Having Faith in the Sustainable Livelihood Approach: A Review

Abstract

This review paper focuses on the development and application of the Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA), especially regarding its limitations, both in terms of its formulation and link to theory as well as practice. The SLA has proved to be a popular approach, not least because it is holistic and ‘people-centered’, and forces a requirement that livelihoods, along with their vulnerability and institutional contexts, are well understood before interventions are designed and implemented to help the community. However, its theoretical underpinning has been questioned, and some have pointed to the weak representation of important dimensions such as power, including its link to globalization, and culture, with the latter including faith. This paper explores the various ways that these issues have been addressed by using faith as a lens, and makes a case for a ‘Sustainable Living Approach’ (SLivA) to provide a stronger dovetailing with the capabilities/functionings approach of Amartya Sen. However, there is a trade-off between the complexity of frameworks and their practicability, and more work is needed in this area, especially in terms of the potential contribution of technologies such as very-high-resolution Earth Observation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.