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Summary This paper addresses one of the major challenges in rural livelihood analysis to quantitatively examine the dynamics of household livelihood strategies. It investigates the interactions between livelihood assets, activities, and outcomes, and captures the dynamics of long-term changes and their underlying factors. The study aims to identify the classification of rural livelihood strategies, their transitions and factors influencing these processes and changes. We employ the dynamic livelihood strategy framework, and use panel data for 2008 and 2012 covering 464 households in 15 villages in Cambodia, for latent class cluster analysis and regression estimation. In this paper, livelihood strategies are quantified based on allocation of available resources, which overcomes the limitations of income-based analysis. Our study identifies five household livelihood strategies pursued in the study areas, and the results show that over 70% of households change livelihood strategies over time in response to evolving pressures, incentives and opportunities. The study identifies covariates that shape the choices of livelihood strategies and affects the households’ access to more remunerative strategies, such as education, ownership of physical assets, and access to infrastructure. These findings suggest policy implications for improving the range of livelihood choices available to lower income groups to move out of poverty trap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary large-scale land deals are widely understood as involving the expulsion of people who, in turn, struggle instinctively to resist dispossession This is certainly true in many instances. Yet this chain of events evidently does not always occur: large-scale land deals do not always result in people losing the land, and many of those who face expulsion do not necessarily respond with the kind of resistance often expected of them. Indeed, much evidence shows that the nature of and responses to big land deals can (and do) vary across and within ‘local communities’. Taking off analytically from a relatively narrow selection of cases, the expulsion–resistance scenario is too often assumed rather than demonstrated, thereby leaving many inconvenient facts undetected and unexplained. This suggests a need to step back and problematise the variable and uneven responses ‘from below’ to land grabbing, both within and between communities. This paper offers an initial exploration into why poor people affected by contemporary land deals (re)act the way they do, noting how issues and processes unite and divide them. This helps explain variation in political trajectories in the context of land grabbing today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]