Abstract: Over the last twenty years, there has been a growing fascination about the livelihood of islands with small populations and territories which overwhelmingly rely on tourism as a source of exports. The Small Island Tourism Economies profiled in this paper were colonised, and had depended heavily on financial aid from their former colonists for infrastructure development that has declin...

Due to its deltaic geographical position and precarious socioeconomic and demographic conditions, Bangladesh is recognized worldwide for its exposure to recurring environmental hazards. Based on a 21-month long field study in two fishing villages that are characterized by distinct ecological settings and ethnic groups, this article examines the arrays of cross-scale environmental, social and in...

R ecent years have seen an unprecedented number of official efforts to improve, develop, and implement new measures of the quality of life and economic performance. Much of the groundwork for these efforts was laid in two important National Research Council reports. Nature's Numbers, published in 1999, considered how to expand the national income accounts that track the country's economic activ...

In both rich and poor nations, worrying about future economic dangers subtracts from the present well-being of individuals, which is why affluent societies have complex systems of private insurance and public social protection to reduce the costs of economic hazards. However, the citizens of poor nations (i.e. most of humanity) typically find both private insurance and public social protection ...

The idealization of natural landscapes and peoples during colonialism, coupled with the popularity of sustainable development in the postcolonial era, has contributed to the expansion of conservation planning throughout the African continent. Concerns surrounding the promotion of national and international conservation agendas at the expense of local livelihood needs have generated interest in ...

For example, during the course of the livelihoods analysis conducted with poor people, it might become evident that they do not make use of public rural health centres. The reasons given by respondents may be that doctors are rarely present at the health centres and medicines are often lacking. This could be having several impacts, or results, on the livelihoods of the poor – they might be spen...

Using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993, this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural South Africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in South Africa about poverty and its alleviation. Pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment, this pap...

2. The origins of agriculture and the shift from hunting and gathering to committed agriculture is 3. regarded as one of the major transitions in human history. Archaeologists and anthropologists have 4. invested significant efforts in explaining the origins of agriculture. A period of gathering 5. intensification and experimentation and pursuing a mixed economic strategy seems the most plausib...