Understanding the Rural Livelihood Stability System: The Eco-Migration in Huanjiang County, China

Abstract

Immigrants are a special group whose livelihood stability is crucial to local sustainable development. To understand the positive effect of eco-migration policy on the immigrants, we innovatively selected the perspective of stability and quantified immigrants’ livelihood stability with relevant concepts, including livelihood capitals and strategies, response capacity, and land-use efficiency, which helped identify the problems and put forward suggestions to enhance livelihood sustainability, achieve better social integration, and promote the sustainable development of the rural resettlement areas. Huanjiang County was used as a study case as it is the largest and most representative eco-migrant resettlement county of the southwestern karst region, China. Aided by participatory rural appraisal (PRA), this paper explores the livelihood stability of immigrants and takes natives as the reference group. The results show that the livelihood stability values of immigrants were less than that of natives, but the gap was smaller than ten years ago; the natural, social, and other capitals owned by immigrants were almost the same as those of natives, demonstrating that the Chinese government’s poverty alleviation policies have benefitted immigrants. However, both immigrants and natives were found to have less natural and social capitals; high income dependency and an unbalanced proportion of income sources in addition to low land-use efficiency. Therefore, there are several suggestions put forward to achieve stable livelihood and rural sustainable development, and these items should be given increased consideration by both the government and households in resettlement areas.