Implementing the livelihood resilience framework: An indicator-based model for assessing mountain pastoral farming systems

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2022.103405Get rights and content

Highlights

  • An indicator-based approach designed to characterize the livelihood strategies of farm households in the Spanish Pyrenees.

  • Land, livestock, and on/off farm labor together with capital assets allow identifying five livelihood strategies.

  • Farms intensified or pursued diversification pathways based on off-farm work, rural-tourism, or added-value productions.

  • The rural tourism typology showed higher adaptive capacity (learning capacity, self-organization, and diversity).

  • Policies must acknowledge farms' heterogeneity and limitations in capital assets to pursue diversification strategies.

Abstract

CONTEXT

Ongoing decreases in family farms and livestock numbers in European mountain areas are linked to multiple interconnected challenges. The continuity of such farms concerns society at large since they also act as landscape stewards, and their management influences the provision of ecosystem services.

The livelihood resilience lens provides a means of examining how farm households respond and build their capacity to persist, to adapt to changes and shocks, and eventually transform what is understood as farming. While an increasing number of studies address livelihood resilience in different parts of the world, its link with livelihood strategies and how these enhance or erode livelihood resilience dimensions is still missing.

OBJECTIVE

We built and applied an indicator-based framework to characterize the livelihood strategies of mountain livestock farming households in the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain) considering local historical trends, to assess how these strategies contribute to their adaptive capacity.

METHODS

We combined sustainable rural livelihoods and livelihood resilience frameworks and operationalized them to: group farm households with similar livelihood strategies based on their income-generating activities; asses the influence of capital assets and context on the adoption of strategies; and relate these strategies with their performance in three dimensions of adaptive capacity, namely capacity for learning and adaptation, self-organization, and diversity. Information was gathered surveying a sample of 103 farm households.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

We identified five livelihood strategies showing different degrees of adaptive capacity. Farm households either intensified production (21.3% of the sample) or pursued various diversification pathways based on additional off-farm work (28.6%), rural-tourism activities (22.7%), or added-value production (13.3%). Pensioners (11.8%) had a low endowment of assets and presented the lowest estimates in several dimensions of adaptive capacity. In contrast, diversification into rural tourism scored higher in adaptive capacity, showing greater proactive capacity, farmer organization, and multiple income sources.

SIGNIFICANCE

We explored the multidimensional issues that influence and are influenced by the livelihood strategies and their adaptive capacity at the farm household level. Our work highlights the relevance of including income-generating activities in addition to structural, technical, and socioeconomic variables in characterizing farming systems. It demonstrates the role of farmer involvement in formal and informal social cooperation networks in the sustainability and adaptive capacity of their households. To be successful, diversification strategies may require certain prerequisites in the farms, while strategies based on off-farm activities, although they support improved financial performance of the farm household, could also contribute to the displacement of agriculture from mountain areas.

Introduction

Family farms represent more than 96% of the farm holdings in Europe, although this number decreased by 30% between 2005 and 2016 while the amount of land used for production remained steady (Eurostat, 2020). The deep socio-economic transformations since the second half of the 20th century have promoted demographic changes and industrialization, causing land-use polarization towards either abandonment or intensification (MacDonald et al., 2000; Verburg et al., 2010; van der Zanden et al., 2017), which was further encouraged by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (Bernués et al., 2015; Navarro and López-Bao, 2018).

The CAP is one of the principal factors that can explain the developments in European livestock farming systems (Matthews et al., 2006). The CAP provides a unified agricultural policy framework at the EU level. The 2014–2020 CAP is composed of two pillars, where Pillar I supports farm revenues through direct payments subject to cross compliance, including greening payments to encourage farmers to adopt farming practices that help achieve environmental measures and climate goals, while Pillar II funds Rural Development Programs (RDP) with agro-environmental measures. The 2023–2027 CAP will introduce the legal figure of the eco-schemes that can be used to promote more targeted and tailored farming practices for addressing environmental and climate challenges (Meredith and Hart, 2019).

Mountain farming systems represent, on average, 18% of agricultural enterprises in the EU (European Comission, 2009), and livestock production is the dominant output. CAP support has been fundamental in keeping pastoral lands populated and productive, representing as much as half of pastoral revenues in the EU Mediterranean region (Euromontana, 2021). However, the CAP has also contributed to intensification of farming practices in non-disadvantaged areas, abandonment of disadvantaged mountain land, and ultimately has failed to maintain activities and halt the reduction in the number of farms (Gardner et al., 2009; Terres et al., 2015; Veysset et al., 2019; Euromontana, 2021).

The decrease in the numbers of farms and livestock (especially sheep) in mountain areas is linked to multiple interconnected challenges in the form of punctual shocks and long-term stressors that hinder the continuity of extensive livestock farming (Meuwissen et al., 2019). The continuous decline of farming revenues and the constant income gap with respect to non-disadvantaged areas (29%), are two of the main reasons behind the scarcity of successors in mountain farming (European Comission, 2009; Euromontana, 2021). The high opportunity cost of household labor for the young family members relative to more qualified jobs with higher remuneration, together with aspects such as lifestyle, job satisfaction, and working conditions, influence the generational relay and farm continuity (Davis et al., 2009; Bernués et al., 2011; Góngora et al., 2019; Nori and López-i-Gelats, 2020). This threatened continuity concerns not only the farm households themselves and their rural communities, but also society at large, since these farms are also landscape stewards whose management influences biodiversity conservation and the provision of a broad array of ecosystem services (ES) (Strijker, 2005; Hoffmann et al., 2014; Dean et al., 2021).

Mountain farming households have enacted adaptation strategies to cope with this situation by increasing the herd size, reducing labor dedicated to farming (García-Martínez et al., 2009) and diversifying their livelihoods, i.e. their capabilities, assets and activities that contribute to a means of living (Chambers and Conway, 1991). Livelihood diversification can occur in multiple ways, ranging from small adjustments that may imply reorganization of land, finances, or labor towards both agricultural and non-agricultural ventures on-farm, but also including off-farm, non-agricultural productive activities (López-i-Gelats et al., 2011). Diversification in farm production may promote economic security at both the farm and regional levels (Abson et al., 2013). The production of value-added products and direct-sale opportunities, especially for milk-producing farms (Toro-Mujica et al., 2015), is seen as another solution to increase revenues, especially with the increase in demand for craft cheeses (Ruiz et al., 2019). Part-time farming may be an adaptation strategy to continue with the farming activity but is related to the existence of off-farm job opportunities that are often linked to tourism development (García-Martínez et al., 2009). The extent to which the opportunities that tourism development provides will increase farm resilience by helping farms to overcome periods of low profitability in their farming activities, in line with the synergy narrative (Vik et al., 2010; Genovese et al., 2017), requires deeper investigation (Muñoz-Ulecia et al., 2021).

Although the drivers of agricultural and land-use change are described in the literature as general processes, the consideration of farm household responses and their characteristics may offer a better framework for understanding the different strategies adopted under common regional environments (Darnhofer, 2010; van Vliet et al., 2015; Muñoz-Ulecia et al., 2021). Thereby, the concept of resilience has gained momentum, providing a means of examining how farm households respond and build their capacity to persist, to adapt to changes and shocks in their systems, and eventually to transform what is understood as farming (Berkes et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2016; Tanner, 2015).

The overall objective of this study was to characterize the livelihood strategies of mountain livestock farming households in light of local historical trends, and to assess how these strategies contribute to the adaptability to the above-mentioned challenges, using a case study in the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain).

Our work elaborated upon the sustainable rural livelihoods (SRL) framework (Scoones, 1998) and the livelihood resilience (LR) framework (Speranza et al., 2014), operationalizing them through a series of quantitative and qualitative indicators adapted to extensive livestock farms. LR assessments adopt quantitative (e.g. Cabell and Oelofse, 2012; Jones and Tanner, 2017; Quandt, 2018; Awazi and Quandt, 2021) or qualitative approaches (e.g. Ashkenazy et al., 2018; Knickel et al., 2018; Jacobi et al., 2018; Nicholas-Davies et al., 2021) and may advocate for the consideration of both objective and subjective resilience indicators (Jones and Tanner, 2017; Jones et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2021). However, their link with livelihood strategies and how these enhance or erode livelihood resilience dimensions is still missing. Our work contributes to fill this gap by linking livelihood strategies with adaptive capacity of livestock farming households. Furthermore, its focus on European farmers represents a contribution to the operationalization of the SRL framework in a different context, which, to the best of our knowledge is missing in the literature.

Section snippets

Theoretical framework

This study is theoretically grounded in the conceptual frameworks of sustainable rural livelihoods (SRL) (Scoones, 1998; Ellis, 2000) and livelihood resilience (LR) (Speranza, 2013; Speranza et al., 2014; Tanner et al., 2015).

The livelihood approach describes the resources that people have and the strategies they adopt to make a living. From the SRL perspective, a livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and

Methodological framework

We identified three core sets of variables to operationalize the SRL and LR frameworks, namely, activity variables, capital assets and adaptive capacity (Table A1).

Study area

The case study was carried out in the Mid-Eastern Pyrenees, in the counties of Pallars Sobirà (PS) and Pallars Jussà (PJ) which constitute the Pallars region (Catalonia, Spain; Figs. 2. a,b). PS is located at higher altitudes on the more mountainous northern side of the region, on the border between Spain, France, and Andorra, while PJ occupies the lower part of the valley, on the southern part of the region. The entire region extends over 2721 km2 along the Noguera Pallaresa valley, with

Results

Farmsteads were located at a mean altitude of 1023.9 m.a.s.l. (SD = 264.0; range 451.8–1649.5). The mean age of the livestock farm holders sampled was 48.3 years (SD = 13.9; range 22–79), of which women represented 13.5%. Cattle farms were the most common (48.7%), followed by sheep (39.3%), equine (10.5%), and goat (1.5%) farms, with an average of 110.7 livestock units (LU) per farm (SD = 94.0; range 7.2–470.4). The utilized agricultural area (UAA) was 73.2 ha per farm (SD = 99.2; range 5–500).

Discussion

In this study, we identified five mountain livestock farming patterns characterized by distinct combinations of income-generating activities and capital assets that led to different estimates of adaptive capacity. Although previous typological studies captured the variability of livestock farms by focusing on technical, structural, and economic aspects (Olaizola et al., 2008; Gaspar et al., 2008; Toro-Mujica et al., 2012) and socio-economic characteristics (Martin-Collado et al., 2014), few

Conclusions

Extensive mountain livestock farming households have implemented a variety of strategies to guarantee their livelihood in the face of changing conditions. Drawing upon the conceptual framework of livelihood resilience in farming systems, we explored the multidimensional issues that influence and are influenced by the livelihood strategies and their adaptive capacity at the farm household level. The conceptual and methodological approaches adopted in this study are flexible and applicable to

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This research is framed within the PACTORES project (Pastoral ACTORs, Ecosystem services and Society as key elements of agro-pastoral systems in the Mediterranean) funded by MINECO (PCIN2017-051) and the project: “Silvopastoralism as an adaptation strategy for integrated rural development in the Mediterranean” (RTA2017-00036-C01/02) which has received funding from Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA), Spain. A. Lecegui was supported by grant

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