Rural Livelihoods in Sierra Leone: Longitudinal Insights from Panguma and Kayima

‘Sustainability’ has become a buzz word in development in recent decades, particularly in relation to livelihoods approaches. ‘Sustainable development’ is commonly defined as that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs; while in the livelihood context, sustainability is taken to mean the ability to maintain and improve livelihoods while maintaining or enhancing the local and global assets and capabilities on which livelihoods depend. In line with these conceptualisations, livelihoods research and practice tends to focus on a snapshot of livelihood systems in the present context, with the aim of enhancing their future capacity in a sustainable way. In contrast, there are relatively few examples of studies which seek to understand livelihood systems in specific rural communities over a long period of time, particularly in an African context. This research seeks to address this deficit by exploring continuity and change in rural livelihoods over a forty year period in Panguma and Kayima, two small towns in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. Over this time, Sierra Leone has been stalked by social, economic and environmental instability. Thirty years of often corrupt and dysfunctional governance led to a brutal civil war throughout the 1990s, which resulted in more than 50,000 deaths, and the displacement of over half the population; climate change has created uncertainty regarding the sustainability of traditional agricultural practices; and communicable diseases such as malaria and Lassa Fever remain constant threats, while the recent Ebola epidemic has had a significant impact on the predominantly agricultural population’s ability to generate a livelihood. In addition, local-scale shocks such as the loss of crops due to pests, fire or theft, or the incapacitation of a household member through illness, injury or death, can have an equally dramatic impact on people’s livelihoods. Faced with this omnipresent vulnerability, the rural communities of Panguma and Kayima have demonstrated remarkable resilience, adapting livelihood strategies in order to mitigate the impact of each challenge over the forty year period covered by this study, but despite such resilience, there has been little discernible improvement in livelihood outcomes for the majority of households. Taking a longitudinal approach, thus, not only enables this research to explore the changes that have occurred within rural livelihood systems in Sierra Leone over time, but also why those changes have not translated into improved livelihood outcomes. In doing so, it identifies some of the key priorities and challenges for future development in Panguma and Kayima which could, in turn, inform development initiatives within those communities, as well as rural development policy in Sierra Leone and further afield. In addition to these policy-driven implications, this thesis also explores the potential benefits and limitations of incorporating a longitudinal dimension within livelihoods research, and situating it within an analysis of the wider political economy, and thus contributes to broader theoretical discussions around livelihoods approaches to development. Moreover, given that that this longitudinal dimension spans pre-, intra- and post-conflict periods, this thesis also contributes to the emerging nexus of conflict and development literature