Resilient Livelihood Styles: An enriched perspective on household livelihood resilience in the sensitive natural environments of Indonesia

Abstract

AbstractLivelihood resilience has rapidly gained relevance in discussions and policies concerning groups and communities challenged by diverse natural and man-made adversities. Most studies seeking to understand how people respond, recover and adapt to shocks and stresses focus on changes in material or financial resources on the community or larger scales. They thereby often disregard differences in household-level practices and the influence of social-cultural structures in building livelihood resilience. We adopt the concept of livelihood styles to explore a more differentiated and ‘subjective’ conceptualisation of resilient livelihoods. By applying a mixed-methods approach, we scrutinised the ways in which various livelihood styles have evolved to adapt to their changing environment in the Maninjau caldera, Indonesia. We found that different livelihood styles show differing levels of adaptability in terms of resilience. This is largely due to the historic evolvement of styles and the way in which they are embedded in social structures. Styles that show higher levels of resilience to changes in the natural environment also appear to be more contumacious towards development interventions that are geared towards new forms of living with the objective of raising people’s income. As such, we show that a resilient livelihood styles perspective offers a way of identifying and interrogating the characteristics that build resilience of household livelihoods that better reflect the reality of local households. It can contribute to the development of more inclusive interventions and policymaking in ecologically sensitive areas that take account of and anticipate transformational environmental changes and the creation of sustainable livelihoods.