In the humanitarian world, livelihoods are activities that allow people to secure the basic necessities of life, such as food, water, shelter and clothing ( UNHCR 2014: 1). The term has historically drawn special attention as it is widely employed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and United Nations agencies dealing with development and relief in rural and urban environments. The frequently protracted nature of crises produced by human-made conflict or natural disasters has ended up placing greater emphasis on refugee capacity to develop coping mechanisms and self-reliance, which have now gained great momentum in international debates. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s the strategy of targeting refugees around the world by humanitarian livelihoods-programming changed from the care and maintenance of refugees to a self-reliance formula. In the same vein, the language of “resilient” (Reid 2012) or “sustainable” livelihoods (Chambers and Conway 1992) has placed further responsibility to survive and thrive on the beneficiaries themselves, based on the capacity of crisis-affected people to circumvent exclusion with urban- or rural-based methods.
NGOs have primarily used livelihoods to refer to biological life and the way in which individuals or social groups develop means to sustain life in contexts of displacement through access to both employment and services. Nonetheless, NGOs’ approaches have nuanced this understanding of livelihoods, which has become a self-standing professional sector, although cutting across humanitarian protection, shelter, labor, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (these three latter often referred to as WASH). The increased importance of livelihoods in the humanitarian sector has paved the way to a common, transnational–but mostly technical–understanding of the term. Against this backdrop, the challenge of translating the word from English into other languages is noteworthy, with several languages borrowing it from English tout court. Some languages, Arabic being an example, resort to paraphrases, such as “ways to improve life.” Tentative translations of the term livelihoods play a major role in unfolding the standardized and dehistoricized way in which livelihood strategies have often been exported through humanitarian programming, which is aimed at guaranteeing survival on the basis of local specificities.
Employed in contexts of crisis, where the source of instability, poor infrastructure, hazards, risks, and violence is both political and economic, the term has gradually been redefined in the light of political vulnerabilities and governance deficiencies (Jaspars and Shoham 2002). Since the early 2000s, the culture-specific concept of livelihoods and the process of livelihood-hunting have increasingly concerned practitioners and researchers. For instance, while the term has largely been employed as an individual strategy of developing tactics of survival in crisis-affected contexts, livelihoods can now also entail a collective aspiration (Kaiser 2009) to economic sustainability and self-sufficiency in cultures where family, religious belonging, or household-oriented ways of coping write the real grammar of everyday life.
References
Chambers, R. , Conway, G. (1992) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century. IDS Discussion Paper 296. Institute of Development Studies.
Jaspars, S. , Shoham, J. (2002) A Critical Review of Approaches to Assessing and Monitoring Livelihoods in Situations of Chronic Conflict and Political Instability. Working Paper 191. Overseas Development Institute.
Kaiser, T. (2009) Dispersal, Division and Diversification: Durable Solutions and Sudanese Refugees in Uganda. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 4(1): 44–60.
Reid, J. (2012) The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience. Development Dialogue, 58: 67–80.
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) (2014) Global Strategy for Livelihoods (2014–2018). https://www.unhcr.org.