Livelihoods as Intimate Government: Reframing the logic of livelihoods for development

Abstract

Livelihoods approaches emerged from a broad range of efforts to understand how people live in particular places. They have since cohered into often instrumentally applied frameworks that rest on the broadly held assumption that livelihoods are principally about the management of one’s material circumstances. This assumption limits the explanatory power of livelihoods approaches by shifting a range of motivations for livelihoods decisions outside the analytic frame. This article extends efforts to recover a broader lens on livelihoods decisions and outcomes by conceptualising livelihoods as forms of intimate government, local efforts to shape conduct to definite, shifting, and sometimes contradictory material and social ends. By employing a Foucault-inspired analytics of government to the study of livelihoods in Ghana’s Central Region, the paper presents a systematic, implementable approach to the examination of livelihoods and their outcomes in light of this reframing, one where material outcomes are one of many possible ends of intimate government, instead of the end. By opening the analytic lens in this manner, we can explain a much wider set of livelihoods outcomes and decisions than possible under contemporary approaches.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Simon for his extensive comments on and engagement with this article. A number of other individuals pushed my thinking on this subject, most notably Arun Agrawal, Brent McCusker, and the students in my ‘Development and Governmentality’ seminar in spring 2010, especially Mary Thompson, Manali Baruah, Bob Greeley, and Ben Haywood. I also thank those who participated in colloquia at the Departments of Geography at Texas A&M, the University of North Carolina, George Washington University, and the University of Florida, and numerous anonymous reviewers. Portions of the research described in this article were supported by the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration and the Walker Institute for International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina. 108

Notes

1.

2. For example, A Agrawal, ‘Environmentality: community, intimate government, and the making of environmental subjects in Kumaon, India’, Current Anthropology, 46(2), 2005, pp 161–190; ER Carr & B McCusker, ‘The co-production of land use and livelihoods change: implications for development interventions’, Geoforum, 40(4), 2009, pp 568–579; V Gidwani, ‘The cultural logic of work: explaining labor development and piece-rate contracts in Matar Taluka, Gujarat—Parts I and II’, Journal of Development Studies, 38(2), 2001, pp 57–74; TM Li, ‘Compromising power: development, culture and rule in Indonesia’, Cultural Anthropology, 14(3), 1999, pp 295–322; TM Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; DS Moore, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; and DS Moore, ‘The crucible of cultural politics: reworking “development” in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands’, American Ethnologist, 26(3), 2000, pp 654–689.

3. Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’.

4. Agrawal, ‘Environmentality’.

5. Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’, pp 180, 187.

6. In the case of Dominase and Ponkrum, I focus on the household as the key social unit around which livelihoods cohere because the problematisation that provided analytic purchase on these livelihoods (discussed below) related directly to this social unit, and only indirectly to other social units. This decision was supported in the course of fieldwork as residents framed livelihoods around the household. This is not to suggest that the household was the only social unit that mattered to these livelihoods. For example, as I will discuss below, family lineages were critical shapers of access to land, and a much wider sense of the Akan identity informed expectations of genders that shaped livelihoods roles and activities. Where in my analysis it is appropriate for the purposes of explaining observed livelihoods decisions, I will bring these other social units and their contributions to the fore.

7. The use of the term ‘self-guidance’ is not meant to be obfuscatory, but instead reflects the fact that self-interest is a very difficult thing to define, often subject to the interpretive bias of the observer. ‘Self-guidance’ removes implicit judgment from the observation of behaviour.

8. Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’

9. For example, R Chambers & G Conway, Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (ids), 1992.

10. Ibid, p 7.

11. F Ellis, Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p 11.

12. Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’, p 177.

13. For extended discussions of this approach, see Ellis, Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries; DF Bryceson, Sub-Saharan Africa Betwixt and Between: Rural Livelihood Practices and Policies, asc Working Paper 43, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1999; D Carney (ed), Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: What Contribution Can We Make?, London: Department for International Development, 1998; D Carney, M Drinkwater, T Rusinow, K Neefjes, S Wanmali & N Singh, Livelihood Approaches Compared, London: Department for International Development, 1999; D Hulme & A Shepherd, ‘Conceptualizing chronic poverty’, World Development, 31(3), 2003, pp 403–423; M Kaag, R van Berkel, J Brons, M de Bruijn, H van Dijk, L de Haan, G Nooteboom & A Zoomers, ‘Ways forward in livelihoods research’, Globalization and Development, 2004, pp 49–74; I Scoones, Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis, ids Working Paper 72, Brighton: ids, 1998; Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’; and C Shackleton, S Shackleton & B Cousins, ‘The role of land-based strategies in rural livelihoods: the contribution of arable production, animal husbandry, and natural resource harvesting in communal areas in South Africa’, Development Southern Africa, 18(5), 2001, pp 582–604.

14. de Haan & Zoomers, ‘Exploring the frontier of livelihoods research’; and Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’.

15. Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’.

16. Arce, ‘Value contestations in development interventions’; and de Haan & Zoomers, ‘Exploring the frontier of livelihoods research’.

17. For example, S Chant, ‘Household decisions, gender and development: a synthesis of recent research’, American Anthropologist, 107(4), 2005, pp 738–739; CR Doss, ‘Intrahousehold resource allocation in an uncertain environment’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 78, 1996, pp 1335–1339; ER Fapohunda, ‘The nonpooling household’, in D Dwyer & J Bruce Stanford, A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988; L Haddad, J Hoddinott & H Alderman, Intrahousehold Resource Allocation in Developing Countries: Methods, Models, and Policy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; L Haddad & R Kanbur, ‘How serious is the neglect of intra-household inequality?’, Economic Journal, 100, 1990, pp 866–881; D Thomas, ‘Intrahousehold resource allocation: an inferential approach’, Journal of Human Resources, 25, 1990, pp 635–664; and C Udry, ‘Gender, agricultural production, and the theory of the household’, Journal of Political Economy, 104(5), 1996, pp 1010–1046.

18. de Haan & Zoomers, ‘Exploring the frontier of livelihoods research’.

19. Arce, ‘Value contestations in development interventions’; A Bebbington, ‘Capitals and capabilities’; Scoones, ‘Livelihoods perspectives and rural development’; and M Kaag et al, ‘Ways forward in livelihoods research’.

20. de Haan & Zoomers, ‘Exploring the frontier of livelihoods research’, p 32.

21. ER Carr, ‘Development and the household: missing the point?’, Geojournal, 62(1), 2005, pp 71–83; and ER Carr, ‘Men’s crops and women’s crops: the importance of gender to the understanding of agricultural and development outcomes in Ghana’s Central Region’, World Development, 36(5), 2008, pp 900–915.

22. M Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G Burchell, C Gordon & P Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp 87–104.

23. M Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage, 1999, p 11. See also K McKinnon, ‘Taking post-development theory to the field: issues in development research, Northern Thailand’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49(3), 2008, pp 281–293.

24. In this article I use the term ‘government’ in the sense defined above. I do not shift to the use of governance, as a Foucauldian framing of government rejects the differentiation between government and governance, where government becomes an object and governance its action. Instead, as will become clear, in this article government and governance are in fact the same thing.

25. PW Hanson, ‘Governmentality, language ideology, and the production of needs in Malagasy conservation and development’, Cultural Anthropology, 22(2), 2007, pp 244–284, p 248.

26. Dean, Governmentality, p 18.

27. Gidwani, ‘The cultural logic of work’, p 79.

28. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, p 87. See also Dean, Governmentality; J Ferguson & A Gupta, ‘Spatializing states: toward an ethography of neoliberal governmentality’, American Ethnologist, 29(4), 2002, pp 981–1002; M Merlingen, ‘Governmentality: towards a Foucauldian framework for the study of IGOs’, Cooperation and Conflict, 38(4), 2003, pp 361–384; and N Rose, ‘Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism’, Economy and Society, 22(3), 1993, pp 283–299.

29. Dean, Governmentality, p 20.

30. For example, J Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999; L Herbert-Cheshire & V Higgins, ‘From risky to responsible: expert knowledge and the governing of community-led rural development’, Journal of Rural Studies, 20(3), 2004, pp 289–302; S Robins, ‘At the limits of spatial governmentality: a message from the tip of Africa’, Third World Quarterly, 23(4), 2002, pp 665–689; and A Sharma, ‘Crossbreeding institutions, breeding struggle: women’s empowerment, neoliberal governmentality, and state (re)formation in India’, Cultural Anthropology, 21(1), 2006, pp 60–95.

31. Dean, Governmentality; Hanson, ‘Governmentality, language ideology, and the production of needs in Malagasy conservation and development’; G Hart, ‘Geography and development: critical ethnographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28(1), 2004, pp 91–100; Merlingen, ‘Governmentality’; and Rose, ‘Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism’.

32. A Appadurai, ‘Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics’, Public Culture, 14(1), 2002, p 24.

33. LG Wilson, ‘Beyond the technocrat? The professional expert in development practice’, Development and Change, 37(3), 2006, pp 501–523; M Goldman, ‘The birth of a discipline: producing authoritative green knowledge, World Bank-style’, Ethnography, 2(2), 2001, pp 191–217; D Segebart, ‘Who governs the Amazon? Analysing governance in processes of fragmenting development: policy networks and governmentality in the Brazilian Amazon’, Erde, 139(3), 2008, pp 187–205; AJ Nightingale, ‘“The experts taught us all we know”: professionalisation and knowledge in Nepalese community forestry’, Antipode, 37, 2005, pp 581–604; JA Summerville, BA Adkins & G Kendall, ‘Community participation, rights, and responsibilities: the governmentality of sustainable development policy in Australia’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 26(4), 2008, pp 696–711; and K McKinnon, ‘Postdevelopment, professionalism, and the politics of participation’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(4), 2007, pp 772–785.

34. J Ferguson & A Gupta, ‘Spatializing states: toward an ethography of neoliberal governmentality’, p 994.

35. Hanson, ‘Governmentality, language ideology, and the production of needs in Malagasy conservation and development’; S Ilcan & L Phillips, ‘Governing through global networks—knowledge mobilities and participatory development’, Current Sociology, 56(5), 2008, pp 711–734; C McFarlane, ‘Transnational development networks: bringing development and postcolonial approaches into dialogue’, Geographical Journal, 172, 2006, pp 35–49; and Merlingen, ‘Governmentality’.

36. RL Bryant, ‘Non-governmental organizations and governmentality: “consuming” biodiversity and indigenous people in the Philippines’, Political Studies, 50, 2002, pp 268–292; J Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; A Sharma, ‘Crossbreeding institutions, breeding struggle’; and M Walker, SM Roberts, JP Jones & O Frohling, ‘Neoliberal development through technical assistance: constructing communities of entrepreneurial subjects in Oaxaca, Mexico’, Geoforum, 39(1), 2008, pp 527–542.

37. Agrawal, ‘Environmentality’, p 165.

38. There are those who examine development and environmental management not just as projects of rule, but as a project of self-making, for example SL Pigg, ‘Inventing social categories through place: social representations and development in Nepal’, Comparative Studies of Society and History, 34(3), 1992, pp 491–513, but even these authors engage the local process of self-making through the lens of larger projects of development or environmental management and regulation.

39. For example, Agrawal, ‘Environmentality’; Gidwani, ‘The cultural logic of work’; Li, ‘Compromising power’; Li, The Will to Improve; Moore, Suffering for Territory; and Moore, ‘The crucible of cultural politics’.

40. Li, ‘Compromising power’, p 295.

41. Moore, Suffering For Territory; and Moore, ‘The crucible of cultural politics’.

42. Moore, ‘The crucible of cultural politics’, p 656.

43. Li, ‘Compromising power’, p 295.

44. Dean, Governmentality, p 18.

45. K O’Brien, R Leichenko, U Kelkar, H Venema, G Aandahl, H Tompkins, A Javed, S Bhadwal, S Barg, L Nygaard & J West, ‘Mapping vulnerability to multiple stressors: climate change and globalization in India’, Global Environmental Change, 14(4), 2004, p 305.

46. Ibid, pp 304–305.

47. Dean, Governmentality, p 27.

48. Ibid, p 23.

49. Gidwani, ‘The cultural logic of work’.

50. Dean, Governmentality, p 23.

51. Carr & McCusker, ‘The co-production of land use and livelihoods change’, pp 570–571.

52. Dean, Governmentality, p 23.

53. For a detailed description of these villages and their histories, see Carr, Delivering Development.

54. In the interests of space, I will not go into a deeply detailed discussion of the vulnerability context of these villages. I explore this context in great detail in Carr, Delivering Development.

55. Ibid.

56. PJ Lamb & RA Peppler, ‘Further case studies of tropical Atlantic surface atmospheric and oceanic patterns associated with sub-Saharan drought’, Journal of Climate, 5, 1992, pp 476–488; SE Nicholson, B Some & B Kone, ‘An analysis of recent rainfall conditions in West Africa, including the rainy seasons of the 1997 el Niño and the 1998 la Niña years’, Journal of Climate, 13, 2000, pp 2628–2640; and R Wagner & A DaSilva, ‘Surface conditions associated with anomalous rainfall in the Guinea coastal region’, International Journal of Climatology, 14, 1994, pp 179–199.

57. K Owusu & P Waylen, ‘Trends in spatio-temporal variability in annual rainfall in Ghana (1951–2000)’, Weather, 64(5), 2009, pp 115–120; and K Owusu, P Waylen & Y Qiu, ‘Changing rainfall inputs in the Volta basin: implications for water sharing in Ghana’, Geojournal, 71(4), 2008, pp 201–210.

58. Carr, ‘Placing the environment in migration: economy and power in Ghana’s Central Region’, Environment and Planning A, 37(5), 2005, pp 925–946’; and Carr, Delivering Development.

59. Carr, ‘Placing the environment in migration’; and Carr, Delivering Development.

60. B Glaser & A Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1967, pp 61–62, 111,112

61. Carr, ‘Development and the household’; Carr, ‘Between structure and agency’; ER Carr, ‘Rethinking poverty alleviation: a “poverties” approach’, Development in Practice, 18(6), 2008, pp 726–734; and Carr, Delivering Development.

62. Throughout the empirical sections of this paper, I refer to reported income figures. These figures do not represent the cash value of subsistence production or household labour, as respondents were unable to provide such information and data do not yet exist that allow for the rough equation of hectares to value for particular crops. While this limitation of the data clearly undervalues women’s economic production, it accurately represents their economic position within the household and in society. No woman is compensated for subsistence production or household labour. Further, there is a general understanding in the literature that, for various reasons, when asked about their finances the Akan tend to underestimate income and overestimate expenses. See E Aryeetey, ‘Household asset choice among the rural poor’, in isser–University of Ghana–Cornell University International Conference on ‘Ghana at the Half Century’, Accra, 2004, p 77; and A Deaton, The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy, Baltimore, MD: World Bank/Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. I therefore do not consider these data very reliable except as a measure of relative earnings. All dollar values in this paper are converted from Ghanaian Cedis at the time of the interview(s) on which they are based.

63. There are almost no remittances flowing into these villages. At most, the same one or two men leave each year to take up fishing or baking in nearby countries, but this is not a common livelihoods practice.

64. For discussion, see Carr, Delivering Development.

65. K Awusabu-Asare, ‘Matriliny and the new intestate succession law of Ghana’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 24, 1990, pp 1–16; L Brydon, ‘Women and the family: cultural change in Avatime, Ghana, 1900–80’, Development and Change, 18, 1987, pp 251–269; I Egyir Intra-household Access to Land and Sources of Inefficiency: A Case Study of Ghana, Working Paper, Accra: Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Ghana, Legon, 1998; AR Quisumbing, K Otsuka, S Suyanto, JB Aidoo & E Payongayong, Land, Trees and Women: Evolution of Land Tenure Institutions in Western Ghana and Sumatra, Research Report 121, Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2001; AR Quisumbing, E Payongayong, JB Aidoo & K Otsuka, Women's Land Rights in the Transition to Individualized Ownership: Implications for the Management of Tree Resources in Western Ghana, Food Consumption and Nutrition Division Discussion Paper No 58, Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1999.

66. Carr, ‘Development and the household’.

67. The issue of access to land for females heading a household is a key point that breaks down the husband/wife duality that I have thus far presented in the livelihoods of Dominase and Ponkrum, pointing to other social relations (in this case, father/uncle–child relations) that have a bearing on the well-being of the residents.

68. Carr, ‘Between structure and agency’.

69. In subsequent field seasons, I found that men whose wives had raised enough to sell a significant surplus generally reduced the size of their wives’ farms the next year.

70. While the number of households operating under this strategy seems small, later fieldwork that effectively covered the entire population of these villages showed that this was probably all, or nearly all, of the households operating under this strategy in 2004. The same is true of the number of diversified households discussed below. It is important to note that in any given year roughly 40% of the population shifts out of both strategies to a situation where the husband and wife farm together, with no differentiation in their agricultural labour. In nearly all cases this shift was a one-year solution for a temporally bounded issue, such as pregnancy, and the household returned to one of the two dominant strategies in the following year. Therefore, virtually all cases where a household is operating under a different strategy from those laid out here are temporary. They give us a picture of a single household dealing with a transition in a single year, but they do not speak to the long-term government of the household achieved through livelihoods in these villages.

71. Carr, ‘Development and the household’.

72. I thank Arun Agrawal for pushing me to think more about this aspect of governmentality in the context of these livelihoods.

73. This was especially true with regard to school expenses, such as books and school uniforms. Under Akan kinship, the children belong to the mother’s family, and therefore are the ultimate responsibility of the mother and her extended family (ie the children’s maternal uncles and grandparents). This gave men something of an excuse for refusing to pay for such items.

74. ER Carr, ‘Small farmers, big impacts’, in R Shah & S Radelet (eds), Frontiers in Development, Washington, DC: usaid, 2012, pp 92–97.

75. See, for example, usaid, ‘Evaluation: learning from experience: usaid evaluation policy’, 2011, at http://transition.usaid.gov/evaluation/USAIDEvaluationPolicy.pdf, accessed 28 September 2012.