Coping and Adapting

Abstract

This chapter explores the nature of coping and adaptation in vulnerable livelihood systems, in order to see whether monitoring coping strategies can be useful in predicting food stress. Much conceptual confusion between coping and adapting characterises current debates about the utility of coping strategies both as indicators of stress and of appropriate interventions. People in marginal environments have always lived with a portfolio of options, and are well aware of the pathways that follow if their efforts to mitigate proximate stress are unsuccessful. They are fairly clear about how their livelihoods have changed over a two to three generation time-frame. To some extent, the confusion arising from Northern practitioners’ and academics’ failure to grasp the complexities of adaptation is of their own making. It implies that the immense amount of thinking about these issues in the developed world needs to be supported by much more information about how poor rural people themselves see them.