Exploring the temporal dimension of vulnerability: Farmers' coping response to the lower Yellow River's low-flows in 1991--1999.
详细信息
文摘
Water scarcity in northern China has been a topic of concern in China for many years, but the increased frequency and duration of "no-flow" events in the Yellow River in the 1990s created a flurry of recent activity in the academic and policy arenas. These no-flow events severely disrupted the supply of irrigation water for agriculture in the lower reaches of the Yellow River and posed a substantial threat to farmers livelihoods, which indicated the acute nature of the problem in northern China. Within a broader effort to assess farmers vulnerability to water shortages, this dissertation research addressed three research questions: How have farmers coped with irrigation water shortages resulting from a sequence of low-flows? How has farmers differential vulnerability to these shortages changed over time? How have the relevant institutions at different scales affected farmers differential vulnerability over time? Using an integrative framework of vulnerability combining exposure and coping, this qualitative research focused on coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies adopted by farming households in three villages in Shandong Province Ma, Ding and Xing). With increasing water stresses and other stresses from land degradation and lack of market access, farmers coping has evolved, expanding from one-time adjustments to long-term adaptations, and switching focus from securing reliable water sources to improving irrigation efficiency and diversifying on-farm and off-farm production. Examining differential vulnerability based on entitlements among villages and farmers showed that the poor and the rich used their assets differently and adopted different coping strategies, which resulted in a growing disparity between the rich and the poor. The entitlement mappings of water and land resources identified the most relevant institutions at macro, meso, and micro levels that have affected farmers use of resources and their coping capacity to water stress, and that have produced different sets of entitlements between the rich and the poor. This research provides a new case study of temporal dimension of vulnerability in the water shortages context. Theoretically, it emphasizes the dynamic component of vulnerability, incorporating the issues of multiple stressors and multiple scale institutional processes. In particular, it presents a different kind of coping sequence from that in previous famine study, in which multiple responses and strategies were carried out simultaneously, but this coping sequence reinforces the concept in development studies: farmers are managers of complex asset portfolios. Empirically, it offers helpful insights into managing vulnerability to water shortages, e.g., diversification and specialization are both important, developing village or township scale feature economy is effective, improving farmers water-saving incentives is necessary. Some recommendations to improve agricultural production and water management policies are raised, such as facilitating the role of community leadership and local innovators and removing the constraints on farmers adaptive capacities, such as: limited access to markets, technology, and loans； declining infrastructure investment； and fragmented and small-scale farming structures.