Making the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach political

The Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA) has been widely adopted to unravel poor people’s living conditions and to search for ways to improve these in developing countries. This talk briefly exposes and illustrates SLA and proposes to enrich it in two ways. Firstly, by relating its rationale with Polanyi’s concept of modes of economic integration. This enables taking account of the interactions between households’ livelihoods and the broader political economy in which they live. Secondly, Latour and Callon’s Actor Network Theory stresses the fact that actions result from networks of humans and non-humans (materials). Consequently, agency in SLA, mainly concentrated in the concept of livelihood strategies, must be considered as relational rather than concentrated in the decisions of individuals or households.

Speaker:
Christian Kesteloot is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and at the (French-speaking) University of Brussels (ULB). He has taught on urban geography, social and economic geography of China, of Japan and the history of geographical thought. Most of his publications considered relations between economic changes and urban space, ethnic minorities and housing as well as the impact of urban residential environments on issues of social integration and exclusion. From 2013 on, he added rural and development issues to his teaching and research interests, focusing on land tenure, land reforms, food sovereignty and livelihood analysis. Since retiring he continues to teach in the Master of Sustainable Development and the International Module in Spatial Development Planning at the KU Leuven and in Brussels Academy, a citizens’ open university.

Chair:
Terry Cannon, Emeritus Research Fellow, IDS and Honorary Professor, UCL