Compare methods

	Livelihood Diversification Analysis	Livelihood Vulnerability Assessment
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	2009
Originator	Frank Ellis; Christopher Barrett, Thomas Reardon & Patrick Webb	IPCC framing; W. Neil Adger; Micah Hahn, Anne Riederer & Stanley Foster (LVI)
Type	Quantitative and analytical method for studying livelihood portfolios	Composite-indicator framework for assessing climate and livelihood vulnerability
Seminal source	Ellis, F. (1998). Household strategies and rural livelihood diversification. The Journal of Development Studies, 35(1), 1-38.	Hahn, M. B., Riederer, A. M., & Foster, S. O. (2009). The Livelihood Vulnerability Index: A pragmatic approach to assessing risks from climate variability and change — A case study in Mozambique. Global Environmental Change, 19(1), 74–88.
Aliases	Income diversification analysis, Rural diversification analysis, Livelihood portfolio analysis, Diversification index analysis	Livelihood Vulnerability Index, LVI, Climate Vulnerability Assessment, Social Vulnerability Assessment
Related	4	4
Summary	Livelihood diversification analysis studies how rural households spread their activities and income across multiple sources rather than relying on a single occupation or crop. Developed conceptually by Frank Ellis and refined empirically by Christopher Barrett, Thomas Reardon, and Patrick Webb, it combines the enumeration and classification of household income activities with quantitative measures of diversity — the number of income sources, the share of non-farm income, and concentration indices such as the Herfindahl or Simpson index — to characterise livelihood portfolios and distinguish diversification driven by distress from that driven by opportunity.	Livelihood Vulnerability Assessment is a framework for measuring how exposed and susceptible households and communities are to climatic and socio-economic stresses, and how able they are to cope and adapt. Drawing on the IPCC's conceptualisation of vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity and operationalised in composite tools such as Hahn and colleagues' Livelihood Vulnerability Index, it translates the social and environmental dimensions of risk into indicators that can be compared across places and groups to guide adaptation and poverty-reduction investment.