Effects of Community Perceptions and Institutional Capacity on Smallholder Farmers’ Responses to Water Scarcity: Evidence from Arid Northwestern China

Yubing Fan,Zeng Tang,Seong Park

doi:10.3390/su11020483

Abstract

Community contextual factors including community perceptions and institutional capacity are among the key determinants in community-based water resource management. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework proposed by Ostrom is commonly employed to examine the outcome of common-pool resource management including water resources. However, community perceptions typically examined in behavioral economics and comparative community analysis literature are rarely incorporated in institutional analysis studies. This study draws on the IAD framework to investigate smallholder farmer communities’ responses to water scarcity in arid northwestern China. Adopting alternating multiple regression and multivariate regression models, this study conducts an empirical analysis using farmer survey data. The results show that the perceptions of water scarcity promote community actions in coping with water shortage. The perception of production risks encourages overall community responses, as well as farming- and irrigation-related responses. Communities with a stronger institutional enforcement are more responsive in taking farming-, irrigation-, and infrastructure-related actions, as well as having better overall responses. The analysis also shows that community interactional capacities and socio-economic factors may influence community actions to mitigate and adapt to adverse effects of local water scarcity. Our findings provide insights for understanding social and institutional aspects of rural farming communities toward sustainable response decisions to overcome water scarcity challenges.

Highlights

IntroductionNatural resources including water provide support for national development and economic growth, in developing societies
Central to rural livelihoods, natural resources including water provide support for national development and economic growth, in developing societies
All correlation coefficients were less than 0.3, and the average variance inflation factor (VIF) was 1.35 with all values within 1 and 2 (Table A1 in the Appendix A). This suggests no concern of a linear combination of other independent variables in the model, as all VIF values were less than the threshold value of 8 [74]

Summary

Introduction

Natural resources including water provide support for national development and economic growth, in developing societies. The efforts of community-based natural resource management to achieve sustainability are encouraged with increasing competition from commercial extractions of natural resources [1,2]. Rural communities’ capacities to effectively manage natural resources are motivated and regulated by physical, social, economic, and institutional incentives and constraints [4,5]. Water resources managed at the community level are no exception. Since the top-down state-led paradigm for water management faltered in the 1980s, variations of community-based approaches emerged and were largely considered for adoption in many developing nations [3,6,7]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion