CONSTRUCTION WITH BAMBOO AS A TOOL FOR RESEARCH-BASED SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT: A SUSTAINABLE LIVELIHOODS ANALYSIS

Bamboo is a natural building material that grows widely across the tropics and subtropics. It has been used in traditional construction for millennia and is now used in a growing range of innovative bio-based building solutions. Citing bamboo’s potential for carbon capture, promising physical properties and relative underdevelopment of the global bamboo industry, many projects and initiatives have been launched that aim to develop bamboo industries to support livelihood development. These projects use a wide range of implementation strategies. Using theory-based program evaluation based on the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, this paper focuses on three case studies from Costa Rica, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Each case study employs different strategies for research for social development and utilized the harvest, processing and manufacture of bamboo construction materials and products. First, a low-cost self-help construction project in Costa Rica is described. Next, a bamboo architecture community development project in Indonesia using participatory action research is analyzed. The final strategy uses community-based action research to develop bamboo-based prototypes of vertical greening systems in Nigeria. In each case study, bamboo is selected as an affordable and locally available material. The projects are evaluated using logic models and the core principles of the Framework. This paper demonstrates applications of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and other theory-based evaluation frameworks to analyze research-for-development and social projects.