ABSTRACT
In the context of globalization and intensified market expansion, there is compelling evidence across the developing world that migration is of growing significance for rural people seeking to diversify agrarian livelihoods (Ellis, 2000; Adger et al, 2002; de Haan and Rogaly, 2002; Rigg 2006). As rural lives and livelihoods become increasingly multi-local, even transnational, marked by links that cut across the boundaries of localities, considerable challenges are posed for the ways in which rural development and natural resource management (NRM) is conventionally envisioned. In particular, migration and mobility are (perhaps deliberately) at odds with the spatial dynamic normally associated with natural resource management interventions (Black and Watson, 2006). Such interventions, whether associated with the state or with NGOs, generally attach resource management institutions to geographical territories (areas of land, forest and water) and thus implicitly carry assumptions about the geographical boundedness of communities and their relationship to particular spaces.
