Doctoral Dissertation Research: Out-Migration, Environmental Change and Rural Livelihoods in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes

In the rural developing world, many households' livelihoods are directly dependent on the environment. At the household and larger scales, climate changes or fluctuations and related degradation of forest, soil or water resources can threaten the sustainability of subsistence and commercial agriculture, collection of wild plant and animal products, and participation in waged and self-employment (Roncoli et al. 2001; Stocking 2003; Takasaki et al. 2004). Unsustainable livelihood practices can also contribute to environmental degradation, creating the potential for feedbacks between environmental and livelihood changes (e.g. Zimmerer 1993; Duraiappah 1998). As opportunities for temporary and permanent out-migration are often more dependent on conditions in destination areas, many observers have hypothesized that environmental change in origin areas may stimulate out-migration (Ramlogan 1996; Myers 1997). This phenomenon has been convincingly documented for acute natural disasters such as flooding and volcanic eruptions (Kayastha & Yadava 1985; Hugo 1996), but much less so for (1) climactic fluctuations such as drought (Findley 1994) and (2) gradual forms of landscape degradation such as soil erosion and deforestation which are widespread in the developing world. The interaction of migration and environment / landscape change is an important issue in human-environment and development studies, within which many questions remain unresolved (Black 1998; Lonergan 1998; Bilsborrow 2002). This project investigates interactions between out-migration, rural livelihoods and environment / landscape change for an important center of out-migration in the southern Ecuadorian Andes. This region, southern Loja province, has a long history of out-migration to frontier, urban and international destinations (Brown & Sierra 1994; Jokisch & Pribilsky 2002), and also of drought and landscape degradation in the form of deforestation and soil erosion (Sierra et al. 2002; Bydekerke et al. 1998). Rapid increases in international out-migration and the declining productivity of smallholder agriculture are key concerns of rural residents and local non-governmental organizations. The project will ask: What are the impacts of the environment on (1) out-migration and destination choice, and (2) natural resource-dependent livelihood strategies, and how do these processes interact? I will use a mixed method approach (including qualitative data collection and spatial analysis) in which the key method is a household and community survey followed by the use of multilevel regression models. This approach will allow the statistical isolation of environmental contextual effects, and will produce results that are generalizable to the study area. Drawing on two years of field experience in the study area, I predict that (1) environmental change and landscape degradation does contribute to out-migration, (2) this effect is a result of impacts on subsistence and small-scale commercial agriculture, and (3) the effects of environmental change will encourage migration to some destination types more than others. These results will address the interaction of two key processes of change in the rural developing world: (1) out-migration and (2) environment / landscape change. In many developing countries, out-migration has led to substantial labor shortages, "brain drains", and increases in remittance income in origin communities (World Bank in press), as well as to urbanization, deforestation and demographic change in destination areas (Bilsborrow 1998; Lambin et al. 2001). Due to out-migration and fertility decline, the world rural population is expected to peak in 2017 and decline thereafter (UN 2004). Paralleling out-migration, many rural areas of the developing world have experienced interlinked environmental changes that occur over a variety of temporal and spatial scales. These include locally-induced changes such soil degradation, which is widely considered to be the world's gravest threat to smallholder agriculture (Ananda & Herath 2003; Stocking 2003), and deforestation, which contributes to soil degradation and biodiversity loss (Vitousek et al. 1997; Lambin et al. 2001). This project will address these issues through an interdisciplinary approach informed by advances in population-environment studies. It will draw on my significant field experience, and on the expertise of UNC investigators in migration and population-environment research.

Principal Investigators: Richard E. Bilsborrow, Clark Gray

CPC Fellow Investigator:

Funding Source: National Science Foundation

Funding Period: 9/1/2005 - 8/31/2008