Adaptation to Social-Ecological Change on the Swat and Kabul Rivers of Pakistan

Rebecca Nixon, Purdue University

Abstract

Social-ecological change has driven rural households throughout the world to employ a diverse array of adaptation strategies. Social, economic, and cultural factors along with environmental changes have been widely studied as determinants of adaptation decision-making. Increasingly, scholars are also examining the socio-cognitive processes and the role of values in these decisions. Many have posited that adaptation to social-ecological change will necessitate tradeoffs of these values; however, little empirical work has been done to identify and examine these tradeoffs. We had three primary research objectives to address this gap in our understanding of adaptation decision-making. First, we identify how farmers and fishers adapted to multiple socialecological stressors in northwestern Pakistan. Second, we investigate how social-ecological factors, perceived changes, and perceived costs influence adaptation decision-making and adaptive capacity. Third, we examine the role of and tradeoffs between values in adaptation decisionmaking. We utilized a mixed-methods approach to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data to address these research objectives. Specifically, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with formal and informal community leaders, farmers, and fishers and 448 in-person surveys with household heads in communities along with Swat and Kabul rivers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Our data shows that farmers and fishers frequently employed environmental management and livelihood diversification to adapt to water stress and that communal pooling was often used to support these strategies. In terms of livelihood diversification, respondents frequently reported decreasing their reliance on fishing, entering the tourism industry, or migrating for labor. Environmental management often took the form of increasing agricultural inputs or changing water supply systems. Our data confirm previous work demonstrating that adaptation decisions are influenced by perception of social-ecological change as well social-economic factors such as age, income, and education of the household head. We further show that adaptation strategies vary across household structures in part due to joint families’ greater access to capital in comparison to nuclear families. In particular, we posit that high entry barriers to livelihood diversification can increase existing income inequalities across household structure. We found that values do influence tradeoff decisions. Specifically, time, labor, and finances appear to be expected and accepted costs of adaptation that respondents are willing to tradeoff in order to adapt. Respondents were also willing to go against friends’ and leaders’ opinion, however, the opinions of family members and tradition were less likely to be traded off in order to adapt. However, our data suggests that even these values may be traded off if necessitated by the intensity of social-environmental change. Our work also demonstrates how adaptation decisions and values that influence them are a part of multi-scalar processes. That is, households’ adaptations can be constrained or supported by processes occurring at broader scales (i.e., community, region, etc.) and the negotiation of value tradeoffs reflect the broader social-cultural context in which adaptation decisions are employed. Based on our findings, we posit that in addition to the identification of values, it is also necessary to examine values as they relate to one another, change over time, and are embedded in multi-scalar processes. This will allow us to more fully understand the factors that influence adaptation decisions and support more equitable strategies that align with stakeholders’ diverse values.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ma, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Climate Change|Agriculture|Aquatic sciences|Ecology|South Asian Studies

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