Research on Livelihood Capital and Livelihood Stability of Reservoir Migrants Based on AHP-TOPSIS Method

Reservoir migrants are forced to rebuild their livelihood systems as a result of land acquisition and relocation, and it is important to explore the advantages of migrants’ livelihood capital and how to promote livelihood stabilization and coordination of livelihood systems after migrant resettlement. This paper takes the migrants of the LJ Water Conservancy Hub Project, one of the 172 major water conservancy projects, as an example, and takes the sustainable livelihood framework as the basis, considers the environmental factors of livelihood, and adopts the AHP-TOPSIS method to construct the migrants’ livelihood capital measurement system, and measures the livelihood stability of the reservoir migrants by using the income diversity, the degree of natural resource dependence and the degree of income risk, and analyzes the changes of the migrants’ livelihood capital and the stability of the migrants’ livelihoods in different ways of relocation and resettlement by comparing them horizontally and vertically and researches the current status of their coordinated development of their livelihoods based on the coupled coordinated correction model. The results of the study show that: There were significant differences in the growth of the six types of livelihood capital among the three types of relocation and resettlement migrants, and the changes in livelihood stability behaved differently, thus affecting the status of their coordinated livelihood development. Migrants resettled into urban（market） towns benefit from the advantages of market town commerce and trade, transforming their houses into commercial storefronts to operate non-agricultural industries, effectively utilizing the advantages of experience and capital increment to promote livelihood stability, and the stability of their livelihoods after relocation is the highest of the three, with a better coordinated development of their livelihoods. For migrants resettled in centralized settlements, there are significant improvements in the livelihood environment, modest declines in natural capital, higher but not yet fully utilized human capital, fewer sources of income for migrants, reduced stability of livelihoods, and barely harmonized livelihood systems. Decentralized and autonomous resettlement migrants have an improved working environment, higher rates of human capital growth, migrants’ autonomy to take advantage of their strengths to improve livelihood stability, and livelihood systems that are close to primary and coordinated development. On the basis of this study, recommendations for the sustainable development of migrants’ livelihoods are proposed for different relocation and resettlement methods.