Sustainable Livelihoods Framework

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.