Sustainable livelihoods and ecosystem health: exploring methodological relations as a source of synergy

Using ecohealth as a transdisciplinary lens to explore the connections among overlapping domains of inquiry, this article examines methodological relations between Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystem Health, two approaches for improving rural health and well-being. The experience of working on a project tasked with developing an integrated, systems-based approach for understanding the nature of rural livelihoods and ecosystems provides the base for analysis. Several key insights are discussed: The overarching goals of health and sustainability facilitate collaboration among disciplines; differences arise from how each approach operationalizes systems as variables and indicators; the dependent variables for one approach can be used as the independent variables for the other. In summary, while broad concepts like health and sustainability help transcend differences across disciplines and scales of analysis, variables and indicators cannot, as they are bound to how an observed system is operationalized. An advantage of using an ecohealth lens is that it creates conceptual and analytical spaces in which differences can be reconciled and used as sources of synergy. A source of synergy revealed in this article is the interdependence of variables used by each approach.