Book Description

What triggers positive changes in the livelihoods of the poor in the rural South? Some scholars and policy makers argue that deagrarianisation and the growth of non-farm employment offer pathways out of rural poverty. However, others remain less optimistic about the benefits that non-farm employment and migration can offer to the rural poor. While such accounts may be highly relevant, they may not always fully consider the complex structural factors and context-specific processes that shape how the rural poor engages in agriculture, migration and non-farm employment. By examining the structures and processes that lead to diverse poverty outcomes - reduction, persistence, or production of poverty - this thesis analyses how rural people interpret changes in their livelihoods, including the role of individual agency. To this end, the context of Nepal provides a window through which I engage with both empirical and theoretical debates on poverty dynamics and agrarian change. Although the vast majority of Nepali rural households remain attached to land and subsistence agriculture, over half of them are involved in international labour migration. Drawing on a year-long fieldwork combining ethnographic inquiries and quantitative analyses, I advance four arguments across the domains of rural people's changing relationship to land and agriculture, labour migration, and rural labour markets. First, for the poor pursuing land-based livelihoods, access to land remains critical as it offers a positive means of entering into non-agrarian pathways and of accumulating human and social capital. Yet, following the increased commodification of land and the attendant processes of dispossession, poor people's access to land has diminished. Second, international labour migration generates contradictory poverty outcomes, offering a route out of poverty for some while including others on adverse terms. In the process, it engenders rising inequality and rural differentiation. Third, regarding agrarian change, labour migration creates simultaneous and contradictory processes of "deactivation" of agriculture in some cases while in others it has led to "repeasantisation" of rural households. Fourth, migration leads to contradictory structural changes in rural labour markets since a decline in the labour pool has not increased demand for agricultural labour. Given the relatively unfavourable terms of engagement of the poor, neither agriculture, migration nor labouring alone provides sufficient means of exiting poverty. Within these key trends, this thesis reveals that it is the diversification of livelihoods combining agricultural and non-agricultural pursuits, principally migration, that facilitates the exit of poor households from poverty. Given the contingencies and risks in the face of structural and social constraints, the agency of poor households plays a critical role as individuals struggle to lift themselves out of poverty. Problematising the teleological vision of "narrative" pathways out of poverty, this thesis stresses the need for understanding and interventions to focus on how the terms of incorporation of the rural poor in different livelihood activities and the role of individual agency affect outcomes. Placing the key arguments drawn from the case of Nepal within the wider narratives, this thesis contributes to critical debates around rural poverty, migration and agrarian change in the rural South.