EIDs and the Intersectional Health/Livelihoods Paradox in the Rural Global South

Abstract

This article presents the framework of the intersectional health/livelihoods paradox to analyse how political economic processes incur land use change to create vulnerability to infectious disease, but that in contending with these risks rural people negotiate conflicts with livelihoods. The conflicts and trade-offs people make in deliberating over health and livelihood outcomes because of ecological degradation are distributed unevenly through lines of social difference, such as gender and class. While the health/livelihoods paradox is evident within contexts of vulnerability to infectious disease, it is poignant when considering the impacts of interventions and containment strategies to control outbreaks in rural settings. Despite considerable attention on the urban context of disease surveillance, spread and containment due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this article refocuses analysis of the impacts of emerging infectious disease (EID) in rural contexts. The article shifts attention away from analysis of the problematic practices of rural households that undertake livelihood activities such as harvesting of wildlife for consumption, to a nexus between land use change, ecologies, livelihoods and health. The literature is fragmented in terms of the landscapes explored, developmental processes, species dynamics, diseases and social contexts. Therefore, this article presents a framework that enables complex dynamics such as these, that lead people to make compromises between competing health and livelihood outcomes to be examined.