Spatial associations between household and community livelihood capitals in rural territories: an example from the Mahanadi Delta, India

Despite the increasing interest of the Sustainable Livelihood Framework in the field of international development and in academia and the recent call for the use of mixed-methods approach, there has been little analysis that bring together qualitative and quantitative methods over a large geographical extent. Based on findings from the rapid rural appraisals during which participants identified the key assets needed to achieve their livelihoods, this chapter tries to bridge this research gap by differentiating two levels of livelihood capitals (household capitals and community capitals) and creating quantitative indicators that can be mapped across the delta, derived from national census data and satellite sensor data. Spatial patterns and differentials in access to livelihood capitals across the delta are examined and the associations that exist between household capitals, between community capitals, and between both are quantified. The results suggest that household physical capital is positively associated with household financial and social capitals but negatively associated with household human capital, supporting the hypothesis that households trade part of their workforce to increase their income, exemplified by the dynamics of male migration. A strong negative association between access to village amenities and access to natural resources was also clearly supported by the findings. Moreover, proximity to main axes of communication increases access to village amenities but decreases access to natural resources, while remoteness increases household human capitals but decreases household physical and financial capitals. Overall, this paper demonstrates that there are associations between livelihood capitals and that they are spatially clustered.


Highlights
• We observed spatial variability in common-pool resources and private assets affecting livelihoods in rural India.
• Workforce availability increases with remoteness, while both household physical and financial capital increase with proximity to urban areas.
• Households make trade-offs between different assets to meet their needs and mediate vulnerabilities.
• Access to natural capital and to community infrastructures are negatively associated spatially.
• We advocate for the separation of community capitals from household livelihood capitals to characterise rural livelihoods.  In-depth fieldwork was conducted to characterise the relative importance of household and 124 community capitals, to explore livelihood dynamics and to draw up a profile of livelihood sys-125 tems. This was also used to identify indicators that stakeholders, experts and local residents per-126 ceive as representative and robust to examine the effects of each capital on livelihood opportuni-127 ties. A Participatory Rural Appraisal was used as the principal suite of tools for data collection to 128 highlight the perceptions and opinions of rural dwellers. This suite of tools enables local people to 129 share their knowledge, and discuss and analyse their situation using their own terms (Mukherjee,  "an essential ingredient in the study of stratification patterns in Indias population" (Deshpande,152 2001). These power relationships were acknowledged and taken into account throughout the Par-153 ticipatory Rural Appraisal to give the opportunity to all social classes to express their opinion.

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Focus groups were purposely held separately, one with men (led by a local man) and one with 155 women (led by a local woman), to enable women who suffer from a lack of recognition in In-156 dia to have their say (Cornwall, 2003;Deshpande, 2002;Leduc, 2009). Moreover, focus groups they quantified the proportion of households falling into each category. The last activity was a participatory photography workshop using the photovoice methodology (Blackman, 2007;Wang 168 & Burris, 1997) on the theme of "Key assets to achieve your livelihoods"; a theme broad enough to 169 let the participants themselves highlight the different roles that community and household capitals 170 play in their decision to pursue a livelihood strategy. consist of three sets of tables: "village amenities", "house-listing" and "population enumeration".

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The "village amenities" dataset includes area in hectares, total income, total expenditure and the 183 different infrastructures available related to education, medical, drinking water, communication,         or sport fields (λ sportfield = −0.68) was an important community capital that enabled to build 367 strong kinships and that also prevented younger males to migrate out of the village for work.

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Overall, the factor kept accounted for 55% of the variance in community social capital between 369 villages.      At the household level, the findings show that physical capital is positively associated with fi-526 nancial and social capitals. This finding reflects the participants' views, who argued that wealthy 527 households who own means of transportation would also own protective assets, would invest in 528 their house and would have a better access to financial services. Moreover, participants also men-529 tioned that non-married households (widowed, divorced, single) and households from scheduled 530 castes would very rarely own productive or protective assets because of the social barriers they 531 face, which corroborates the synergies between social capital and both financial and physical cap-532 itals found in the present paper. In other terms, higher classes of Indian peasantry are locked 533 into an upward spiral of wealth and power, letting the lower classes of peasantry underdeveloped 534 (Corbridge & Harriss, 2013). This bundle is negatively associated with household natural capi-535 tal, which represents households' access to agricultural land. This trade-off represents a proxy 536 of coping dynamics: poor households sell part of their land (natural capital) to cope with shocks 537 and increase their income (financial capital), which is then invested in their physical capital, as 538 observed by Parida (2016).

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Interestingly, we did not find any associations between household human capital, which rep-  should include a spatially-explicit approach to provide place-specific infrastructure development 563 28 and activities to strengthen livelihoods of the rural poor.
In villages located near the main trading centres, agricultural tenancy laws should be imple-565 mented and enforced to regulate rents and offer security of tenure to tenants, as this paper demon-566 strated that the trade-off between proximity to urban areas and natural capital illustrates small-