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This dissertation examines how smallholder farming livelihoods may be more effectively leveraged to address food security. It is based on empirical research in three woredas (districts) in the Jimma Zone of southwestern Ethiopia. Findings in the chapters that follow draw on quantitative and qualitative data. In this research, I focus on local actors to investigate how they can be better supported in their roles as agents who have the ability to improve their livelihoods and achieve food security. This general aim is operationalized through three research questions that are addressed in separate chapters. The research questions are: (i) How do livelihood strategies influence food security?; (ii) What livelihood challenges are common and how do households cope with these?; and (iii) How do social institutions, in which livelihoods are embedded, influence people’s abilities to undertake livelihoods and be food secure? Using quantitative data from a survey of randomly selected households, I applied a number of multivariate statistical analysis to determine types of livelihood strategies and to establish how these strategies are associated with capital assets and food security. Here I view livelihood strategies as a portfolio of livelihood activities that households undertake to make a living. The predominant livelihood in the study area was diversified smallholder farming involving mainly the production of crops. Food crops such as maize, teff, sorghum, and in smaller quantities – barley and wheat, were primarily produced for subsistence. Cash crops namely coffee and khat were primarily produced for the market. Based on our analyses, we found five types of livelihood strategies to be present along a gradient of crop diversity. Food security generally decreased with less crops being part of the livelihood strategy. The livelihood strategies were associated with households’ capital assets. For example, the livelihood strategy with the most number of crops had more access to a wider range of capital assets. They had larger aggregate farm field size, and were more involved in learning with other farmers through informal exchange of information and knowledge. The status of food (in)security of each household during the lean season was measured using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS). A generalized linear model established that the type of livelihood strategy a household undertook significantly influenced their food security. Other significant variables were educational attainment and gender of household head. The findings contribute evidence to the benefits of diversified livelihoods for food security, in this case, the combination of diverse food crops and cash crops. Smallholder farming in southwest Ethiopia is beset with process-related and outcome-related challenges. Here, a process-related challenge pertains to the lack of different types of capital assets that people need to be able to undertake their livelihoods, while an outcome-related challenge pertains to lack of food. The most frequently mentioned process-related challenges were associated with the natural capital either as lack in necessary ecosystem services or high levels of ecosystem disservices. Farming households typically faced the combined challenges of decreasing soil fertility, land scarcity, die-off of oxen due to diseases, and wild animal pests that raided their crops and attacked their livestock. Lack of cash was also common and this was associated with an inability to access goods and services that households needed to address other problems. For example, lack of cash prevented households from buying fertilizers or replacing the oxen they lost to diseases. Confronted with multiple and simultaneous challenges, households coped by drawing on more readily accessible capital assets in order to address a lack. This process is here referred to as capital asset substitution. The findings indicate that when households liquidate a physical asset in order to gain cash which they then use to address other challenges, the common outcome is an erosion of their capital asset base. Many households reported having to sell their livestock to buy fertilizers, as required by the government, without seeing an increase in their harvest. The same process of liquidating capital asset to purchase food particularly during the lean season, also led to erosion of capital assets. On the other hand, when households drew on their social capital to address the challenges, they tended to maintain their capital asset base. The local didaro system is one such example in which farming households with adjacent farm fields synchronize their cropping timing and pool their labor together to address the problem of wild animal pests. Human capital, for example, in the form of available labor was also important for coping. Protecting and enhancing natural capital is needed to strengthen the basis of livelihoods in the study area, and maintaining social and human capitals is important to enable farming households to cope with challenges without eroding their capital asset base. Smallholder farming in southwest Ethiopia is embedded in a social context that creates differentiated challenges and opportunities amongst people. Gender is an axis of social differentiation on which many of the differences are based. Since the coming into power of the currently ruling Ethiopian political coalition, important policy reforms have been put in place to empower women. This includes the formal requirement that wives’ names are included in land certificates. Local residents reported notable changes related to gender in the last ten years. To make sense of the changes, we adapted the leverage points concept which identifies places to intervene in a system with different depths and effectiveness for changing the trajectory of a system. Using this concept, we classified the reported changes as belonging to the domains of visible gaps, social structures, and attitudes. Importantly, changes within these domains interacted, suggesting that changes facilitate further changes. The most prominent driver of the changes observed was the government’s emphasis on empowering women and government-organized interventions including gender sensitization trainings. The changes toward more egalitarian relationships at the household level were perceived by local residents to lead to better implementation of livelihoods, and better ability to be food secure. The study offers the insight that while changing deep, underlying drivers (e. g. attitudes) of systemic inequalities is critical, other leverage points such as formal institutional change and closing of certain visible gaps can facilitate deeper changes (e. g. attitudes) through interaction between different leverage points. This can inform gender transformative approaches. While positive gender-related changes have been observed, highly unequal gender norms still persist that lead to women as well as poor men being disadvantaged. Social norms which provide the basis for collective understanding of acceptable attitudes and behaviors are entrenched in people’s ways of being and doing and can therefore significantly lag behind formal institutional changes. For instance, daughters in southwest Ethiopia continued to be excluded from land inheritance because of long-standing patrilineal inheritance practices. This impacted on women’s abilities to engage in smallholder farming in equal footing as men. Norms influenced practices around access and control of capital assets, decision-making, and allocation of activities with important implications for who gets to participate, how, and who gets to benefit. Landless men also faced distinct disadvantages in sharecropping arrangements where people involved often have unequal socioeconomic status. Processes that facilitate critical local reflections are needed to begin to change unequal social norms and transform smallholder farming to becoming more inclusive and egalitarian spheres. To more effectively leverage smallholder farming for a food secure future, this dissertation closes with four key insights namely: (1) Diversified livelihoods combining food and cash crops result in better food security; (2) Enhancing natural and social capital is a requisite for viable smallholder farming; (3) Social and gender equality are strategically important in improving livelihoods and food security; and (4) Institutions particularly social norms are key to achieving gender and social equality. Because the livelihoods-food security nexus depend on people’s agency in their livelihoods, this dissertation concludes that livelihoods should be recast as critical spheres for expanding human agency and that conceptual development as well as formulation of suitable tools of measurement be pursued.

Global climate change and environmental degradation are largely caused by human activity, thus progress towards a sustainable future will require large-scale changes to human behavior. Human-nature connectedness—a measure of cognitive, emotional, spiritual and biophysical linkages to natural places—has been identified as a positive predictor of sustainability attitudes and behaviors. While calls to ‘reconnect to nature’ in order to foster sustainability outcomes have become common across science, policy and practice, there remains a great deal of uncertainty, speculation, and conceptual vagueness around how this ought to be implemented. The overarching aim of this thesis is to advance conceptual and empirical understandings of human-nature connectedness as a leverage point for proenvironmental outcomes and sustainability transformation. In particular, the thesis attempts to assess the nuances of the HNC-PEB relationship by investigating the scalar relationships between where someone feels connected to nature and where someone acts proenvironmentally. This research was conducted through conceptual exploration (Chapters II, III, IV, and VI), systematic literature reviews (Chapter I and V) using hierarchical cluster analysis, and empirical case studies (Chapters VII and VIII) relying on structural equation modeling and two-step cluster analysis. In this thesis, the relationship between humannature connectedness and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors was investigated in a small microregion of Transylvania, Romania, where traditional relationships with the land and changing socio-economic characteristics provided an interesting case study in which to explore these connections. The key findings can be organized into three sections: Section A, which addresses human-nature connectedness and its potential for sustainability transformation; Section B, which addresses human-nature connectedness as a determinant of pro-environmental behavioral outcomes, and Section C, which explores the relationships between human-nature connectedness and energy conservation norms, attitudes, and behaviors. Results cumulatively suggest that human-nature connectedness is a multidimensional construct that requires greater integration across heterogeneous disciplinary and methodological boundaries in order to reach its potential for meaningful sustainability transformation. Results also highlight the critical need to adopt systemic approaches to understanding how interactions between human-nature connections, norms, attitudes, and behaviors are hindering or promoting sustainability outcomes. This thesis makes two main contributions to the literature: first, it considers the human-nature connectedness and pro-environmental behavior literature within a systems-thinking and VI sustainability transformation lens; and second, it extends the human-nature connectedness and pro-environmental behavior literature by investigating the multidimensional aspects of these constructs. Overall, these insights point to the deep leverage potential of humannature connectedness when conceptualized and operationalized as a multidimensional construct.