Our focus was to find examples of synergies among the local adaptive strategies, policy and technology. Such synergy we argued would encourage ample conditions to lead to sustainable livelihoods. In order to test this hypothesis we have had to identify with local communities potential indicators of sustainable livelihoods. The added value to traditional community development work is the inclusion of the ecological and social dimensions to the traditional economic focus.

Our work is grounded in systems ecology and the principles of co-adaptation between nature and society. It is significant because it provides an operational handle to help design policy and technological interventions which can help household and communities achieve sustainable livelihoods or at least reduce the obstacles which prevent them from so doing. In other words, the work provides a way to operationalize the common rhetoric of "bottom-up designs of project and policies", but goes further in seeking to integrate bottom-up and top down approaches.

Policy design which took into account the local strategy would not only prevent such perverse impact but should have the potential to augment local livelihoods. Take the case in Zimbabwe of the deregulation of central agricultural marketing at the urging of local groups. When the system of central purchasing of farmer's grain by Government was removed and local storage was improved, more grain became available for local consumption and cash incomes improved simultaneously from local sale of surplus. On the other hand, sudden marketing deregulation led to chaos in Zambia where local groups were not as involved and where adequate local storage and other mechanisms were not in place. Our work is replete with similar examples from the different communities and countries.

Another significant contribution of this work is that it turns traditional approaches to poverty reduction upside down. It begins with local people's strengths and gifts not with their weaknesses and needs. It does not seek to give them what others perceive as their needs but rather to build on what they, the local people, see as their strengths. And it has the potential to bring together the powerful forces of policy and technology to help this process.

The concepts and methodology we have used are not new. Our major contribution has been to bring them together in a way that made operational sense. Of course, it will be naive to claim that any single approach leads to sustainable livelihoods, but we have demonstrated an important first step in an alternative approach to helping the transition to poverty elimination and the achievement of sustainable livelihoods. The concepts and methodology are not context specific and this gives the work potential application to households and communities in other ecozones and economies, as well as provides tools for bottom-up approaches to work on issues such as land restoration and biodiversity conservation. The application of the approach to the Great Plains to promoting public and private sector policy changes which can enhance livelihoods sustainability is an attractive option for further work by IISD because of the natural linkages with current Great Plains initiatives such as the Adaptation Council of Manitoba.

The response to the potential of our work from the people involved in it has been extremely positive. CIDA participated in the project as a member of the International Advisory Group. They have invited us to submit a proposal which applies the adaptive strategies approach to community-based drought mitigation work in countries in Southern Africa. UNDP funded a significant part of the field work. They have already reviewed the preliminary findings. As a result they have invited us to participate in their in-house training workshop with 25 program managers to examine innovative ways of poverty reduction. The UN Capital Development Fund has invited us to discuss ways in which they might benefit from this approach. The World Bank has invited us to do an in-house briefing seminar on our findings. The G.E.F. has indicated interest in the application of our approach to work on land and biodiversity conservation in dry areas.

The recently approved U.N. System Special Initiative for Africa has drawn directly from our work in its proposal on employment and sustainable livelihoods as a priority area. The implication of this, apart from the central recognition that it confers on our work, is that the door is now open for us to develop a concrete proposal for further work in Africa to be supported by the international community.