Compare methods

	Sustainable Livelihoods Framework	Participatory Rural Appraisal
Field	Development Studies	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1998	1994
Originator	Robert Chambers & Gordon Conway; Ian Scoones; DFID	Robert Chambers and collaborators
Type	Analytical framework for understanding livelihoods and poverty	Family of participatory field appraisal and planning methods
Seminal source	Scoones, I. (1998). Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis. IDS Working Paper 72. Institute of Development Studies, Brighton.	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	SLF, Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, SLA, DFID Livelihoods Framework	PRA, Participatory Learning and Action, Participatory Rural Appraisal Methods, PLA
Related	4	2
Summary	The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) is an analytical lens for understanding how poor households construct their livelihoods, drawing on five categories of capital assets within a vulnerability context that is mediated by institutions and policies. Crystallised by Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway and operationalised by Ian Scoones and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in the late 1990s, it shifts development analysis from sector-by-sector or income-only views to a holistic, people-centred account of what people have, what they do with it, and what outcomes result.	Participatory rural appraisal is a growing family of approaches and methods that enable local people to share, enhance, and analyze their own knowledge of their lives and conditions, and to plan and act on it. Associated above all with Robert Chambers, PRA reverses the conventional research relationship: outside facilitators hand over the stick, and community members themselves do the mapping, ranking, diagramming, and analysis that drive planning and action.