• Energy Research

This paper proposes a reformulation of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) fit for the 21st century. The article explores the rise and usage of the original SLF, highlighting how its popularity among development practitioners emerged both from its practical focus, and its depoliticization of wider shifts in the development landscape at the time. Distilling the various critiques that have emerged around the use of the SLF and sustainable livelihoods approaches, the article highlights problems of theory, method, scale, historical conceptualisation, politics, and debates on decolonising knowledge. It further explores two key shifts in the global development landscape that characterise the 21st century, namely the impacts of climate change on rural livelihoods, and the shifts wrought by globalisation, before highlighting the structural and relational turns in critical development literature. In speaking to both historical critiques and more recent debates, we present a SLF for the 21st century, foregrounding a structural, spatially-disaggregated, dynamic and ecologically-coherent approach to framing rural livelihoods. We offer a framework and not an approach, hoping that that our SLF leaves open the possibility for different theoretical traditions to better work with emerging rural livelihoods.

COVID-19 has changed the permeability of borders in transboundary environmental governance regimes. While borders have always been selectively permeable, the pandemic has reconfigured the nature of cross-border flows of people, natural resources, finances and technologies. This has altered the availability of spaces for enacting sustainability initiatives within and between countries. In Southeast Asia, national governments and businesses seeking to expedite economic recovery from the pandemic-induced recession have selectively re-opened borders by accelerating production and revitalizing agro-export growth. Widening regional inequities have also contributed to increased cross-border flows of illicit commodities, such as trafficked wildlife. At the same time, border restrictions under the exigencies of controlling the pandemic have led to a rolling back and scaling down of transboundary environmental agreements, regulations and programs, with important implications for environmental democracy, socio-ecological justice and sustainability. Drawing on evidence from Southeast Asia, the article assesses the policy challenges and opportunities posed by the shifting permeability of borders for organising and operationalising environmental activities at different scales of transboundary governance.

Concerns over hydropower development in the Mekong River Basin and elsewhere include not only the overall impacts of dams on basin ecology and economy but also more site-specific impacts on affected communities. While hydropower development is impacting the livelihoods of local communities living along the river, the latter's views and concerns are often sidelined by top-down hydropower planning. Nonetheless, local communities create and shape their political spaces of engagements in relation to hydropower decision making across scales, albeit through various means and with different results. Taking the planned Pak Beng hydropower dam as a case study and building on the concept of institutional bricolage, we look at: 1) local communities’ responses in Thailand and Laos, including how these are influenced by social movements; 2) how these responses are translated into collective action (or the lack thereof), including in relation to local communities’ (in)ability to negotiate better compensation for their to be impacted livelihoods; and 3) how local communities strategies are embedded in the wider political context and different manifestations of state-citizens relations. We argue that while affected farm households can pursue their interests to secure proper compensation through individual means, this leads to sub-optimal outcomes for affected communities collectively.

This paper looks at how local livelihoods and to a certain extent their transitions are embedded in, and in thrall to, power relations at higher levels. Placing the (re)shaping of livelihood pathways within the context of top-down hydropower planning, it shows how the latter predetermines farm households’ current farming strategies and future livelihood pathways. Taking two villages along the Mekong River, both of which are to be impacted by the planned Pak Beng hydropower dam in Pak Beng district, Oudomxay province, the paper illustrates how the pathways that rural livelihoods are taking in northern Laos are being shaped by decisions and processes embedded in national and regional exigencies. We argue that top-down approaches in hydropower planning, as manifested in the current institutional vacuum to formally deal with resettlement and compensation issues at the village level result in village authorities’ and potentially affected villagers’ inability to strategically convey and negotiate their views and concerns. Moreover, we reveal how it is the specter of change which drives livelihood adaptation, not change itself, thus illustrating how the defined compensation rules and procedures (re)shape farm households’ farming strategies and future livelihood pathways even prior to the construction of the hydropower dam.