Rural geography II: Scalar and social constructionist perspectives on climate change adaptation and rural resilience

Abstract

This report considers rural geography scholarship in relation to the field of climate change adaptation. While applied perspectives on the modelling and mapping of the potential impacts of climate change-related hazard events on rural localities continue to be an important research theme, more theoretically sophisticated and interpretivist approaches are providing more challenging understandings of the multi-scalar nature of climate change adaptation processes, from the micro-scale of the farm operator to the global scale of shifting climate regimes. Social constructivism is being deployed to critique taken-for-granted interpretations of the natural processes underlying regionally-specific climate change impacts, further broadening the ontological and epistemological lens of the sub-discipline. Rural geography continues to be a fertile sub-disciplinary field for theoretical and methodological experimentation.

Keywords

climate change climate change adaptation food security gender geographical scale social constructivism

I Introduction

As has already been well-noted, the predominant themes, concepts and methods of rural geography have undergone substantial transformation over the past two decades as researchers have continued to push the established ontological and epistemological boundaries of the sub-discipline by drawing on ideas and approaches from elsewhere within and without human geography (see, for example, Woods, 2004; Clout, 2007; Tonts et al., 2012). This increasing diversity of perspectives and approaches is perhaps no better illustrated than in the case of climate change adaptation research. As is highlighted in this report, there is an ongoing and largely applied concern to continue to model and map various climatic variable scenarios across potentially vulnerable regions and localities as a key element of climate change preparedness and adaptation. Simultaneously, though, a growing body of rural geographical research has emerged that, from a social constructivist and an assemblage perspective (see Lewis et al., 2013), challenges so-called ‘common sense’ lay and scientific understandings of the varied processes by which climate change is thought to be influencing environmental, socio-cultural and economic processes and their interrelationships within rural areas. In addition, and given the complex combination of forces thought to be driving climate change, researchers have drawn on the concept of (socially constructed) geographical scale to better ‘hold together’ the plethora of human and non-human entities involved in managing and adapting to climate change-related hazards. For the remainder of this report I explore recent rural geography scholarship in relation to this major theme.

II Agriculture, rural society and climate change adaptation

A central theme of the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel Report on Climate Change (Dasgupta et al., 2014) is the highly variable character of the current and likely ongoing impacts of climate change on rural environments and societies. Climate change is increasingly seen as an important driver of change across and within rural environments, but it is also still regarded as only one influence among many. There is also a growing awareness that climate change processes are having, and will likely continue to have, spatially specific impacts across urban and rural space (Woods, 2011; Meyer, 2016). Earlier scenario modelling exercises emphasized that global warming would produce new and potentially lucrative land use opportunities for some more favoured regions at the same time that it might well foreclose on or inhibit established land uses in others. This research hinted at the possibility that climate change might be both threat and opportunity, depending on location. More recent research suggests that a detailed understanding of how shifting climate regimes affect land use can only truly be gained through the development of heuristic frameworks that explicitly incorporate the influences of geographical and temporal scale. Central to this research agenda is a concern to locate the most basic land use decision-making unit – the farming household – within the warp and weft of a fixed biophysical landscape, highly dynamic climate and seasonal regimes, and the multi-scalar social, economic and regulatory institutional frameworks within which each farming unit now increasingly operates. Small-scale family farmers and farming families are still responsible for the ownership and management of the vast majority of agricultural production units and land, even if corporate interests are assuming an increasing share of production values and volumes and of land area farmed (Suess-Reyes and Fuetsch, 2016). It is on this multi-scalar interpretation of recent climate change adaptation strategies by rural land users that the remainder of this progress report now focuses.

1 Climate change adaptation in the global rural: Multi-scalar and behavioural perspectives

In many respects, this research is reminiscent of the earlier behavioural geography research agenda, with its focus on explicating the boundedly rational (satisficing) decision-making of the individual amidst an almost overwhelmingly complex and dynamic social, economic and physical environment (Golledge and Stimson, 1987; Walmsley and Lewis, 1993). Feola et al. (2015) commence from the position that farms – and farming households – both contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution but are also affected by resultant global climate change (also see Mehar et al., 2016). They propose a triadic schema in which farmer decision-making and behaviour is seen as essentially embedded within the highly localized socio-cultural, economic, demographic and environmental context of the kin-based household and the farm parcel itself (the decision-making model). Additionally, the framework incorporates forces and processes beyond the farm gate, including national scale macro- and micro-economic regulations and practices, together with global scale processes such as globalization and, of course, climate change itself (what they label cross-scale and cross-level pressures) (Feola et al., 2015). The temporal dimension constitutes the third component of their framework, explicitly seeking to capture the dynamism of the key natural, social and political dimensions surrounding but also inherent to the farmer decision-making process itself which, following the precepts of bounded rationality, is recursive rather than linear and marked by discontinuities associated with trial and error.

Their retrospective application of this framework to five case studies from central, South and North America, north-west India and the Philippines emphasizes the often path-dependent character of much farm decision-making and of farming practices. An overt concern to incorporate a temporal dimension into their framework allowed these researchers to identify farm management decisions that seemed sound and rational at the time that they were taken (e.g. increased irrigation usage in low rainfall years) but later proved to be maladaptive strategies due to, for instance, groundwater resources becoming depleted. Importantly, the testing of this ambitious schema against already completed and published research allowed Feola et al. (2015) to propose some design and methodological improvements for future climate change adaptation research, including greater use of triangulation, simulation modelling, and cross-comparative studies from the same or similar regions.

A similar attempt to situate farmer decision-making within the uncertain spatial and temporal trajectories of climate change can be found in Juhola et al.’s (2017) own triadic framework for considering Nordic farmers’ climate change adaptation strategies. Juhola et al. (2017) distinguish between the aim and degree of these adaptations, where the aim may be to: a) reduce the risk of climate change impacts; b) improve the ability of the farm operator to cope with a changing climate; or c) capitalize on any local potential benefits emanating from climate change. Drawing on Rickards and Howden’s (2012) research, Juhola et al. (2017) argue in favour of evaluating the degree of climate change adaptation in accordance with a tripartite framework that distinguishes between incremental (a largely path-dependent form of adaptive strategy), systemic (fundamental change to the functions if not the purpose of the enterprise) and transformational (changes to the orientation and purpose of the entire farming system) strategies. Through this useful schema Juhola et al. (2017) identified a broad range of on-farm adaptive measures that spanned the spectrum from, for example, avoiding unnecessary field tillage operations (incremental), to the abandonment of livestock raising (transformational), to the construction of ecological buffer zones around the ‘farm’ so as to reorient the enterprise around the provision of ecosystem services (i.e. wetland wildlife habitat). However, the majority of strategies fell into the incremental category, with farmers overwhelmingly concerned to secure the financial future of their business and property, whereas farm advisors were more focused on encouraging take-up of environmental management practices.

One of the truisms of the contemporary development studies and natural hazards literature is that climate change vulnerability and economic inequality are positively correlated with each other. Those nations and regions most susceptible to damaging climate- and weather-related hazards are also home to some of the world’s poorest populations. In such places, agriculture still forms a dominant share of regional economic output and employment, with subsistence production also significant. Consequently, severe floods, droughts and the like have sudden, dramatic and long-standing impacts on the welfare of local households and individuals. However, just as the physical environmental settings in which climate change adaptation strategies are formed vary spatially, so adaptation decision-making processes are cross-cut by a range of social factors and structures. In other words, risks to physical environmental hazards are influenced by pre-existing levels of social inequality, meaning that vulnerability to risk is unevenly distributed, socially and spatially (Cheshire et al., 2015; Meyer, 2016). The inexorable intertwining of climate change as an anthropogenic and environmental process, on the one hand, and its uneven social and economic impacts at regional and local scales, on the other, is now officially recognized in the Millennium Development Goals (Davies et al., 2009).

Drawing upon Shiva (1989), Chandra et al. (2017) explore the many ways in which gender refracts the impacts of and adaptations to climate change hazards and military conflict in their case study of Mindanao in the Philippines. Women in traditional agrarian societies inherit structured inequalities in their access to land, credit, markets, healthcare and employment, for instance, and therefore the consequences of extreme climate- and/or weather-related events are usually especially dire for them. Changed weather patterns, including more frequent and intense events, not only directly reduce crop and livestock productivity but can also provide more conducive conditions for pests and diseases to thrive, further exacerbating yield losses and negatively affecting human health. As Chandra et al. (2017) emphasize, though, in Mindanao climate change risk is exacerbated by the long-running and bloody conflict within the Bangsamoro between government and ethnic forces, resulting in further incidents of forced displacement, loss of life, destruction of crops and livestock and increased food insecurity.

In such circumstances, simple commodity producers typically redeploy their mobile household resources – chiefly labour and skills – to defend their livelihoods and/or adapt (Friedmann, 1978). Such strategic decisions have gendered dimensions. Women’s perceived greater relative mobility – a social construction borne out of the gendered division of labour on smallholder farms – is considered a household asset with female family members able to leave the farm and find paying work (i.e. reducing overall household needs while bringing in much needed capital) without negatively affecting the farm’s production cycle. As highlighted by Chandra et al. (2017), many Mindanao smallholder members were forced to seek employment in distant labour markets so as to remit funds in order to provide basic daily nutritional needs. More financially secure households used such remittances to continue their children’s education or invest in more sophisticated farm inputs (e.g. hybrid seeds). However, in the context of an increased exposure to climate- and conflict-derived hazards, and the consequent injuries and sickness that emanate from these events, women’s individual mobility was seen to clash with their reproductive and productive roles as carers and subsistence farmers/market stallholders respectively.

As Chandra et al. (2017) note, increased food insecurity at the household scale reverberates through to broader spatial and institutional scales within Mindanao. At the community scale, poverty and warfare disrupt the development of human capital – via the disruption of children’s education – and undermine villagers’ sense of cultural identity and place attachment. Local governments (and non-government organizations to a lesser extent) become caught in a powerful and vicious spiral of decline as dwindling revenues from continued poor agricultural returns intersect with dramatically increased expenditures on disaster aid and recovery missions. Mehar et al. (2016) similarly highlight the stark gendered divisions of labour in Indian smallholder households in Bihar, a region hard-hit by a series of severe droughts since 2009, and the similarly gendered character of coping strategies emanating from increased exposure to the risk of food and income shortages. In a region where nearly nine out of ten inhabitants are dependent on agriculture, and eight out of ten are illiterate, the capacity of local households to adapt through expanded investment in more sophisticated and supposedly reliable inputs is strictly limited. Nonetheless, landless farmers were more likely to invest in technologically-advanced crop management systems than landed farmers. Women’s capacity to influence on-farm coping strategies is hampered by the simple fact that over 80 per cent of farms have men as the sole decision-makers. Abid et al. (2016) also highlight the positive relationship between educational attainment, farm scale and the application of climate change adaptation strategies in the Punjab province of=Pakistan.

Lyle (2015) recalls earlier behavioural geography scholarship in his advocacy of a scalar-sensitive approach to understanding the climate change adaptability of farm households, local communities, regions and beyond. He particularly accentuates the fundamental role of the individual farmer – and her/his psychological and cognitive constitution – in the adaptation process, but situated within the simultaneously enabling and constraining socio-cultural environments in which they live and farm. In a similar vein, sociologists McGuire et al. (2015) explore the role of farmer identity in Iowa farmers’ receptiveness to rural soil and water protection policies. The concern to better understand the micro-scale decision-making and behavioural context of the individual farm operator/manager and household necessarily raises questions over the ways in which scientific knowledge on climate change, agriculture and the broader environment are produced and communicated to practitioners ‘on the ground’ and, moreover, how these agents interpret and act on such information.

Climate change, then, is actively reconfiguring the spatial and social distribution of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ across the globe’s rural societies, economies and environments. Thus, it would be a mistake to conceive of the increased risks and vulnerabilities associated with global warming as constituting only costs and impediments to the reproduction of everyday life. The search for more optimal social protection measures in order to better enable village- and household-scale adaptation to climate-related risks has triggered a wave of public and private sector innovation, encompassing a range of policies and practical measures (Davies et al., 2009). The emergence and geographical spread of index insurance into some of the most climate change-vulnerable nations provides a useful illustration of the adaptability of at least some global firms to develop bespoke products and market them to new and potentially profitable markets. Index insurance provides a means for ‘Global South’ smallholders to be remunerated in the case of climate- and/or weather-related losses. These farmers would otherwise be deemed uninsurable due to their lack of size and scale, non-ownership of land and, in the context of climate change, heightened risk to catastrophic events (Johnson, 2013).

In observing its rapid promotion and apparent acceptance, Johnson (2013) debates the social and economic benefits of index insurance. On one hand, she notes its capacity to protect the livelihoods of some of the most impoverished and politically weakest members of already relatively poor societies, and to potentially improve their productive capacity by bringing them within circuits of capital (e.g. microfinance) hitherto closed to them. Some index insurance schemes, backed by the World Bank and global agribusiness firms (e.g. Syngenta), promote the increased use of more knowledge- and capital-intensive farm inputs. Furthermore, given that index insurance pays out affected producers not on actual crop and/or livestock losses but in accordance with weather indices (i.e. records of extreme weather events) the burden of proof is removed from the smallholder. On the other hand, though, Johnson (2013: 2669) questions the moral dimensions of this ‘extension of global risk markets mediated through finance’ to regions and populations that are ‘otherwise weakly articulated [within] agricultural value chains’. She observes that index insurance projects are effectively another form of agricultural financialization in which smallholder subjectivities are reshaped so as to produce reliable financial citizens (Larder et al., 2015; Gertel and Sippel, 2016) and, hence, acceptable risks for global banks and insurance firms. Moreover, index insurance can be seen as a new ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey, 2001) for a global re-insurance sector facing stagnant demand in its traditional ‘Global North’ sectors and forced to seek new, if, higher risk, markets (Johnson, 2013).

As already noted though, the resilience of farming units and households is inexorably interrelated with that of broader social, cultural and economic institutions (Dasgupta et al., 2014; Cheshire et al., 2015). In the context of pre-existing socio-spatial inequalities, climate change-related hazards (e.g. storms, floods, droughts) are generally thought to compound local socio-spatial disadvantage. Given the relative increasing concentration of the elderly in rural areas in general, and in selected non-metropolitan regions and urban settlements in particular via a combination of numerical and structural ageing processes (Davis and Bartlett, 2008; Stockdale, 2011) there is justifiable concern over the capacity of communities containing high concentrations of aged to adapt to the climate change-related events. In this vein, Krawchenko et al. (2016) model the potential impact of storm surges on a number of rural communities on the Nova Scotia (Canada) coast, using the World Health Organization’s agenda on age-friendly communities as a guide. Krawchenko et al. (2016) stress that the individual experience of social vulnerability is mediated by a wide variety of environmental and other broad structural factors and, therefore, while the elderly may be regarded as a potentially ‘at risk’ social grouping, not all rural aged people necessarily fall into this category. Through their detailed modelling of two potential flooding scenarios in the Annapolis and Lunenburg areas of Nova Scotia to 2026, Krawchenko et al. (2016) highlight the inadequacy of current statutory planning frameworks to protect ‘instrumental activities of daily living’ (e.g. shops) but note the potential inherent in non-statutory processes, such as the Integrated Community Sustainability Plans (ICSPs) to facilitate successful long-term adaptation.

2 Climate change and more-than-human and humanistic ruralities

Consistent with more poststructuralist and social constructivist ontologies and epistemologies (Demeritt, 2002), Lehébel-Péron et al. (2016) compare and contrast scientific and lay understandings of the complex and multifarious environmental and social influences underlying a sustained decline in heather honey production in the Mont Lozére region of southern France. They find substantial congruence and complementarity between local apiarists’ accounts of regional environmental change and those of a wide range of scientific disciplines. From a more-than-human studies approach Phillips (2014) similarly highlights the fundamental but largely unexplored roles – from a social scientific perspective – of bees in contemporary agricultural production. A more dissonant perspective is revealed in Olive and McCune’s (2011) exploration of southern Ontario private landholders’ environmental and institutional knowledge, specifically their awareness of locally- and regionally-endangered species, of relevant legislation (i.e. the Ontario Endangered Species Act 2007) and of provincial incentives and supports to better facilitate protection of these endangered species. As encapsulated in their paper’s pithy title, Olive and McCune (2017) found amongst their respondents a mix of attitudes regarding local environmental management, broadly speaking, including a sense of wonder (love of the natural and cultural landscape in with the respondents dwell), ignorance (lack of awareness of locally-endangered floral species), and resistance (landowners unwilling to engage with the relevant provincial agency for fear of encountering more government regulation and control over private land).

While this progress report has thus far overwhelmingly focused on the individual farmer and farm household seeking to manage the actual and potential impacts of climate change as the scalar models and frameworks considered above highlight, land manager decision-making is also influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, by the social and cultural institutions of, for want of a better term, the community that the farm and farm household is embedded within. Peer networks amongst farmers have been shown to be important influences on decision-making and actual farm management while the expanding scholarship on alternative farm networks (AFNs) highlights the often necessarily strong local relationships between producers and consumers (Marsden, 2010).

Ryan (2016) highlights the powerful conceptual and practical insights that an emotional geography approach can shed on community-scale adaptations to climate change and its associated ‘natural’ hazards. Her analysis of the flood-prone town of Londonderry, Vermont, USA, and its residents’ conflicting perspectives on the relative merits of an adaptive planning and urban design strategy to better facilitate the town’s resilience in the context of the increased likelihood of extreme weather events, provides a useful lesson in: 1) the central importance of emotion in effective reasoning and public decision-making; and 2) the benefit of so-called subjective knowledge in a field that has hitherto been dominated by so-called objective ‘hard’ science ontologies and epistemologies. Ryan’s (2016) paper centres on a community consultation workshop in which ‘emotional-physical story-telling’ (EPS) is employed to elicit residents’ emotional connections to the river which flows through the town and various key infrastructure items. In the Londonderry case EPS facilitated the public expression of the community’s affective responses to important local sites and, relatedly, the future of their town in the face of climate change-related threats. Importantly, the EPS technique revealed how a sense of hope in the future of a place (i.e. a locality, an environmental setting and its people) can be fostered and practically acted upon.

III Conclusion

Recent rural geography scholarship in areas of climate change adaptation highlights that the sub-discipline remains a fertile field for theoretical and methodological experimentation. While applied perspectives on the modelling and mapping of the potential impacts of climate change-related hazard events on rural localities continue to be an important research theme, more theoretically sophisticated social constructivist approaches are providing more challenging and deeper understandings of climate change impacts, broadening the ontological and epistemological lens of the sub-discipline. Research is also increasingly sensitive to the multi-scalar nature of adaptation processes, from the micro-scale of the farm operator to the meso-scale of the planning authority, to the global scale of banking and insurance corporations and shifting climate regimes.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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