Understanding Livelihood Change in Cambodia (ARDB)

In Cambodia most rural people are dependent on natural resource (NR) systems for their food, employment and income. The productivity of many of these resources are either static or declining in their ability to support the growing number of people in the rural population is declining. However, these people lack the capacity to break the dependency they have on the natural resources and as a result the future for many is not positive. In response, the long-term aspiration of government is to increase the growth of secondary and tertiary industries in the rural environment to provide opportunities for people who will be excluded from the exploitation of agriculture, forestry and fisheries.

The Aquatic Resources Dependency and Benefit Flows (ARDB) project was designed to understand the relationship between people and their natural resource base and to see how that dependency affects people's ability to change their livelihoods. Using a systematic and participatory research process IMM aimed to understand the factors at the household, community and national levels that drive or inhibit change in rural livelihoods so that those factors can be incorporated into future decision making processes.

The outputs of the intervention were:

1. Capacity of DoF and NGO staff to understand and use livelihood approaches increased
2. Livelihood dependency on aquatic resources and linkages with other natural resource systems, characterized
3. The role of community and household structures and processes as drivers or inhibitors of change, defined The role of policies and institutions as drivers or inhibitors of change, defined
4. A framework for guiding micro- and macro-level interventions in support of pro-poor secondary and tertiary rural enterprises, developed