PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

indigenous livelihood strategies deployed by the Turkana people to cope
with crises in general, and in the 2005-2006 drought and famine in
particular? How do they cope on their own without support from outside
the community? And how do local practices and indigenous knowledge
contribute or not to the challenge of maintaining sustainable livelihoods?
In this thesis, it is argued that a new approach needs to be taken to
understanding Turkana pastoralists livelihoods – one that recognises the
Turkana people’s social networks as a fundamental component of crisis
management with a view to conceptualising how, in practice, effective
adaptation measures can built on indigenous social capital 18. This new
perspective reflects a paradigm shift in livelihood intervention thinking
followed in the 1980s which proposed externally imposed, often blueprint
solutions, and marks a shift towards a more iterative approach between
external donors’ prescriptions and local people’s own potential. It
advocates acknowledgement and understanding of the ways in which
Turkana people manage and change their own livelihood strategies in
response to stress and uncertainties. Potentially, it implies a new
dimension to rural development which builds on the Turkana people’s own
successes and enables them to avoid - or find alternatives to – some of the
deleterious effects of unsustainable changes in their livelihood.
As will be explored throughout this thesis, Turkana people’s networking
behaviour is an attempt to create or strengthen social ties that can be used
to mitigate environmentally stressful periods of time such as drought.
These networks form pathways that determine access and rights to
livelihood resources or ‘capital’ (natural, economic, physical, human and
social), and are critical to the maintenance of different livelihood
18 Social capital is the social resources (networks, social claims, social relations,
affiliations, associations and mutual trust) (DFID 1994; Scoones 1998). This study uses
these elements interchangeably.
18