Rural institutions, social networks, and self-organized adaptation to climate change

By Harry Fischer, Ashwini Chhatre, Sripad Devalkar, Milind Sohoni
Environmental Research Letters | September 2021

DOI

doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac22bf

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Citation

Fischer, Harry., Chhatre, Ashwini., Devalkar, Sripad., Sohoni, Milind. Rural institutions, social networks, and self-organized adaptation to climate change Environmental Research Letters doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac22bf.

Environmental Research Letters, 2021

Abstract

Support for rural livelihoods to adapt to climate change is a top policy priority around the world. We advance the concept of ‘self-organized adaptation’ to analyze how long-term pathways of transformation come about as the organic outcome of farmers’ incremental and continuous responses to climate and other challenges. Through an analysis of four decades’ responses to changing climate conditions in an agricultural system of the Indian Himalayas, we show how several key policy interventions—institutional support for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge, investments in infrastructure, and strengthening of market linkages—have produced favorable conditions for successful, long-term self-organized adaptation to climate change. This has led to the transformation of an agricultural system specialized in apple production to one with a great diversity of fruit, vegetable, and food grain crops. We find that farmers growing these crops cluster into five distinct agricultural portfolios that reflect the constraints and opportunities that different farmers face, and which are patterned by interaction with rural institutions and household social networks. We highlight the role of distributed decision-making in shaping broader trajectories of systemic transformation, and we argue for the need to move beyond pre-defined climate interventions toward the identification of policy mechanisms that can support more effective self-organization over the long-term.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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Ashwini Chhatre

Professor Sripad Devalkar is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business (ISB). His research interests fall under two broad themes - agricultural operations and Non-profit and public sector operations. Within these thematic areas, he is interested in understanding issues related to supply chain management and how the interaction of operational, financial, and risk management decisions affect outcomes.

He teaches the core Operations Management course in the PGP programme at ISB, as well as, an elective course on Logistics and Supply Chain Management.

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Sripad Devalkar