Vacancy

• MA/MSc degree in economic history; interest in, and ideally some familiarity with social psychology
• Interest in the topic of social cohesion and in collaborating in a broad research consortium with academic and non-academic stakeholders
• Strong interest in interdisciplinary research, including analytical and theoretical dimensions
• Professional competence in English 
• Experience in working with historical sources
• Experience in applying quantitative and/or qualitative methods is a plus
• We look for team players who want to play an active role in an inter- and transdisciplinary research community and training programme

Around the world, climate risks facing agriculture have intensified in recent years. The capability of rural societies to adapt to or mitigate the effects of climate change hinges on their capacity for cooperation. This project studies the historical roots of cooperation in rural societies faced with climate uncertainty. In the post WWII period, rural societies in Asian countries underwent a dramatic transformation. The introduction of new agricultural technologies increased crop productivity and rural incomes. At the same time, these changes reshaped economic, political, and social power in rural communities. They also exposed farmers to new forms of climate risk, contributing to variation in cooperation and conflict. Focusing on local processes during this period allows us to trace when and why cooperation breaks down or endures, and to assess the consequences for sustainable development.

Through a comparative and long run study of rural Asia, the project will investigate interactions between climate, institutions and cooperative behaviour. This will involve the collection of archival data at the household or village level to understand how local conditions and cooperative behaviour changes over time and across regions or countries. The project will analyse the drivers of cooperation through historical analysis, with additional insight from the field of social psychology that helps to understand cooperation at an individual and group level. By clarifying when cooperation succeeds or fails in historically climate-vulnerable agricultural contexts, the project offers lessons for climate adaptation in other countries around the world.

Concepts and Project Motivation

The project visualizes cooperation as a form of intergroup behaviour that affects groups’ sensitivity to changes in climate over the long term. Exploring adaptation through cooperative behaviours lends itself to integrating concepts and theories from social psychology, while tracking changes in cooperative behaviour over time enables the project to exploit the toolkit of an (economic) historian.

The project examines the historical-institutional context as well as possible individual- and group-level initiatives that include farmer networks, associations, assemblies and other  organizations in agricultural regions prone to weather extremes. It will include a particular focus on the impact of access to economic resources, seeking to understand whether (and how) access to resources enables or erodes cooperation as an adaptation tool.

We aim to examine these themes and questions through a comparative and longitudinal study of agriculture in Asia. The vast diversity in landscapes and social groups across regions lends itself to comparative research. The project will primarily examine historical sources from Asian countries tracing the onset of Green Revolution technologies and their impacts on climate risk and resulting forms of adaptation. These include administrative reports and archival materials from 1945 to the present day.

As with any historical project, the sources can dictate the scope of the project and naturally come with limitations. The available data and sources offer opportunities to explore long-run trends in the emergence and expansion of institutions and organizations as well as changes in degree and nature of participation. Social and cultural psychology theories offer directions on how collaboration between farmers may change due to climate change on the microlevel. Using the available data, the project explicitly explores both horizontal and vertical connections. It investigates bottom-up and top-down forms of organization and association.

Regional and Historical Setting

Across Asia, the Green Revolution led to intensified forms of agriculture and new human-environment relationships. This in turn necessitated bottom-up forms of resource-sharing within villages as well as top-down designed socio-political and economic institutions. This project will investigate how new technologies and new forms of climate risk led to different forms of institutional adaptation. Focusing on local processes through history offers a new perspective on cooperation and climate risk, including implications for sustainable development. The project will study resource-sharing among farmer networks at the microlevel as well as cooperation at the meso and macro level. 

How these dynamics have emerged, changed over time and affected practices (i.e., support for agricultural practices, regulations, laws) will be central to the analysis. The research setting is Asia from 1945 to today, offering several avenues of inquiry into the interactions between the introduction of new technologies, historically rooted but evolving socio-economic  inequalities, emerging democratic institutions, and farmer initiatives in the face of climate change. The large regional variation in cooperation enables regionally and temporally comparative research.

Innovative Aspects

Embedded in the project is an exploration of the unintended consequences of cooperation. In a tropical setting, farming is based on survival. Weather extremes have been frequent and are getting more frequent over time. Amidst these conditions, farmers make choices that could potentially assist in managing vulnerability in the short term while unravelling a greater societal vulnerability to climate change in the long term.

In this particular PhD project, we aim to compare agricultural practices and the types of cooperative participation across distinct social groups over time. The project thinks of cooperative participation as participation in cooperatively organized institutions such as assemblies, associations and farmer networks.

Conceptually, the project aims to study cooperation through the lens of economic history and social psychology. Exploring this topic from a historical perspective brings us new understandings of how adaptation strategies have changed over time and across regions and what has facilitated these changes. Bringing psychology into this discussion furthers our understanding of cooperative behaviour as an adaptation tool at individual and group levels by theorizing (and depending on the candidate’s interest and background potentially also fieldwork)

The project will contain five key components:

1. An integrative literature review which defines and integrates relevant concepts, theories and perspectives from economics, history and social psychology to determine how disciplines have viewed the determinants and functioning of cooperation and climate adaptation among farmers.
2. The construction and analysis of a new household or village level dataset on agriculture and climate risk, economic outcomes, and various institutional forms of cooperation. This includes a careful study of different levels of cooperation (or lack thereof) as well as the different institutional forms it can take. The project aims to construct this dataset using administrative reports and archival sources.
3. The construction and analysis of a new dataset on participation in organizations across regions in Asia and over time. The project aims to show the importance of cooperation as a tool of climate change adaptation. It also goes further and asks: Who cooperated and why? In doing so, it enables the more empirical testing of findings in point 1.
4. A qualitative or quantitative analysis of farmer networks outside organizations. Tracing these networks may not be possible through historical archival sources alone. Here, the project can supplement archival approaches with oral histories or fieldwork.
5. A comparative element, which is present throughout the project. The project can exploit regional variation in cooperation to explain what might have facilitated or held back cooperation. This includes an analysis of cooperation across socio-economic groups as well as across regions with distinct social and institutional conditions. It also studies cooperation over time, with a particular emphasis on the role of cooperation in changing the sensitivity of farming groups to long-run climate change.

We would be interested to hear from candidates from any of the fields mentioned above to explain how their skills could contribute to the design of the project as outlined here.

Huis, M. A., Hansen, N., Otten, S., & Lensink, R. (2017). A three-dimensional model of women’s empowerment: Implications in the field of microfinance and future directions. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 1678.

Vallury, S., Cook, N. J., & Nelson, D. R. (2024). Social inequalities shape climate change adaptation among Indian farmers. Environmental Research Letters, 19(11), 114035.