Abstract:
In this thesis the ways rural poverty and vulnerability differentially accumulate and percolate from broader processes of environmental change and variability, economic shifts, and changes in policy and governance are examined. Geographically the focus of the study is the northern Northwest Province, South Africa: the southern periphery of the Kalahari dryland region. The environmental and political economic transformations and cadences that have shaped present-day household-level livelihoods are traced from a historical, regional perspective down to a detailed, contemporary household-level analysis focussing on the rural community of Makgori, located in the heart of the southern Kalahari region. The methodology employed in this research is thus a welding together of empirical and archival data from an array of sources. This hybrid approach is necessary to capture the realities of rural livelihood construction at the household level, and bed the household in the biophysical and political economic realities within which it exists and evolves.<br><br> Theoretically the thesis roots notions of rural vulnerability in entitlements theory, arguing that vulnerability is not only a function of an ability to survive external shocks and stress but is also a function of an inability to access and control adequate resources. More specifically it is argued that vulnerability is rooted in productive activities, once households fail to acquire resources through their own productive activities they become reliant on formal and informal transfers of resources that by their nature are ephemeral and transitory. The thesis concludes by arguing that rural vulnerability must be conceptualised in terms of the normal, day-to-day survival of a household and not as the result of an abnormal external event. Vulnerability is fundamentally an internal, inherent property expressed by an inability to access resources and engage in productive activity.<br><br> The research indicates that rural livelihoods tend to simplify their productive base over time as households are forced or decide to shed potentially riskier productive activities such as agricultural practice in the face of external transformations and processes that limit their ability to access resources. Histories of colonialism and processes of globalisation in all its forms - economic, cultural and social - are resulting in livelihoods that are embedded within increasing broad, complex and irresistible frameworks and transformations that constrain and control access to resources. Consequently, households are exposed to rapidly changing exigencies, political, economic and environmental, that they are increasingly unable to deal with. Household vulnerability is fundamentally rooted in an inability to adapt and evolve to external change. In the context of the southern Kalahari region vulnerability is inherently historical and is rooted in environmental variability and marginality and in broad shifts in social structure and political economy that are to an extent legacies of colonialism and Apartheid.
