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1994; Moser, 1993). Women and men often have vastly different opportunities
available to them for income generation, resource management and food security.
For instance, Prebisch et al. (2002) demonstrate that as Mexican men migrate out
of their rural communities in search of waged employment, women are left to tend
family farms, resulting in the feminisation of smallholder agriculture. Similar themes
are taken up by Perreault (2005) who examines the gendered role of indigenous
peoples' agrobiodiversity maintenance in swidden gardens in the Ecuadorian Amazon
and the importance of this diversity for household food security. In this case, not
only is there a highly gendered division of labour regarding the tending of gardens
and the preparation of foods made from garden crops, but these same foods fi gure
importantly in similarly gendered discursive and performative representations of
indigenous identity. Gendered asymmetries in access to and control over natural
resources also have important implications for the well-being of women and chil-
dren. For instance, in her work in northern Pakistan, Halvorson (2002) examines
the gendered ideologies of conservative Islam and the implications these have both
for women's spatial mobility and differential outcomes on child health. As evident
in these works, a critical approach to livelihood calls for examination of the mic-
ropolitics of intra- as well as inter-household power relations, resource access and
strategies for production and reproduction.
Insofar as it focuses attention on the reproduction of social life and the manage-
ment of resources (both natural and social) necessary for human well-being and
the varied forms of environmental knowledge, the concept of livelihood has been,
and will continue to be, central to geographical work on environment and develop-
ment. It is important to acknowledge its limitations, however, and to adapt the
concept to the changing political and economic conditions in which the world's
poor live their lives. Paramount among these limitations is the tendency for liveli-
hoods to be considered as primarily rural and local. Though there is nothing about
the concept that precludes its consideration in urban contexts or at socio-spatial
scales beyond the household or rural community, geographers tend to reserve 'liveli-
hood' for studies of rural, often agrarian communities. This is likely a legacy of
the cultural ecology and political ecology approaches, in which rural, agrarian
livelihoods have long been a central concern. It is also surely a result of the com-
plexity of researching urban and multi-scalar economic strategies. An illusion of
isolation and simplicity can be sustained in rural settings in ways that urban con-
texts do not allow. But the rapid urbanisation of Latin America, Asia, the Middle
East and much of Africa in recent decades necessitates a rethinking of how geog-
raphers study livelihood. If we accept that the concept of livelihood is inherently
useful for environment and development geography, then we must fi nd ways to
employ it in geographical contexts relevant to the world's poor. Recent work by
Potts (2006) and Potts and Bryceson (2006) on migration, urbanisation and liveli-
hood in Africa points towards a much-needed extension of the livelihood concept
into urban contexts. Following these authors' lead will necessitate a rethinking not
only of the categories of livelihood strategies, but of our traditional conceptualisa-
tions of resources themselves.
Moreover, it is important that geographers conceptualise livelihoods as encom-
passing geographies at scales beyond the local (Bebbington, 2003). The concept of
livelihood may be used to describe the strategies for household reproduction
employed by a farmer in rural Africa. But can we use the same concepts - if not
the same analytical metrics - to describe and analyze the transnational networks
