1 Sustainable Livelihoods Framework: ten years of researching the poor African Environments Programme, Oxford University Centre for the Environment (OUCE) 24 th January 2008, 2-6pm, Sustainable livelihoods: still being sought, ten years on Simon Batterbury Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne and James Martin fellow, Oxford simonpjb@unimelb.edu.au all papers at www.simonbatterbury.net Ten years ago there was a major flurry of activity in the British aid community. Following the election of a Labour government in 1997, The Overseas Development Administration of the British government was transformed into the Department for International Development. Its budget was increased, it was delinked from the Foreign Office, its new Ministerial head was the socially committed and controversial MP Clare Short, and it began a search for the most appropriate building blocks necessary for poverty alleviation and sustainable development. A new framework, the 'sustainable livelihoods approach' (SLA), soon entered DfID discourse. From around 1997 to 2001 a considerable body of research was commissioned by DfID totaling many million pounds (£30m+?). Scones and Wolmer estimate £200m was spent on livelihoods research and policy in total from 1997-2001 (Sccones Wolmer 2003:12). Numerous papers and pamphlets were issued including SL guidance notes for project managers, professional networks were established, and livelihoods support programs and projects emerged across governmental and nongovernmental aid organizations. In DfID, various Rural Livelihood activities and staff posts were established and ran for some years. This paper offers a few remarks on the lessons learned from the burst of 'livelihoods' activity that begun in the UK in the late 1990s. I regard the focus on 'livelihoods' in the approach, as opposed to 'adaptation' , 'vulnerability' , the economics of the household or newly rediscovered terms like 'resilience' as broadly positive, not least because of the considerable applied research effort that accompanied its emergence and its holistic agenda, which combines the best of several existing techniques and ideas. Nonetheless, some development programmes to support rural livelihoods have failed significantly. There are also explanatory problems with some aspects of the SL framework. My approach to the research issues raised by the SL framework is to elaborate and extend it in detailed studies, rather than to seek other alternatives and terminologies. The arrival, departure, and persistence of SLAs Discourses and development frameworks have histories. Work on frameworks to understand rural livelihoods have a very long history, based in academic disciplines like anthropology, geography and sociology, and in the applied research of governments and aid agencies. Those identifying with an agrarian studies tradition would justifiably claim a long engagement with rural livelihoods, although less perhaps with the measurable ecological dimensions of agrarian change (Akrom-Lodhi and Kay xx, Bernstein xx, Harriss, unpublished paper 1997). Agrarian studies, with a basis in political economy, is often less than optimistic about development prospects for the rural poor. De Haan&Zoomers (2005) trace the origins of a rather more hopeful, agent-centered form of livelihoods thinking to the 'new household economics' with its micro-household focus, and to Norman Long's identification of '"livelihood strategies" in a 1984 publication (Long 1984). Back in the late 1980s I was a PhD student learning how to study a particular livelihood system in Burkina Faso, using basic survey techniques, ethnography, agronomic and environmental measurements, and extensive participatory appraisal techniques. As a