The livelihoods approach regards awareness of the asset status of poor individuals or households as fundamental to an understanding of the options open to them. One of its basic tenets, therefore, is that poverty policy should be concerned with raising the asset status of the poor, or enabling existing assets that are idle or underemployed to
be used productively. The approach looks positively at what is possible rather than
negatively at how desperate things are. As articulated by Moser (1998: p.1) it seeks
“to identify what the poor have rather than what they do not have” and “[to]
strengthen people’s own inventive solutions, rather than substitute for, block or
undermine them”. This means identifying institutions that hamper and block people’s
ability to construct improved livelihoods, whether such institutions are traditional (e.g. customary land tenure), modern (e.g. centralized state rules and regulations), or
in some sense ‘post-modern’ (e.g. recent CBNRM policies and institutions).