Social capital, risk preferences and adaptation to climate change in the Rift Valley

This project is closely related to the water quality and health studies I and several collaborators have been conducting in the Rift Valley. With a subset of the larger team (Bellemare, Paul and Weinthal), we carried out three rounds of surveys with 400 households living in 20 rural Rift Valley communities. These surveys were supplemented by two rounds of experimental games – to measure risk and ambiguity preferences, and trust – among male and female heads of household. We are using these data to study if and how households cope with the high climatic variability in this region, and its negative effects on agricultural productivity. Work by Tewodros Rango is also helping to document variation in water quality over time in these communities.

Main research collaborators:

  • Chris Paul; Erika Weinthal; Tewodros Rango (Duke)
  • Marc Bellemare (University of Minnesota)

Related Publications:

Paul, C.; E. Weinthal; M. Bellemare; M. Jeuland (2015). “Social capital, trust, and adaptation to climate change: Evidence from rural Ethiopia.” Global Environmental Change (Forthcoming).

Abstract: Climate change is expected to have particularly severe effects on poor agrarian populations. Rural households in developing countries adapt to the risks and impacts of climate change both individually and collectively. Empirical research has shown that access to capital—financial, human, physical, and social—is critical for building resilience and fostering adaptation to environmental stresses. Little attention, however, has been paid to how social capital generally might facilitate adaptation through trust and cooperation, particularly among rural households and communities. This paper addresses the question of how social capital affects adaptation to climate change by rural households by focusing on the relationship of household and collective adaptation behaviors. A mixed-methods approach allows us to better account for the complexity of social institutions—at the household, community and government levels—which drive climate adaptation outcomes. We use data from interviews, household surveys, and field experiments conducted in 20 communities with 400 households in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia aimed at eliciting trust and risk preferences. Our results suggest that qualitative measures of trust predict contributions to public goods, a result that is consistent with the theorized role of social capital in collective action. Yet qualitative trust is negatively related to private household-level adaptation behaviors, which raises the possibility that social capital may, paradoxically, be detrimental to private adaptation. Policymakers should account for the potential difference in public and private adaptation behaviors in relation to trust and social capital when designing interventions for climate adaptation