Poverty, resource use, governance and sustainable livelihoods in the muslim countries: case study of OIC member countries

Abstract

This research is an extention of the IRPA research project on "Linking Environment and Rural Poverty: Resource Use, Governance and Sustainable Development Policies." (08-02-02-0018-EA281), the findings of which have been published in 2008. In the current project, the researchers have widened the scope to include livelihoods sustainability and resource use admist the available resource stocks( naural.i.e., agricultural, mineral, oil resource and human resources as well) in the Muslim world, using the OIC members as proxy. In the previous project, it has been established that resource contraints impact negatively poverty eradication, particularly rural poverty, and sustainable environment strageties and policies; depicting a vicious cycle. Livelihoods sustainability; especially those of the rural folks, are largely sharped by how the available stocks of resources are used to increase the people's access to livelihood opportunities, chances and livelihood assets. The major concern here is about the pattern of resource use, which entails a chain of generating, horizontally and vertically distributing, laterally redistributing and utilizing to sustain the assets that appear more likely to scale up livelihood chances in the broader domain of the Islamic fraternity. There are pertinent knots along this chain which need to be explored, identified and straitened for resource utilization policies and programmes to yield positve results particularly in the rural areas in the individual countries and in the collective OIC countries.