Agency in sedimented situations featuring farmer experiences of climate disruptions in the Mekong Delta

Abstract

ABSTRACT Climate instability and devastation pose global threats to human security. Place-based approaches to psychology offer useful orientations towards situating people in time and place, and for advancing research into climate disruptions. Informed by assembling thinking, this article explores the emplaced experiences and emergent agentive responses to climate change among farmers in four sites in the Mekong Delta Region of Vietnam. In August 2023, 20 farmers (5 each from 4 communal sub-regions) took part in interviews where they emplaced their experiences of climate disruptions by drawing their farms, what had changed, and how they were responding. With government and cooperative support, farmers report building water levees, regenerating soil compositions, seeding alternative crops, and changing cultivation practices. These efforts are restrained by the share scale of changes, increased debt burdens, and resource limits. Findings foreground the importance of culture, interconnected identities and emergent agency in the assemblaging of, and changes within local farmscapes and continuing familial legacy place attachments in the region.