Towards feminist geographies of livelihoods: introduction

Abstract

In this introduction to the themed section, Towards Feminist Geographies of Livelihoods, we argue that feminist foundations have been sidelined in broader livelihoods frameworks and approaches. We contend that feminist geographies greatly enrich the field of livelihood studies, helping to better understand the role of social difference and intersectionality in pursuing livelihoods. Our discussion also introduces the four papers to the themed section from both established and early career scholars in geography and development studies. As a collection, this themed section pushes the interdisciplinary and applied field of livelihood studies to consider feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and social relational dimensions.

Keywords:

• Critical development studies
• feminist geography
• gendered livelihoods
• mixed-methods research
• intersectionality
• feminist methodologies

Livelihood approaches have been heralded as an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approach to understanding human-centred analyses of poverty, development, and the means and agency with which people create their living. Emerging from critiques of macro-level theorizations dominating development studies in the late twentieth century, many of which were leading to failed interventions in the Global South, livelihood approaches stressed the importance of grounding research from the perspective of local actors, including their social, historical, cultural, and spatial contexts (Bagchi et al. 1998; Bebbington 1999; Arce 2003; Scoones 2009; Natarajan et al. 2022). Livelihoods encompass much more than income and other economic measures, capturing the context, resources (commonly referred to as assets or capitals), access, activities, mediating factors, and outcomes all relevant to making a living (Chambers and Conway 1991; Ellis 2000; de Haan and Zoomers 2003, 2005; van Dijk 2011). The broad scope of livelihood frameworks has been widely adopted by government bodies, academic scholars, and multilateral development agencies, demonstrating their policy and practical applicability—as well as their limitations (Carney, Drinkwater, and Rusinow 1999; Toner 2003; Kaag et al. 2004; Morse, McNamara, and Acholo 2009; McLean 2015; Scoones 2015; Natarajan et al. 2022).

Livelihood studies have expanded and shifted in recent decades. For example, ‘sustainable livelihoods’ approaches (or SLA) are often referred to interchangeably with broader livelihood approaches. However, critical scholars have argued that SLA can create blaming tendencies toward vulnerable actors and their livelihoods and normalize top-down definitions of ‘sustainability’ (Sneddon 2000; Rakodi 2002; Toner 2003). In recognizing these limitations, some scholars have shifted away from SLA and the debates surrounding ‘sustainability’. Instead, they have expanded livelihoods thinking to focus on the interplays of economy-ecology-society and the relational web of livelihoods (Miller 2019); or alternatively, mobilized political ecology foundations to deepen engagement with politics of place and the environment in analyzing livelihoods (Radel 2012; Harcourt 2017; Sumner, Christie, and Boulakia 2017). This research includes vital work on the interrelations between climate change and livelihoods (Bee 2013; Smucker and Wangui 2016; Radel et al. 2018; Green et al. 2020).

Furthermore, with the majority of livelihood research conducted in rural areas, some scholars have demonstrated its usefulness in urban locales as well (Lloyd-Jones and Rakodi 2002; Hanson 2005; Staples 2007; Mosiane 2011; Turner and Oswin 2015; Turner, Langill, and Nguyen 2021). The relationships between the realms of the ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ have also been an important point of focus, challenging their conceptual divide and instead demonstrating the fluidity and co-dependency between them (Rigg 1998, 2006; Oberhauser 2016; Peng et al. 2019). In addition, attention to the sociocultural aspects of contemporary livelihoods sheds light on the complex interplays of material realities and historically situated power dynamics. Recent critiques have emphasized culture as pivotal to shaping livelihoods, including the decision-making processes involved in pursuing livelihood activities and outcomes (Daskon and Binns 2009; Tao, Wall, and Wismer 2010; Forsyth and Michaud 2011; Turner 2012; Po et al. 2020; Fan 2022).

Despite the important contributions to critical development studies made by livelihood scholars, most livelihood frameworks are unable to capture the social dynamics and constraints essential for understanding economies, spatial contexts, divisions of labor, and power inequities. Gender and other forms of social difference shape all aspects of livelihoods, from available assets and activity choices to access and outcomes (Beall 2002; Oberhauser, Mandel, and Hapke 2004; Mandel 2004; Langill 2021; Fan 2022). Recognizing the importance of social difference, gendered livelihoods emerged as another important sub-field. This scholarship examines gender identities and gendered inequalities in undertaking livelihoods. Some of the important contributions of this work include the insights garnered through in-depth methodologies that uncover the lived experiences of rural farmholders, intrahousehold divisions of labour and resources, and the contested nature of gendered impacts of environmental stressors.

These approaches have made immense strides in understanding social differences—and particularly gendered differences—in livelihood analyses, and how livelihoods are uneven within the ‘local’ or ‘household’ (Hapke and Ayyankeril 2004; Mandel 2004, 2006; Wangui 2008; Arun 2012; Radel 2012; Bonnin and Turner 2014; Keahey 2018; among others). For example, Mandel’s (2004, 2006) contributions based in Benin have been foundational to gendered livelihoods thinking. Mandel emphasizes that men and women often require different resources to undertake their livelihoods, and the importance of mobility in enabling or constraining women’s livelihoods. In another example, Arun (2012) examines gendered processes interwoven with rural livelihood diversification, uncovering how male out-migration has reshaped household gender dynamics and divisions of labour in the South Indian context. More recently, Keahey (2018) makes a strong intervention into this field by illuminating sources of conflict and cohesion between men and women in South Africa. Adopting participatory methods and postcolonial feminism, Keahey emphasizes livelihood relationality. The contributions of gendered livelihoods approaches have been further amplified through earlier special issues on the subject (Oberhauser, Mandel, and Hapke 2004; Johnston-Anumonwo and Oberhauser 2011).

Despite the ongoing contributions of gendered livelihoods scholars, socially differentiated livelihood analyses remain peripheral in the field with limited attempts to address these power differentials beyond examining gendered roles and divisions of labor. We therefore build on these earlier foundations while suggesting a pointed path forward. We view feminist geographies of livelihoods as possible, expansive, and necessary. We contend that feminist geographies of livelihoods can better attain the fundamental objectives of livelihood studies: to understand the uneven, relational, multi-scalar, and iterative pursuit of making a living.

Our objective in this themed section is to centre feminist foundations of social difference to livelihood studies, thus emphasizing how feminist underpinnings strengthen this interdisciplinary field. We push livelihood studies to go further than just ‘adding gender’ and show what advancements the field can contribute by beginning from feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and conceptual bases. Together, the contributions in this themed section develop feminist approaches to livelihoods that emphasize multiple and intersecting forms of social difference. The papers also demonstrate how these social dimensions shape livelihoods at the individual and household scales, and how they relate to space and place more broadly.

Drawing on feminist theories and praxis, this set of papers provides empirically rich analyses of livelihoods from diverse areas in the Global South, including Ethiopia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Thailand. The variety of environmental, social, cultural, and economic systems in these studies highlight the centrality of context-specificities in producing livelihoods. This collection thus focuses on new and innovative themes in feminist livelihood research. It illustrates the ability of livelihood approaches to move beyond structural frameworks and capture intrahousehold relations, human-environment engagements, power, and social difference.

In the first paper, ‘Gendered livelihood impacts and responses to an invasive, transboundary weed in a rural Ethiopian community’, Maria Elisa Christie, Daniel Sumner, Lidya A. Chala, and Wondi Mersie work at the nexus of feminist livelihoods and feminist political ecology to analyze the gendered impacts of invasive plant species on agriculture-based households. Their research involves intensive fieldwork and participatory methods to gain an understanding of the lived experiences of smallholder farmers as they respond to the infestation of parthenium in the Oromo region of Ethiopia. This infestation and subsequent efforts to manage this invasive weed impact the community at multiple scales as livestock raising and dairy production are brought from the fields to household spaces and gardens. The authors critically examine these everyday, yet wide-ranging and profound connections between environmental change and social relational elements of livelihoods in rural agriculture. This study shows that feminist livelihood approaches to environmental shocks and stressors are essential for understanding the full impact of pest infestation and thus implementing more equitable livelihood outcomes.

The second paper, ‘“I shouldn’t have to do this alone”: intersectional livelihoods and single Hmong women in Thailand’, by Jennifer C. Langill, approaches livelihoods from a decolonial intersectional framework with attention to gender, ethnicity, marital status, and generation in northern Thailand. Langill’s ethnographic research provides a rich and complicated analysis of four Hmong women’s livelihood experiences. Each of these four women undertake their livelihood independently from a male counterpart, with one widowed, one divorced, one unmarried, and one’s husband incarcerated. Their distinct struggles to make a living are interwoven with multiple marginalized identities as they navigate culturally defined gendered intergenerational change. Drawing on intersectionality to disrupt the homogenizing category of ‘women’, Langill’s critical analysis offers a case study of the immense possibilities underlying feminist livelihoods approaches.

Chukwudi Charles Olumba and Cynthia Nneka Olumba provide an important empirical analysis to examine how climate-smart agriculture practices (CSAP) are linked to household headship in the third paper, ‘Gendered livelihoods and the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices in Nigeria’. Their research draws from the General Household Survey in Nigeria to compare the adaptive capacity of farming in both male- (MHH) and female-headed households (FHH). The authors show that MHHs adopt more CSAPs, even though FHHs are much more engaged in on-farm activities than MHHs and thus have more potential to adopt CSAPs. Importantly, they uncover how livelihood diversification moderates the relationship between household headship and CSAP adoption. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of investing in gender-sensitive livelihood policies to promote adaptive capacity to climate shocks in the Global South, and the importance of intrahousehold dimensions in this process.

Last, Claudia Radel, Lindsey Carte, Richard L. Johnson, and Birgit Schmook center the role of emotions in the livelihood-migration nexus in the viewpoint, ‘Emotions and gendered experiences of livelihood migration: memos from Nicaragua and Guatemala’. The authors argue that affect and particularly emotions, such as stress, suffering, aspiration, and happiness, are important aspects of what drives and impacts labour migration as a livelihood strategy. Their study is focused on smallholder farmers in mixed Mestizo-Indigenous communities of Guatemala and Mestizo villages in Nicaragua where difficult political, economic, and biophysical conditions have driven many people to migrate. The gendered and intersectional migration patterns of men and women from different classes and ethnic groups are embedded in socially differentiated affect and emotions. Demonstrating the diversity of emotional experiences, the authors underscore the enhanced perspectives on livelihood migration provided by attending to emotion and affect more broadly.

This collection of papers highlights the breadth and combination of methodological approaches that can be utilized within feminist geographies of livelihoods. The research-for-development project conducted by Christie et al. includes interviews, focus group discussions, and generative participatory activities to uncover important insights into longitudinal social-environmental changes. Langill’s paper is a close ethnographic account, drawing on interviews and participant observation in a case study village. Based on extended fieldwork in the village, she disentangles the intersections of multiple shifting subjectivities. In addition, Olumba and Olumba conduct multivariate probit analysis based on a nationally representative panel dataset of rural Nigeria. Their innovative methodology demonstrates how feminist approaches and epistemologies can deepen our engagement with ‘big data’. Last, Radel et al.’s paper is based on large-scale household surveys, interviews, and workshops that build on extensive field research to engage in provocative discussions about their multi-method insights to emotion, empowerment, and socially differentiated experiences of migration.

Conceptually, this themed section interrupts and challenges rigid and narrow understandings of livelihoods commonly observed in the literature. Feminist scholars have made important contributions to the conceptualization of livelihoods as place-based and socially differentiated. The authors in this edited collection achieve this by drawing on foundational and feminist livelihood literature, as well as their synergies with feminist political ecology, labour migration, and decolonial intersectionality. Such a rich collection aims to amplify feminist geographies of livelihoods in a way that situates them as a critical, interdisciplinary, and dynamic body of literature. The depth and scope of these papers demonstrate that this approach applies to diverse conceptual, empirical, and methodological studies across various geographical contexts. Finally, these studies are embedded in feminism as foundational to livelihood studies, thus contributing to broad empirical and conceptual research agendas.

Taken together, this themed section builds a feminist geographical approach that addresses the tensions within and opportunities for reimagining feminist livelihoods through avenues of resistance and transformation. Feminist foundations and epistemologies are too often absent from livelihood studies. Through these contributions, we demonstrate the consequences of overlooking feminist foundations, the promises and potential of feminist methodologies, and the novel contributions of feminist thought in livelihoods approaches. In sum, feminist livelihoods help to critique and overcome central limitations of livelihood scholarship, fundamentally enriching this important and dynamic field of study.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of our colleagues who have contributed to the rich discussions that have led to this themed section. This collection would not have been possible without the contributing authors, Lindsey Carte, Lidya A. Chala, Maria Elisa Christie, Richard L. Johnson, Jennifer C. Langill, Wondi Mersie, Chukwudi Charles Olumba, Cynthia Nneka Olumba, Claudia Radel, Birgit Schmook, and Daniel Sumner, as well as participants in our sessions at the 2021 American Association of Geographers meeting and the 2022 Fourth International Feminist Geography Conference, Pushing Boundaries. Finally, we would like to thank Gender, Place & Culture editors Kanchana Ruwanpura, Lena Grip, and Sneha Krishnan for their invaluable support throughout this process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer C. Langill

Jennifer C. Langill is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Geography at McGill University. Her work falls at the intersection of feminist geographies and development geographies, drawing from feminist approaches to political ecology and critical livelihood scholarship. In 2024, she is joining the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Ann M. Oberhauser

Ann M. Oberhauser is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on gender and globalization, critical development studies, feminist pedagogy, and neoliberal trends in higher education. Her co-edited and co-published books include Bridging Worlds – Building Feminist Geographies: Essays in Honour of Janice Monk (2022); Feminist Spaces: Gender and Geography in a Global Context (2017); and Global Perspectives on Gender and Space (2014).