Rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment
Introduction
One of the major areas of population–environment research in the past decade has focused on household-level population dynamics and their relationship, through livelihood strategies, to environmental change, particularly in rural areas of the developing world. Studies have sought to go beyond the attribution of environmental degradation to high fertility and associated population increase. Instead, they have investigated the relationships among population variables (household size, age and sex composition, fertility, on-farm population density, migration, and mortality), biophysical variables (forest cover, coastal mangroves, and soil quality), and natural resources (firewood, timber, non-timber forest products, bushmeat and water) in the Amazon Basin, Central America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and Africa (e.g., Walker and Homma, 1996; Homewood, 1997; Pichón, 1997; Entwisle et al., 1998; Zaba and Madulu, 1998; Ezra and Kiros, 2001; Adger et al., 2002; McCracken et al., 2002; Vance and Geoghegan, 2002; Liu et al., 2005; Moran et al., 2005; Caldas et al., 2007). The research teams involved in these efforts have spanned the social and environmental sciences and have employed a wide range of methodologies, such as household surveys, participant observation, ground-level analyses of biophysical variables, and integration of remotely sensed imagery. This paper sets out to assess the lessons learned from and fruitful future directions in this large and growing body of research.
A focus on household dynamics does not imply that smallholders are necessarily the primary nor the ultimate agents of natural resource degradation or rural landscape change. Industrial agriculture, commercial lumber and mining operations, and state development schemes have arguably left a greater imprint on natural ecosystems throughout the developing world. Further, the very presence of smallholders in biodiverse but agriculturally marginal environments (rainforests, savannahs, coastlines) is all too often the result of historically produced unequal land tenure regimes and international development policies strongly biased against the poor. Nevertheless, this focus on the microdemographic dynamics of rural smallholders is based on recognition that (a) they are important players in natural resource use and landscape change, particularly in rainforest frontiers in Central Africa and Amazonia; (b) rural dwellers account for 59% of the population of the developing world (PRB, 2005) and play a vital role in provisioning cities and regional markets with foodstuffs and other resources (e.g., renewable fuels); and (c) policy interventions that target the health, livelihoods, or environments of rural people must be based on sound understandings of how these are linked. In particular, a better understanding of household dynamics can help researchers and policy makers to understand how certain kinds of demographic behavior, especially fertility and migration, relate to livelihood strategies. From the environmental perspective, household demographic dynamics can affect local environmental outcomes and resource dependence, and these dynamics may have significant repercussions for natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. Conversely, changes in the quality and quantity of natural resources can have important impacts on household fertility, morbidity, mortality, and migration. These multiple and multi-level dynamics between household demographics and environmental variables, mediated by contextual factors such as local and regional environmental variability, policies, institutions and markets, make this a complex area of study, but also one that is ripe for new discoveries and insights (see also Zimmerer, 2004).
The importance of these links is apparent in the outpouring of recent research on this topic. Yet a comprehensive review of this diverse literature has been lacking. This paper therefore reviews some of the major strands of this research, examines common threads and lessons learned, and identifies some remaining research questions. We begin with a discussion of the livelihood approach as an organizing framework and the importance of households as decision-making units. Section 3 then describes how we selected the literature for review, and then has four subsections addressing in turn household fertility, morbidity and mortality, migration, and lifecycles in relationship to the environment and natural resources. We offer some conclusions in Section 4.
Section snippets
The livelihood approach as an organizing framework
In this paper, we use the livelihood approach as an organizing framework and focus on demographic and environmental changes as they play out in households. In most rural areas of the developing world, the household is the basic unit of production and reproduction,1
Household population dynamics, environment and natural resources
Household population dynamics encompass several key variables: nuptuality, fertility, morbidity, mortality, migration, as well as the “lifecycle” of a household, which is shaped by the former variables and affects a household's size and age and sex composition. Given our focus on household-level demographics, we organize our survey of the related literature around these variables, rather than, say, by region, resource type, or bioclimatic zone.
This section is therefore organized into
Conclusion
This has necessarily been a cursory examination of a large body of literature. As the reference list shows, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of research dedicated to household demographics and the environment since these studies began around 1990. There have also been many theoretical and methodological advances during this time, and a growing understanding of the complexity and place-specificity of population–environment linkages. In this sense, it will not be possible to
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and the NASA-funded Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) (NASA contract NAS5-03117 with Goddard Space Flight Center), which underwrote the Population-Environment Research Network cyberseminar in which an early version of this paper was presented and discussed. VanWey acknowledges NIH Grant HD35811-04. The views expressed here are those of the authors and
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