Rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment

Abstract

This paper reviews and synthesizes findings from scholarly work on linkages among rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment. Using the livelihood approach as an organizing framework, we examine evidence on the multiple pathways linking environmental variables and the following demographic variables: fertility, migration, morbidity and mortality, and lifecycles. Although the review draws on studies from the entire developing world, we find the majority of microlevel studies have been conducted in either marginal (mountainous or arid) or frontier environments, especially Amazonia. Though the linkages are mediated by many complex and often context-specific factors, there is strong evidence that dependence on natural resources intensifies when households lose human and social capital through adult morbidity and mortality, and qualified evidence for the influence of environmental factors on household decision-making regarding fertility and migration. Two decades of research on lifecycles and land cover change at the farm level have yielded a number of insights about how households make use of different land-use and natural resource management strategies at different stages. A thread running throughout the review is the importance of managing risk through livelihood diversification, ensuring future income security, and culture-specific norms regarding appropriate and desirable activities and demographic responses. Recommendations for future research are provided.

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.