METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

At its initiation, the study began with the goal to identify livelihood ‘impacts’ of agricultural commercialization and, in particular, joint ventures within smallholder irrigation schemes. A focus on impacts implicitly meant that the study would have to assess whether or not livelihood outcomes had been sustainable. This raised three related methodological challenges.

66 1.5.6.1 Livelihood Outcomes

In determining livelihood outcomes (or results), the study moved beyond metric variables, such as income, to include also the less tangible outcomes relating to well-being, such as power, influence, identity, affirmation, respect and dignity. However, an assessment of sustainability of outcomes would have been premature, since the RESIS Programme was at an early stage. Furthermore, although “enhanced income” was considered a success indicator among most of the petty commodity producers, such indicator was not shared by the broader group of subsistence producers and other members of local communities.

1.5.6.2 Community

Subsumed to livelihood outcomes, the concept of ‘community’ was not easy to define (Tapela et al, 2007; Warburton, 1998; Chambers, 1997; Welbourn 1991 in Chambers, 1997), owing to factors such as diversity of interests, power dynamics and porosity of boundaries.

Conscious effort was made to avoid imposing technicist views of what community means, and, as far as possible, respondents were asked to define what they understood their communities to be. Consideration was given to linkages between rural local communities and other spheres of livelihood generation, for example rural hinterlands and urban centres.

For practical reasons, the study mostly engaged with people found within the study sites at the time of research, although in-depth research also included a number of migrant workers.

1.5.6.3 Livelihood Sustainability

The second challenge related to lack of conceptual clarity about what constitutes

‘sustainable livelihoods’ (Carswell et al 1997 in Scoones, 1998) and specifications of how sustainability should be achieved (Dietz, 1996; Cole, 1994; Chatterjee & Finger, 1994). This difficulty was compounded by differences in interpretations of the meaning of sustainable livelihoods and perceptions about how trade-offs between productivity, equity and sustainability (Carney, 1997) should be handled in the context of government-led interventions and contract farming arrangements. It seemed unlikely that stakeholders would reach a consensus within the time horizon of the study. Effectively, therefore, it would have been futile for the researcher to pursue a goal to assess impacts of agricultural commercialization and joint ventures on the sustainability of livelihoods in smallholder

67 schemes. The study therefore sought to limit the study to an examination of institutional influences on livelihood assets, strategies, outcomes and, in particular, vulnerability. Where the consideration of sustainability factors was deemed necessary, this was limited to preemptive qualitative assessments of existing institutional provisions for longer term, post-project outcomes.

1.5.6.4 Livelihood Impacts

The third challenge methodological challenge related to the complex nature of rural livelihoods and livelihood systems. Scholars (Ellis, 2000, 1998; Kepe, 1997; Ntshona, 2002;

Tapela, 2005; 2008; 2009) clearly indicate that rural people’s livelihoods often straddle divides between ‘subsistence’ and ‘commercial’ in ways that are complex, dynamic and nested. The diversity, dynamism and inter-connectedness of livelihoods and livelihood systems, and the porosity of household and community boundaries multi-causality of livelihood outcomes, it soon became apparent that the researcher would have to grapple with a major methodological challenge to assess livelihood impacts. A pertinent question was how to determine with confidence the extent to which a given agricultural commercialization and/or joint venture factor affected rural people’s livelihoods, ‘baskets’

of livelihood strategies and livelihood systems, as opposed to the effects of a multiplicity of other possible causal factors. For example, early observations were that while given joint ventures exposed all smallholders within a group to the same risk and hazard factors, households of smallholders showed markedly different degrees of vulnerability to attendant hardships.

Although economists have devised econometric methods that enable disaggregation of effects of different factors that cause specific outcomes, such methods were found not to be sufficiently helpful to gauging qualitative impacts of agricultural commercialization on observed livelihoods. It became clear therefore that a critical part of the study would be to devise a methodology that would provide both a valid assessment and useful insights on how interventions towards agricultural commercialization affected people living within or adjacent to small-scale irrigation scheme in poverty nodes in Limpopo Province.

Owing to methodological difficulties pertaining to determining ‘livelihood impacts’ (Ahmed

& Lipton, 1997), therefore, the study refrained from assessing whether or not livelihood  

68 outcomes are sustainable or not but rather focused on the ways in which contractual joint ventures and strategic partnerships have affected ‘livelihoods’ within selected smallholder irrigation schemes. Consequently the study examined how rural people’s livelihoods were enhanced or adversely affected by agricultural commercialization and contract farming arrangements in selected smallholder irrigation schemes.

The researcher modified the proposed research aim by shifting focus away from assessing livelihood impacts to examining ways in which formulation and implementation of agricultural commercialization through contractual joint ventures and strategic partnerships affected ‘livelihoods’ within selected smallholder irrigation schemes. This allowed a greater degree of freedom to make causal, though cautious, statements about agricultural commercialization and livelihoods. However, it did not completely eliminate the need to isolate, where possible, the effects of agricultural commercialization from other factors and to distinguish between direct and indirect effects and short-term and long-term impacts.

A pertinent counterfactual question remained: What would have happened without agricultural commercialization and joint venture contracts in the selected small-scale irrigation schemes? In a study by Ahmed & Lipton (1997:5) on the ‘Impact of Structural Adjustment on Sustainable Rural Livelihoods”, authors observe that the “before and after approach”, which is often used to assess the impact of reforms, traces economic performance before and after adjustment and attributes differences to the adjustment. A major problem with the approach, however, is that it is difficult to control for exogenous shocks (Ibid.). The authors further state that such an approach can neither show that any element of adjustment or the whole package has succeeded or failed in changing some policy variable, nor account for changes that would have occurred without adjustment. The above observations can be transposed to the methodological problem for the study.

Both structural adjustment and agricultural commercialization, through contract farming, are premised on transaction cost economics approaches. However, the point of departure for the study was its emphasis on interactions between institutional arrangements and livelihoods, from perspectives of rural poverty and inequality. Drawing from unresolved debates on merits and demerits of agricultural commercialization and contract farming (Section 1.2.4), a hypothetical view by the study was that neo-liberal approaches to

69 commercial agriculture-driven rural development might not be appropriate constructs for resolving rural challenges of smallholder irrigation schemes in Limpopo Province. As such, the ‘before and after’ approach was not very useful since it omitted a whole range of quantitative and qualitative effects occurring between joint venture project inception and conclusion. It was important to gain insights into these effects, since they embodied people’s real experiences and perceptions rather than concerns by other stakeholders about the economic viability of projects.

Instead of the ‘before and after’ approach, therefore, this study opted to trace livelihood trends and trajectories throughout the course of agricultural commercialization processes.

The rationale was not to simply use comparisons of livelihood characteristics prior to and after contractual joint ventures to determine livelihood impacts. Rather the objective was to obtain insights into how commercialization processes intersected with people’s livelihoods, what coping strategies people adopted and what combination of factors predisposed households towards increasing vulnerability or resilience over a period of approximately three years. During this time, joint venture and strategic partnership projects came and went, but primary data collection continued to track livelihood trends and trajectories, both in direct response to agricultural commercialization and to a combination of this and other effects.

Variables that were endogenous and exogenous to agricultural commercialization often co-existed in many of the affected households, such that it was not easy to isolate effects of agricultural commercialization from other effects. For example, there was antecedent socio-economic differentiation. There were also variations in livelihood generation strategies, shocks experienced and coping strategies prior to, during and after the course of joint venture projects. Some of the shocks emanated from outside of joint venture projects, while strategies for coping with shocks induced by joint ventures involved reliance on other resources within the broader ‘baskets’ of livelihoods. It was possible though to make useful qualitative causal descriptions and analyses of observed phenomena. It also appeared that disaggregating the individual facets of household characteristics and effects of commercialization was not as critical as acknowledging the reality that rural livelihoods are inherently complex and their various facets are closely inter-connected, often inextricably.

Thus, rigor in isolating facets and effects was perhaps not as important as capturing the  

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‘untidy’ reality and qualitatively analysing, as faithfully as possible, the intersection between livelihoods and agricultural commercialization.

In attempting to overcome some of the methodological difficulties, the sampling frame for two of the study sites included households who had and who had not been directly involved in contractual joint ventures, for the sake of comparison. Owing to antecedent differences in household natural resource endowments, tenure rights, material asset ownership, literacy, attained education levels, employment, financial resources, indebtedness, social networks and political influence, this ‘control group’ approach did not sufficiently account for observed differences during agricultural commercialization processes. The approach was therefore of limited use in assessing the degree to which changes in livelihoods could be ascribed to agricultural commercialization. Despite this limitation, the control group approach was useful in highlighting differences in shocks experienced and coping strategies adopted at specific points during commercialization processes.

Towards addressing the aforementioned methodological challenges, attention was also given also to literature on similar studies in order to draw lessons on possible ways of overcoming the methodological difficulties. What emerged was that other researchers (Farrington et al, 1999; Ahmed & Lipton, 1997; Gibbon 1996 in Ahmed & Lipton, 1997) had encountered similar problems in livelihood impact studies and concluded that despite limitations, the sustainable livelihoods approach to assessing impacts of interventions remains a useful tool. Farrington et al (1999) for example, concludes that the sustainable livelihoods approach provides a useful tool for “putting people and issues of most concern to them at the centre of analysis” and reduces the prospect that any one discipline or sector will dominate. The study surmised therefore that the sustainable livelihoods approach, when used in conjunction with complementary analytical frameworks, is useful in analysing the highly complex interactions between people, institutions and interventions. As such, methodological challenges should not rule out the validity of findings obtained using the approach.