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Description: Poor people in most rural areas of developing countries often improvise resources in unique ways to enable them make a living. Resources & Opportunity takes the view that resources are dynamic and fluid, arguing that villagers co-produce them through redefinition and renaming in everyday practice, and use them in diverse ways. The book focuses inter alia on ordinary social activities to bring out people's creativity in locating, redesigning and embracing livelihood opportunities in processes anchored in social relationships that span local, national, regional and international borders. The book uniquely brings out the respective tensions between agency and structure, locality and globality in livelihood construction in rural Kenya. Endorsements: Resources & Opportunity is a bold and analytical account of rural life showing in vivid details how the poor struggle to re-engineer social relations in order to co-produce resources and deploy them in making a living. It shows that rural people fruitfully face up to corruption, commercialisation, competition, marginalisation and state penetration, to remain 'afloat' and sane in unfavourable conditions. The empirical nature of the work makes it interesting and useful for students, scholars and policy makers. Oti Eyetsemitan, PhD, Social Scientist at the Federal College of Education, Lagos, Nigeria This is a remarkable book that utilises everyday happenings to tell a persuasive story on how the poor re-arrange their social and physical landscapes to create resources and opportunity for constructing livelihoods. It is written by the author both from an insider and outsider perspective. It is compulsory reading for mission and development practitioners, scholars and policy-makers working in Africa and elsewhere. Damon So, PhD, Research Tutor, Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, Oxford, UK About the Contributor(s): Edward Ontita holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands, and is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology & Social Work, University of Nairobi, Kenya. He is an M&E Expert with CRESS-Africa Consulting, which focuses on development management research and training in Eastern Africa. In 2011, he was a Visiting Research Scholar at Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS), Oxford, UK.

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9781498266772

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