbanized households possess significantly fewer livestock than their rural counterparts, and struggle to manage the cash earned from relatively low-paying wage labor. These three studies demonstrate that pastoralists perceive climate change as a significant driver of changes in livelihood strategies. Pastoralists' perceptions of climate change broadly match climate data. Furthermore, pastoralists, with little to no assistance from the state or development organizations, are successfully adapting to climate change in ways that are likely to increase their resilience to future climate shocks.

A widespread phenomenon on dumpsites in the developing world, subsistence waste picking is also a common practice at the city-owned Coastal Park Landfill (CPL) in Muizenberg. Poor unemployed people from the townships of Capricorn, Vrygrond and Hillview, situated at the foot of the tip “skarrel for scrap” every day. The word skarreling is an Afrikaans term meaning to rummage or scrabble, scuttle or scurry. Thus, if one talks of “skarreling for scrap”, it generally refers to poor peo-ple trying to eke out a living by looking for recyclables in the waste that can be put to personal use or turned into money.In the two decades since the transition to democracy, South Africa and the City of Cape Town (CCT) have formulated a number of framework and subordinate policies which express their commitment to sustainable development (SD). SD aims to achieve a balance between its three components, econom-ic, environmental and social sustainability. Thus, SD is not only about increased economic efficiency and stability, while at the same time reducing pollution and handling natural resources more thought-fully; it is also about promoting social equity by reducing poverty and empowering the poor. This study is guided by the assumption that waste pickers in developing countries play an important part in recycling efforts, and that recycling in turn is an integral component of SD, which is the guid-ing principle of South African policy-making. In an ideal scenario – as implicitly promised by the policies on SD – the management of solid waste should pursue the economic and environmental goals of SD by promoting recycling and should be aligned with the goal of creating sustainable livelihoods.However, the reality in the CCT is a different one. Landfill skarreling in the CCT, and particularly at CPL, is accompanied by conflict and a criminalisation of the skarrelaars. The CCT decided to phase out landfill salvaging in 2008, and subsequently has put a lot of effort into keeping skarrelaars away from its landfills. The implications of this decision – job losses for poor people and a potential in-crease in crime – have not been thought through. There is thus a dysfunctional triangular relationship around waste recycling in the CCT, leading to tensions between (1) the City’s commitment to SD; (2) its approach towards recycling (as part of solid waste management) in policy and practice; and (3) the livelihoods of the poor in adjacent townships. In the CCT the goals of SD are undermined by the City’s recycling strategies, with adverse effects for the livelihoods of the people who live off skarrel-ing.There are several causes for this disjuncture between policy and reality. The first has to do with igno-rance on the side of the policymakers. They seem to be badly informed about the extent and nature of skarreling, perhaps assuming that this activity is performed only by a few people who need quick cash for drugs. The second cause can be attributed to the neoliberal macro-policies pursued in South Africa, as well as to the global competition between cities for investment. This neoliberal urbanism leads cities like Cape Town to re-imagine themselves as “world (-class) cities”, in which poor waste pickers are perceived as a disturbing factor. In the CCT, this goes hand in hand with an approach reminiscent of the apartheid mindset, which saw the need to control poor, black (and potentially unru-ly) people.The dissertation therefore focuses on the core themes of sustainable development, (urban) neoliberal-ism, and informality in combination with a case study of the informal waste pickers at the chosen landfill site. Writing from a political studies angle, this study is framed as a policy critique: it argues that the policies around SWM ignore South African realities, and that the SD policies and their im-plementation lack coherence. Moreover, the conflict between the skarrelaars and the CCT at the CPL is rooted in inadequate national and local legislation which does not acknowledge the role of informal waste pickers in SWM and aims at excluding rather than including them. If waste pickers were sup-ported in their recycling efforts in both policy and practice, this would be a win-win situation for the state/city (economic benefits and less crime), the skarrelaars (regular employment and incomes) and the environment (less waste buried on landfills).The case study is primarily designed as a qualitative study, but also includes quantitative elements as it attempts a first quantification of the extent and nature of skarreling at the CPL site, one of only three operating dumpsites in Cape Town. The aim on the one hand is to estimate the contribution of the skarrelaars to waste reduction (and therefore to sustainability) in the City, especially since the waste they collect is not buried on the landfill, thereby prolonging the operational life span of the landfill. The other aim is to assess the role of the skarrelaars as an economic factor in the township, in particular the question of how important the incomes generated from skarreling are for their individu-al livelihoods and for the community as a whole. / Magister Artium - MA

In literature and popular discourse sustainable development debates have a habit of polarizing around conflicting understandings. On the one hand sustainable development is interpreted as an extension of dominant neoliberal agendas, on the other it is constructed as an alternative to the mainstream. This thesis works through these positions, to argue for an understanding of sustainable development in the spaces between; where hegemony and counterhegemony slip and slide, collide, disrupt and confuse. It is a thesis about the entanglements of sustainable development policy; a study in which I contend that sustainable development is best understood through the multiple sites of practice where policy is enacted. Drawing upon notions of messiness and bringing together actor-orientated sociology and livelihoods approaches, I explore sustainable development as it is negotiated through networks of actors and livelihoods in rural Cambodia. Specifically, I present a study of two projects implementing community fisheries as an instrument of sustainable development policy in two remote provinces of Cambodia. It is a study about the different actors responsible for implementing each project, as well as the life worlds of rural villagers affected by them. Through an in-depth analysis grounded in the diverse realities of people in particular places, I uncover the struggles through which sustainable development is negotiated. I expose a policy interpreted through multiple, overlapping simplifications and assumptions and uncover how these are simultaneously produced, recirculated, contested and transformed in practice. Significantly, I highlight the destabalising consequences of a policy which attempts to legislate away diversity or difference. Thus, I reveal the possibility of alternative realities finding expression through spaces otherwise characterised by domination.

The sustainability of grouper culture as an alternative livelihood option for coastal fishers was investigated in the southern provinces of Thailand. A sequenced approach using qualitative and quantitative research methods was used to explore factors that could undermine the potential for grouper culture to contribute to a sustainable livelihood. A study was initially conducted in 28 villages in 6 provinces in southern Thailand to provide baseline information on grouper aquaculture and fisheries, focusing on culture practice, the actors and institutions involved in grouper culture and beneficiaries. Factors contributing to the variation in levels of uptake of grouper culture between provinces was explored. This initial overview facilitated the description of the grouper culture system in terms of its boundaries, hierarchies, interconnections and processes and the development of a framework for the assessment of the sustainability of the grouper culture system. A case study approach was used to investigate in-depth the role and sustainability of grouper culture at the community and household level. Three communities were selected for study in Trang and Satun provinces. Research was guided by the sustainability assessment framework, which comprised five components: Livelihoods, Institutions, Environment, Markets and Production Systems. Data was collected using qualitative, participatory methods and a quantitative survey. The research found that grouper culture has the potential to contribute to a sustainable livelihood for coastal fishers in southern Thailand, although problems with fish disease and mortality, fluctuations in the availability of seed fish and water quality undermine the ability of most farmers to obtain the maximum benefit from grouper culture. Non-technical factors including motivation and incentive, access to financial capital and levels of social capital were also observed to influence sustainability of grouper culture. Grouper culture was found to be an activity in which members of all wealth groups could participate with institutional support, access to credit, and access to wild sources of seed and feed. It is unlikely to provide a suitable alternative to fishing, as the two activities contribute in different ways to the livelihoods of coastal households, but may support livelihood diversification.

One of the most pressing challenges facing the world today is how to sustainably feed a growing population while conserving the ecosystem services we depend on. Coffee landscapes are an important site for research on agrifood systems because they reflect global-scale dynamics surrounding conservation and livelihood development. Within them, we find both what is broken in our global agrifood system, as well as the grassroots struggles that strive to change the system by building socio-ecologically resilient, sustainable livelihoods. Research shows that smallholder shade coffee farmers steward high biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services. At the same time, studies in the last decade demonstrate that many smallholder coffee farmers in Mesoamerica suffer annual periods of seasonal hunger, as well as pervasive poverty. This dissertation explores household livelihood strategies, with a particular emphasis on agroecology, and how they can contribute to build sustainable systems that secure food and maintain biodiversity in coffee communities of Chiapas, Mexico. Research was conducted using a mixed methods approach, which included the collection of quantitative and qualitative socio-ecological data through focus groups, surveys, semi-structured interviews, participant observation and plant inventories. Surveys were conducted with 79 households in 11 communities, all located within the buffer zone of a biosphere reserve. A stratified random sample of 31 households from these 79 were surveyed again to collect more in-depth data, including the collection of biophysical data in their subsistence and coffee land use systems. The following research questions were explored: 1) What are the major ecological, social, economic, and political drivers of seasonal hunger? 2) What is the relationship between agrobiodiversity (plant and livestock diversity) and food security (months of adequate household food provisioning and dietary diversity)? 3) What household livelihood assets and strategies contribute to or limit food security and food sovereignty? Across the sample population, total agrobiodiversity and maize and bean production were strongly correlated with improved food security. Coffee income was not strongly correlated with improved food security, which suggests that income is used for priorities within the household other than food, despite seasonal food shortages. Results demonstrate the importance of balancing subsistence and commodity (i.e. coffee) production in these communities, where subsistence food serves as a risk management strategy to buffer against volatility in coffee prices, in addition to offsetting income that might be used for food towards non-food expenses. Subsistence production, which typically applies agroecological practices in this site, also holds important cultural and environmental value. The results of this research indicate that government policy and development practice should enable farmers to maintain the social, ecological and cultural processes that support the management of agrobiodiversity for subsistence and coffee.

Climate change has varying effects across the world. In North America, arid and semi-arid regions are subject to creeping warming together with more extreme climate variations, decreasing precipitation, and decreasing river flows that risk livelihoods of human populations living in these areas, and push their capacity to adapt beyond known boundaries. Environmental impacts act together with effects of socio-economic globalization and challenges imposed by institutional and policy events. These multiple forms of globally-driven changes interact with local communities and produce winners and losers depending on their levels of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, as well as on the specific stressors and shocks affecting the livelihood resources on which they depend. Rural communities often are hot spots of global change impacts because many livelihoods depend on the community’s natural resource base, and in several cases, they are also subject to market fluctuations and crashes due to their participation in international chains of food and producer goods. They will face a larger burden of the global change impacts due to this multi-tiered exposure. The socio-economic and institutional changes affecting rural communities have also produced de-agrarianization of livelihoods. Diversified livelihoods based on extractive industries and manufacturing or urban-based jobs coexist with traditional small-scale ranching and farming. In terms of water and land access and use, the modifications in user sectors and necessities, combined with increased demand by social and ecological components of the watershed systems, creates more complexity of environmental governance regimes and institutions. The purpose of this research is to identify and understand how rural communities of arid Northwest Mexico—with reference to the San Miguel Watershed (SMW) in central Sonora State—experience and respond to globally driven environmental, socio-economic, and institutional changes. The SMW is in a rapidly changing arid transboundary region, and exhibits a variety of institutional arrangements for land and water management, which makes it a case suitable for the study of adaptation in the face of global change. The study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies in three municipalities representing the upper, middle, and lower SWM. Rural households and producers, governmental agents, and local leaders were the participants of direct data collection, while documentary analysis and a broader literature review on rural adaptation in Mexico and the arid Southwest United States complemented primary data. The main contributions of the research are: 1) identifying multiple types of rural livelihoods and their importance in understanding adaptation to global change; 2) emphasizing institutional events and factors acting as both stressors and regulators in these adaptation processes, 3) describing how interactions between institutions can produce diverse governance outcomes in terms of access and management of resources for livelihoods' adaptation; and 4) providing empirical evidence for improving adaptation policies in rural arid Northwest Mexico, and other rural arid communities of the world. The study also includes a series of findings and lessons regarding advances in understanding human adaptation in rural communities, contributions to the theory and methods of adaptation science, and policy guidelines based on the findings.

Impact investing is growing as a development approach to bring about positive social, environmental and economic impact for marginalized people in the developing world. But existing in a developed country like Canada, the Aboriginal communities are not getting enough attention due to lack of capacity, state dependency, state policies and negative perception among the stakeholders in the financial ecosystems. This thesis followed mixed methods participatory action research approach and had a deeper look on the present investment ecosystem and identified many barriers to investment for Aboriginal cooperative or social enterprise including negative stereotypes regarding Aboriginal communities impeding investing in cooperative or social enterprise. However, proper education, financial inclusion, awareness among stakeholders and engaging micro-investors in Aboriginal enterprises could improve the situation and develop opportunities for both the supply and demand side. / May 2016

Rural people in the Sahel derive multiple benefits from local ecosystem services on a daily basis. At the same time, a large proportion of the population lives in multidimensional poverty. The global sustainability challenge is thus manifested in its one extreme here, with a strong need to improve human well-being without degrading the landscapes that people depend on. To address this challenge, knowledge on how local people interact with their landscapes, and how this changes over time, must be improved. An ecosystem services approach, focusing on benefits to people from ecosystem processes, is useful in this context. However, methods for assessing ecosystem services that include local knowledge while addressing a scale relevant for development interventions are lacking. In this thesis, such methods are developed to study Sahelian landscapes through an ecosystem services lens. The thesis is focused on village landscapes and is based on in-depth fieldwork in six villages in northern Burkina Faso. In these villages, participatory methods were used to identify social-ecological patches (landscape units that correspond with local descriptions of landscapes, characterized by a combination of land use, land cover and topography), the provisioning ecosystem services generated in each social-ecological patch, and the benefits from ecosystem services to livelihoods (Paper I). In Paper II, change in cover of social-ecological patches mapped on aerial photographs and satellite images from the period 1952-2016 was combined with population data and focus group discussions to evaluate change in generation of ecosystem services over time. In Paper III, up-scaling of the village scale assessment to provincial scale was done through the development of a classification method to identify social-ecological patches on medium-resolution satellite images. Paper IV addresses the whole Sudano-Sahelian climate zone of West Africa, to analyze woody vegetation as a key component for ecosystem services generation in the landscape. It is based on a systematic review of which provisioning and regulating ecosystem services are documented from trees and shrubs on agricultural lands in the region. Social-ecological patches and associated sets of ecosystem services are very similar in all studied villages across the two regions. Most social-ecological patches generate multiple ecosystem services with multiple benefits, illustrating a multifunctional landscape (Paper I). The social-ecological patches and ecosystem services are confirmed at province level in both regions, and the dominant social-ecological patches can be mapped with high accuracy on medium-resolution satellite images (Paper III). The potential generation of cultivated crops has more or less kept up with population growth in the villages, while the potential for other ecosystem services, particularly firewood, has decreased per capita (Paper II). Trees and shrubs contribute with multiple ecosystem services, but their landscape effects, especially on regulating ecosystem services, must be better studied (Paper IV). The thesis provides new insights about the complex and multi-functional landscapes of rural Sahel, nuancing dominating narratives on environmental change in the region. It also provides new methods that include local knowledge in ecosystem services assessments, which can be up-scaled to scales relevant for development interventions, and used to analyze changes in ecosystem services over time. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.</p><p> </p>

L'objectif général de ce travail était d'évaluer les stratégies des moyens de subsistance dans le lac Tonle Sap en rapport avec divers facteurs de changement. Plus précisément, l'étude visait à étudier les variations et les déterminants des moyens de subsistance (spatial et temporal), ainsi que les impacts des futurs changements et des communautés de pêcherie (CFis) dans les plaines inondables de Tonle Sap. En utilisant les approches multivariées, j'ai pu mettre en évidence les résultats suivants : Les différentes caractéristiques écologiques déterminent les différentes stratégies des moyens de subsistance et les ressources environnementales sont indispensables pour la période post-conflit des pays comme le Cambodge ; Les divers facteurs humains, naturels et économiques, sociaux et physiques ont influencé le choix et le revenu des ménages ; parmi lesquels, la possession de terrain était le plus important; La perte de net revenu est attendue dans tous les futurs scenarios de changement, particu- lièrement avec ceux qui dépendent uniquement un moyen de subsistance, subi une perte en moyenne de 18% dans tous les scénarios, comparativement à 9% pour le groupe des multi-moyens de subsistance ; La taille idéale de la zone communautaire est de 2 310 hectares et l'impact positif des CFis peut être réalisé en améliorant la planification, le processus opérationnel et le mécanisme de résolution des conflits, également qu'en développant et renforçant des réseaux et la conformité des règles. Les résultats suggèrent que les moyens de subsistance sont spécifiques au contexte et le choix des stratégies des ménages est associé à une gamme de facteurs socio-écologiques. Nous devons éviter une prescription unique pour aborder les problèmes des moyens de subsistance dans le Tonle Sap. Effectivement, les implications politiques pour améliorer la participation aux moyens de subsistance ainsi que pour maximiser les avantages économiques et sociaux à long terme pour les ménages devraient accorder une attention particulière aux ménages pauvres en ressources. Par conséquent, l'augmentation de la richesse et des biens du ménage, ainsi que l'établissement des programmes efficaces de conservation des ressources améliorent effective- ment la capacité d'adaptation des ménages en réponse aux changements inattendus et également contribuent à renforcer et soutenir les organisations des CFis. / The overall goal of this research was to assess the livelihood strategies in the Tonle Sap in the face of various drivers of change around the lake. Specifically, the study intended to investigate livelihood variations and determinants (both spatial and temporal), and the impact of future scenario changes and of the Community Fisheries (CFis) in the Tonle Sap's floodplain. By using multivariate approach, I am able to highlight the fol- lowing findings: - different ecological characteristics influencing livelihood strategies and the environmental resources are imperative in post-conflict Cambodia; - various human, natural and economic, social, and physical capitals have influenced household's choice and income. Land was the most significant; - net income loss is expected for under all future scenarios, with those engaged in single livelihoods experiencing an average loss of 18% across all scenarios compared to 9% for the multi-livelihood group; - an ideal size of community area is 2,310 hectares and the positive impact of CFis can be achieved by improving planning, operational process and conflict resolution mechanism, developing networks and reinforcing rule compliance. The findings suggest that livelihood is context specific and the choice of household's strategies is associated with a range of socio and ecological factors and we should avoid a one-size-fit prescription to tackle livelihood problems in the Tonle Sap. Policy impli- cations to improve livelihood participation and maximize the long-term economic and social benefits for household should consider special attention to resource poor house- holds, increase household's wealth and assets, design and implement effective resource conservation programs, improve households' adaptive capacity in response to unex- pected changes and continue strengthening and supporting the CFi organizations.