ABSTRACT
Making a living is fundamental to people’s survival across the Global South and also reflects the complex array of everyday practices that people engage in. This chapter furthers some of the critical themes raised already (see Chapter 4 in particular) but changes the scale and focus of attention to the local level to explore how people are actually making a living in the Global South within the context of these broader processes. In doing so, the local geographies of making a living are explored, and the ways in which work and livelihoods shape, and are shaped by, the particularities of place are revealed. This chapter makes four key arguments. The first is that ways of making a living in the Global South (and North) can only be fully appreciated if they are analysed holistically, recognizing their complexity, fluidity, (il)legality, and informality and spatial particularities. We discuss different ways of understanding making a living in the first part of the chapter, drawing on the ‘whole-economy model’, and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work on ‘diverse economies’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006a; 2006b), illustrating these analytical concerns through the informal economy. The ways in which people across the Global South make a living are intimately tied to globalized economic processes and structures, which are constantly changing. Our second argument is that ways of making a living must be understood as historically and spatially contingent and never static. We explore this issue in relation to changing political and economic processes, which unfold in particular contexts and also in relation to changing state-based forms of employment, and through the example of deagrarianization and the internationalization of agriculture in the context of the rural Global South.
