Project 2.2

This project studies cooperation as an adaptation tool. Through a comparative and longitudinal study of rural India, the project examines individual- and group-level initiatives that include associations, assemblies and farmer networks across regions and over time. The project will explore laws, trust, historical learning and local-level institutions to explain why we see distinctive forms of cooperative participation across regions and socio-economic groups. The project examines whether cooperative behaviour changed the sensitivity of cooperating groups to climate change in the long run. The results will offer new insights into the conditions that facilitated (or hindered) forms of cooperation among a key population group (farmers) and the role that this cooperation has played in managing challenges brought by climate change. This, in turn, will inform us about the importance of cooperation and the conditions that could facilitate it in other parts of the world affected by climate change, not least the Netherlands.

This project focuses on adaptation in response to climate change, with a focus on cooperation as an adaptation tool. Through a comparative and longitudinal study of rural India, the project examines group-level initiatives, including farmer networks, associations and assemblies, across India. It will particularly focus on the impact of access to economic resources, exploring whether access to resources enables or erodes cooperation. Additionally, the project will investigate laws, trust, social networks and local-level institutions to explain why we see distinctive forms of cooperation across Indian regions and socio-economic groups.

The project has lessons for a global audience. Climate change has altered the world’s agricultural landscape. Across the globe, seasons are shorter and extreme weather events are more frequent than a century ago. International organizations have stressed the importance of adaptation strategies to deal with the ongoing challenges these continuous changes bring to our ecosystem. By looking at adaptation in India, where climate extremes are frequent and severe, this project offers global learning opportunities and policy implications. Analysing adaptation in regions that have a long history of dealing with climate risk is a route to understanding the potential impacts of rising weather extremes in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

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 cooperative behaviour among farmers.
2. The construction and analysis of a new dataset on the types and number of organizations (associations, assemblies and others) that represent forms of socio-economic cooperation across rural regions. This includes a justification for why we should see these organizational forms as cooperation. 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 India 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.