Browsing by Subject "Livelihoods"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Comparing The Impacts Of Community-Based Tourism Development On Local Livelihoods And Empowerment
    (2023) Legatzke, Hannah
    For decades, policymakers, scholars, and development practitioners have promoted community-based tourism (CBT) for sustainable development in socioeconomically marginalized rural communities. However, the mixed results of these initiatives warrant further study into the mechanisms through which community-management of tourism leads to local livelihood opportunities and community empowerment. This dissertation responds to this need through a comparative case study of CBT management models in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala. Different trajectories of community tourism involvement in the three gateway towns to the most visited parks in the reserve make it possible to study the role of community-tourism management compared to tourism development in strictly protected areas and in the private sector, in the local livelihood and empowerment outcomes of tourism. During approximately 10 cumulative months of ethnographic field research in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, I applied the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) and Community Empowerment Framework to compare the impacts of tourism and its role in residents’ livelihood activities. Through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, content analysis, participant observation, and 134 livelihood surveys with household heads across the three towns, I find that community-based management of tourism supports a wider distribution of local tourism income-earning opportunities and overall greater local empowerment than conventional growth-oriented, private sector led tourism development in strictly protected areas, in part through emphasis on training opportunities and recognition of the compatibility and tradeoffs between tourism and residents’ other livelihood activities. Nonetheless, difficulties achieving social unity and differential individual barriers to tourism participation make ensuring equitable tourism community-tourism development an ongoing challenge. Tourism becomes part of integrated household livelihood portfolios, rather than supporting households alone or replacing small-scale agricultural activities. Overall, this dissertation contributes to understandings of the role of CBT in sustainable development as well as a methodology for more closely analyzing and comparing the livelihood outcomes of tourism development.
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    Constructing Empowerment Among Youth in Nairobi, Kenya
    (2016-06) Nikoi, Acacia
    This dissertation examines how youth empowerment is conceptualized and experienced by youth in Nairobi, Kenya. The study is based on a four-year longitudinal study of youth who participated in a non-formal, vocational training program. The findings demonstrate the complex ways youth seek, engage, and enact empowerment in their lives and suggest that youth conceptualizations of empowerment are more complex than the discourse that surrounds youth empowerment efforts heralded through vocational or entrepreneurial training. Based on the findings of this study I propose a multidimensional model of empowerment that is grounded in youth’s lived experiences and constructions of the empowerment process. These dimensions - marketable skills and knowledge, personal development, aspirations, and undugu - reflect the economic, social, and cultural settings in which youth live. Through an examination of these four dimensions, I explore the role of empowerment as a catalyst as youth strive to move from youth- to adulthood.
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    Contract Farming in Tanzania: Implications for Smallholder Farmers’ Gender Relations, Livelihoods, and Subjectivities
    (2022-08) Lyimo, Francis
    AbstractIn the attempt to transform Tanzania’s agriculture and improve smallholder farmers’ lives, the government of Tanzania adopted a private-public partnership (PPP) model, which put smallholder farmers at its center as potential entrepreneurs who can address the problem of food shortages and “lift themselves out of poverty.” The Tanzanian government has encouraged the practice of contract farming and embraced the dominant global agricultural narrative, which considers contract farming to be the best approach for both technological transfers to smallholder farmers and smallholder farmers’ market integration while also increasing incomes, productivity, and food availability. However, there has been a debate about contract farming between neoclassical and institutional economists, who focus on the economic impacts and are proponents of this mode of production, and social scientists, including geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists, who look at a wider range of social and economic consequences and tend to be far more critical. Drawing from feminist political ecology (FPE), the feminist post-structuralist approach (PSF), and Marxian political economy perspectives, and using mixed methods of data collection (interviews, participant observation, informal interviews, and survey method), I explore (a) how gender relations are affected by smallholder farmers’ (SHFs) incorporation into contract farming schemes, (b) the localized political conflicts that these schemes generated; c) the ways the local farmers’ livelihoods were affected by these new farming arrangements, and (d) the ways farmer identities and subjectivities, were affected by their incorporation into contract farming schemes at a moment when ‘entrepreneurial’ smallholder farmers were being celebrated. My findings show that participation in contract farming and the adoption of new farming techniques shaped farmers’ lives by changing their traditional rice production practices. The introduction of contract farming in Mngeta altered people’s previous livelihood activities through increased mechanization and commercialization. With the arrival of contract farming and of new commercial opportunities afforded by KPL, the dominant company engaged in rice production, more men became interested in growing rice, a crop previously considered to be exclusively a “women’s crop.” Men’s increased involvement in rice production provided a way for them to gain control over the rice harvest and over the money they generated from selling rice to outside buyers, an encroachment on what had formerly been a woman’s domain. Additionally, the training designed by NAFAKA to instill entrepreneurial skills led some farmers to adopt neoliberal subjectivities, encouraging these small farmers to understand the problems they faced- of low productivity, a lack of markets, the absence of credit, and food insecurity- as a product of personal shortcomings, such as a lack of entrepreneurial initiative or persisting traditional mindsets, rather than as rooted in relations of power and inequality. Technologies of the self, involving the desire to become a “modern farmer”, produced a lending system that tied smallholder farmers to debt relations without which they could not meet the expectations of “modern farming.” Moreover, broader relations of production and distribution between the company and its contract farmers created the conditions for dissatisfaction and mistrust, and political contentions between the two parties, leading to the collapse of the scheme and the subsequent collapse of KPL. The study analyzes the broader significance of this research and recommends areas for further research and policy interventions.
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    How do the availability of fish and rice affect occupation and food security in the Lower Mekong Basin?
    (2011-09) Bouapao, Lilao
    This study aims to contribute to our understanding of how rice and fish availability affect occupation and food security of people in the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB), including Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam. The study focuses on subsistence and commercial fishers and farmers. The data obtained for my research are from the first basin-wide survey conducted across the four countries using a common methodology and timing in 2009. Results of the study show that the extent of dependence of people on rice and fish availability for occupation, income, and food and their resilient capacities varies greatly between strata and across study sites. If both fish and rice decline at a common rate applicable to the whole LMB, cash income of at least one of four strata in each site will easily fall below the poverty line of $1.00 per capita per day. Seen from the perspective of food, all strata of all sites will be significantly affected if the availability of rice and fish decline. Altogether, fish and rice account for more than 81% of the total daily calorie intake. With uneven distribution of population by countries and varied social-ecological zones and livelihood activities, impacts of changes in the rice and fish availability will not distribute evenly. If changes occur throughout the Mekong, the number of people impacted will be highest in Vietnam, followed by Cambodia and Lao PDR. Thailand will be affected the least. Please see separate PDF files for the questionnaire in five languages.