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Both the donors and aid recipients meet for livelihoods promotion, which is about enhancement and sustenance of people’s lives through the use of resources and opportunities. Livelihoods promotion is important in the international development cooperation fabric because it is the goal to which the efforts of both the donors and aid recipients should be directed. While the donors are busy formulating and implementing policies for aid to be available, the aid recipients are busy struggling to access and utilise the available resources and opportunities from the donors. In this first section of the chapter, I first present the general understanding of the concept of livelihoods promotion. I then discuss issues of access, followed by the actor-oriented approach, agency, and interface.

Livelihoods promotion in focus

The notion of livelihoods promotion is a child born of the concept of social ex- clusion that refers to the lack of decent living: access to social security, to employ- ment, to safety, to human rights, and so on (de Haan 2000: 9). Social inclusion, instead, refers to the way in which people make themselves a living using their capabilities and their tangible and intangible assets. De Haan (2000: 9) continues to argue that

livelihood is sustainable if it is adequate for the satisfaction of self-defined basic needs and proof against shocks and stresses. If livelihood is sustainable, it is synonymous with social inclusion; if not, it equates with social exclusion.

This concept derives from the work of Chambers & Conway (1992) who argued for the creation of livelihood strategies that account for their long-term impact in terms of maintaining the natural resource base for use by others and future genera- tions, whilst being resistant to external shocks and stresses. On this note, DFID (1999: section 1.1) argues that:

A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base.

The theorisations on livelihoods promotion have evolved in three ways: as a concept, an analytical framework, and as a set of principles (Farrington 2001: 3; Toner 2003: 772-775). As a concept, it is about “environmentally and socially sustainable livelihoods that provide a living in a context less their negative effects on the benefits and sustainability of the totality of other livelihoods everywhere”

(Chambers & Conway 1992: 26). It is, thus, about the idea that people construct livelihoods by drawing on a range of assets and entitlements (Toner 2003: 772).

As a framework, livelihoods promotion is a tool that attempts to capture the inter- action between livelihood assets, vulnerability, and transforming structures (such as policies and institutions). It draws from other types of analyses such as the eco- nomic, social, institutional, and so on in order to identify how people’s options and constraints can best be understood (Toner 2003: 773-774).

As a set of principles for action, livelihoods promotion has far-reaching implica- tions for how development interventions should be designed, implemented, and evaluated. The principles are essentially a checklist of current best practice, but they also reflect the concerns and assumptions that underpin the theoretical frameworks of the sustainable livelihoods approach. The normative principles include people- centeredness, participatory and responsive, sustainability, and empowerment, while the operational principles include interventions in partnership, interventions at multi- levels and in a holistic manner, interventions in a disaggregate manner, and inter- ventions in long-term and flexible manner (Carney 2002: 14–5; Toner 2003: 774- 775).

In the three ways that the livelihoods promotion thinking has developed, the issues of vulnerability and resources are central. According to Blaikie et al. (1994: 9), vulnerability is about “the characteristics of a person or group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impacts of natural hazard”. It is possible to note two sides of vulnerability: an external side of risks, shocks, and stress and an internal side of defenselessness, implying a lack of means to cope with damaging loss (Brons et al., 2005: 3). Thus, vulnerability is about insecurity of human well-being and survival. Vulnerability circumstances can be trends, shocks, and cyclical or seasonal shifts. These circumstances affect people at different levels of the population or specific to a particular social group, household or individual.

Access

What is central in the livelihoods promotion is the question of people trying to access and utilize resources and opportunities in order to overcome their circum- stances of vulnerability. Resources are what people have and can have for use in order to address their problems. They could be tangible as well as intangible. People combine the five cardinal resources – natural, physical, human, financial, and social

– for promoting their livelihoods (de Haan 2000: 10), even though Baumann & Subir (2001, as quoted by Toner 2003: 773) argue for the sixth capital resource, the

political resource, of which Toner (2003: 773) argues that it is included in a sound definition of social capital because it is about considerations of power and political relationships. Material resources become tangible and claims and access become non-tangible. As to claims, one can call upon moral and practical assistance. As to access, one needs to have or get possibility to use the resource in practice.

The concept of access is about the ability to utilize a resource when needed. According to de Haan (2000: 10), access “means having or getting the opportunity to use the resource in practice”. This implies, for instance, that access refers to the real opportunity for an individual or group of people to use a given resource in order to address a perceived need. According to Blaikie et al (1994: 48), access is “the ability to use resources which are directly required to secure a livelihood”. As access to resources is essential to maintain livelihoods, if there is less access there is also an increase in vulnerability. Each individual or household has specific resources and assets, material and immaterial that assist in determining a specific access level and opportunities and decisions, influenced by structures of domination (Nathan 2005: 8). This understanding of access is influenced by the “access model to maintain livelihood” by Blaikie et al (1994) whereby every household and every member has an access profile.

In order that the people address their vulnerability circumstances, they need to access resources and opportunities. The question of access is important for it deter- mines the use of resources. Resources could be there, but if one cannot access them, they are not useful. Claim becomes an important factor. It is determined by the social resource which “includes the institutions, the relationships, the attitudes and values that govern interactions among people and contributes to economic and social development” (de Haan 2003: 4).

Actor-oriented approach, agency, and interface

Access, as I have demonstrated, is important in determining the livelihoods pro- motion of the people. When donors and aid recipients meet, they are both involved in activities in which their observations and interpretations are necessarily shaped by their own perspectives. Thus, it is important to understand the dynamics of the interactions between the two parties of donors and aid recipients, dynamics which enlighten the issues of access to livelihood promoting circumstances. In any inter- national development cooperation, when donors come to meet the aid recipients, they come with their packages of interests, purposes, and motives, all encapsulated in the modernising development discourse. The aid recipients also approach, relate, and meet the donors as knowledgeable actors with their interests, purposes, and

motives. Issues of interests, values, motives, and power struggles of the actors are thus brought to centre stage (Long 2002:2). In order to understand the dynamics in the interactions, the concepts of agency and interface are of particular relevance.

The actor-oriented approach re-asserts the importance of the agency of indivi- duals in the face of social structures that happen to be absolute explanatory cate- gories for humans. While Emirbayer & Mische (1998: 963) have criticised what they call theorists of practice (such as Bourdieu) for having selective attention to the role of habitus and routinized practices, and thus seeing human agency as habitually repetitive and taken for granted, they have captured the complexity of agency. Emirbayer & Mische (1998: 963) re-conceptualise human agency as

a temporary embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualise past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment).

Their definition discards nothing of the previous discussions on agency, but only orders the important dimensional constitutes of agency within a temporal perspec- tive.

Long (2002: 2) continues to argue that actors are able to negotiate, accommodate, and struggle over definitions and boundaries of meanings, and in doing so give new meanings and/or transform existing meanings. With the new meanings, then, know- ledge is continuously built and re-built since the contexts in which the people live continuously create encounters that permit processing and absorption of new ideas and new cognitive frames. This communicative experience assists them in shaping the already existing stocks of knowledge and evaluative modes. Much as knowledge creation and/or dissemination is an interpretative and cognitive process, entailing bridging the gap between a familiar world and less familiar, or even sometimes an alien one, of sets of meanings, more importantly, knowledge emerges out of a com- plex interplay of social, cognitive, cultural, institutional, and situational elements. This implies that knowledge is always essentially provisional, partial, and contextual in nature, and people work with a multiplicity of understandings, beliefs, and com- mitments (Long & Long 1992: 212-213).

An important notion in continuously building and rebuilding of knowledge is the notion of interface. Long (2002: 2) argues that the notion of social interface

provides a useful heuristic device for identifying and analysing the critical points of intersection between different fields or levels of social organization, since it is at these interfaces that discrepancies and discontinuities of value, interest, knowledge, and power are clearly revealed.

For Long, interfaces are battlefields of knowledge in which actors’ under- standings, interests, and values are pitched against each other (Long 1992: 2). In development programmes as interfaces, due to a multiplicity of actors with different backgrounds, mandates, and experiences, and the resultant differential viewpoints, perceptions, objectives, practices, and strategies, there are struggles, negotiations and accommodations.

Among the many key elements of the interface perspective is the issue of multiple power relations. The interface analysis can assist in the comprehension of how power wields and yields (Villareal 1994), how power is endorsed, transformed, or challenged. It is possible with the interface analysis to understand reasons for popu- larisation of some powerful people for legitimisation of claims upon authoritative bodies, on one hand, and on the other, the rejection of some with deployment of and defence from countervailing powerful people. Long (2002: 9) argues that the “major task of interface analysis is to spell out the knowledge and power implications of this interplay.” Other elements in the interface perspective are interlocking relation- ships and intentionalities, site for conflict, incompatibility and negotiation, arena for clash of cultural paradigms, knowledge processes, and a stage for analysis of power as an outcome of struggles over meanings and strategic relationships (Long 2002: 7-9).

There is a substantial difference that Bierschenk (1988) makes with regard to this concept of interface. He uses the concept of arena as a place of concrete con- frontation between social actors interacting on common issues, when he talks of development projects as an arena of negotiation for strategic groups. With this understanding there is an issue of spatial connotation of the notion of interface. It is in this space that there is a multiplicity of interactions. All these interactions are interfaces. With this notion of social arena, interface is seen as intersection in the fields and not in the levels. I make use of this interpretation of interface as social arena in this study.

Thus, in the striving for livelihoods promotion within international development cooperation, the social arena is central. It is in here that the donors and aid recipients try to make sure that their intended goals are exhibited, negotiated, and met, with as few compromises as possible. It is in such social arenas that the unequal relationship signals are manifested. In understanding the aid recipients’ responses to the donors in the social arenas of development interventions, I use the concept of organising practices, which I present in the following section of this chapter.