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Human Adaptation to Social and Environmental Change in Rural Communities of the San Miguel Watershed in Arid Northwest Mexico
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Lutz Ley, America Nallely
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The University of Arizona.
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HUMAN ADAPTATION TO SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN RURAL COMMUNITIES OF THE SAN MIGUEL WATERSHED IN ARID NORTHWEST MEXICO
by
America Nallely Lutz Ley
___________________________________________ Copyright© America Nallely Lutz Ley 2016
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
GRADUATE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM IN ARID LANDS RESOURCE SCIENCES
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2016
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by America Nallely Lutz Ley, titled “Human Adaptation to Social and Environmental Change in Rural Communities of the San Miguel Watershed in Arid Northwest Mexico” and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
_____________________________________________________ Date: 11/21/2016 Christopher A. Scott
_____________________________________________________ Date: 11/21/2016 Jeffrey M. Banister
_____________________________________________________ Date: 11/21/2016 Stephanie J. Buechler
_____________________________________________________ Date: 11/21/2016 Thomas E. Sheridan
_____________________________________________________ Date: 11/21/2016 Robert G. Varady
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
____________________________________________________Date: 11/21/2016 Dissertation Director: Christopher A. Scott
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STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotations from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.
SIGNED: America Nallely Lutz Ley
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people and organizations that supported me during my doctoral studies at the University of Arizona, and to whom I am very grateful. I should start by acknowledging the COMEXUS Fulbright-Garcia Robles Program that gave me a full scholarship to complete the first three years of my PhD program, between 2012 and 2015. During these years, I also received partial support from the Mexican Council of Science and Technology, CONACyT, and full support during the fourth academic year, 2015-2016. I want to thank Dr. Christopher A. Scott and Dr. Robert G. Varady for offering me a Research Associate position at the UA Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. I have had wonderful and exciting work years since I arrived in 2012, and up to the completion of this dissertation. Through this appointment, I received partial funding from the National Science FoundationCoupled Natural and Human Systems research program (DEB-1010495 Strengthening Resilience of Arid Region Riparian Corridors: Ecohydrology and Decision-Making in the Sonora and San Pedro Watersheds), the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI CRN3056 – Innovative Science and Influential Policy Dialogues for Water Security in the Arid Americas), and the World Water Council (Increasing Resilience to Climate Variability and Change: The Role of Infrastructure and Governance in the Context of Adaptation). This support was critical for conducting my fieldwork in Sonora, Mexico, and for other educational and professional experiences through my academic formation. My dissertation committee offered the intellectual guidance and moral support required to take this work successfully to its final defense. Dr. Chris Scott (Udall Center and School of Geography and Development), Dr. Bob Varady (Udall Center), Dr. Tom Sheridan (School of Anthropology and Southwest Center), Dr. Jeff Banister (School of Geography and Development and Southwest Center), and Dr. Stephanie Buechler (School of Geography and Development and Udall Center): my sincere gratitude goes to all of you. Other institutions that gave me financial and training support during my doctoral studies are the UA Institute of the Environment (Carson-Haury Scholars Program, Haury Program in Environmental and Social Justice, and the IE Travel Award fund), the office of Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs at the University of Arizona (Arid Lands Resource Science PhD Program, Global Change PhD Minor Program, and the Herbert Carter Travel Award fund), and also the Central Arizona Project that granted me an Award for Water Research in 2014. I want to thank especially those who offered me advice and help always timely and kindly throughout my program: Marylou Myers, Istvan Molnar, Sharon Megdal, Diana Liverman, Stuart Marsh, Barron Orr, Katie Hirschboeck, Julie Cole, Chris Cokinos, Anna Spitz, Tina Gargus, and Joan Lagasse-Long. Thank you all!
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DEDICATION
To the people of Cucurpe, Rayón, and San Miguel de Horcasitas No task is completed alone. You shared generously your time, knowledge, homes, and many cups of coffee. I hope to fairly reflect here your lives, challenges, and hopes. We are all the proud children of this desert.
To my parents You’ve always helped me to see how high I can fly, to believe in the great things I can accomplish, and to be humble enough to ask God for guidance when my wings are tired and my sight is short. I love you forever.
To my brothers and dearest friends Thank you for being there when I was in dark places and for celebrating with me during the tops. You make a world of difference. I am such a lucky woman for having you in my life!
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TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES............................................................................................................................. 9 LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................ 10 ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS ......................................................................................... 11 ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................... 13 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: A PERSONAL ROADMAP FOR RESEARCH ....................... 15 1.1.
Background ....................................................................................................................... 15
1.2. Why study multiple exposures and adaptation to global change in arid and semi-arid rural communities? ................................................................................................................................ 21 1.3.
The chapters in this dissertation ........................................................................................ 31
1.3.1. Addressing rural adaptation to global change in Mexico and the Southwest U.S. between 1990 and 2015 (Questions 1 to 3, chapter 2). ............................................................. 31 1.3.2. Adaptation to global change by agrarian and non-agrarian livelihoods in the San Miguel Watershed (Questions 4 to 8, chapter 3). ...................................................................... 33 1.3.3. Institutional mismatches and their effects on resources’ governance outcomes in the San Miguel Watershed (Questions 9 to 11, chapter 4). ............................................................. 34 1.4.
Contributions of this study ................................................................................................ 35
CHAPTER 2. BEYOND GRAINS AND CATTLE: A LITERATURE REVIEW ON LIVELIHOODS AND ADAPTATION TO GLOBAL CHANGE IN RURAL MEXICO AND THE SOUTHWEST UNITED STATES, 1990-2015 ................................................................................ 39 2.1.
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 39
2.2.
Double or multiple exposure of rural communities? ......................................................... 46
2.3.
Methods ............................................................................................................................. 52
2.3.1.
Data collection........................................................................................................... 52
2.3.2.
Literature analysis ..................................................................................................... 55
2.4.
Results ............................................................................................................................... 57
2.4.1.
Temporal, spatial, and conceptual distribution of studies ......................................... 57
2.4.2.
Multiple exposures and adaptation in rural Mexico and the Southwest U.S............. 64
2.4.3.
Outcomes and feedbacks: vicious or virtuous rural futures?..................................... 73
2.5.
Discussion and conclusions ............................................................................................... 77
CHAPTER 3. GLOBAL CHANGE AND ADAPTATION OF AGRARIAN AND NONAGRARIAN LIVELIHOODS IN RURAL COMMUNITIES OF A WATER-SCARCE WATERSHED IN NORTHWEST MEXICO ................................................................................... 85 3.1.
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 85
3.1.1.
Changing rurality in Northwest Mexico .................................................................... 85
3.1.2.
The Double Exposures and the Sustainable Livelihoods Frameworks ..................... 93
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3.2.
Study area .......................................................................................................................... 99
3.3.
Methods ........................................................................................................................... 101
3.3.1.
Sample ..................................................................................................................... 101
3.3.2.
Instruments and data collection ............................................................................... 103
3.3.3.
Data analysis ........................................................................................................... 104
3.4.
Results ............................................................................................................................. 105
3.4.1.
Livelihood profiles in the San Miguel Watershed................................................... 105
3.4.2.
Distribution of capitals among the livelihood profiles ............................................ 120
3.4.3.
Livelihood profiles and multiple exposures ............................................................ 146
3.5.
Discussion ....................................................................................................................... 160
3.6.
Conclusions and policy implications............................................................................... 165
CHAPTER 4. INSTITUTIONAL MISMATCHES AND GOVERNANCE IN THE SOCIALECOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF THE SAN MIGUEL WATERSHED............................................. 168 4.1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 168 4.2. Institutions and environmental governance regimes ........................................................... 172 4.3. Case study and setting .......................................................................................................... 181 4.4.
Institutional frameworks for governance of resources and development in the SMW ... 183
4.4.1.
Water governance .................................................................................................... 187
4.4.2.
Land governance ..................................................................................................... 200
4.4.3.
Agrarian productivity and rural development governance ...................................... 204
4.5.
Institutional mismatches and adaptive governance ......................................................... 206
4.5.1.
Organizational level-based institutional mismatch ................................................. 209
4.5.2.
Spatial scale-based institutional mismatch .............................................................. 215
4.5.3.
Formal regulation-based institutional mismatch ..................................................... 218
4.5.4.
Practice-based institutional mismatch ..................................................................... 223
4.6.
Discussion: is a “mismatched” governance possible? ..................................................... 227
4.7.
Conclusions and policy implications............................................................................... 231
CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS, POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS, AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS ................................................................................................................................. 233 5.1. For the broader public: advances in the understanding of rural adaptation.......................... 233 5.2. For other researchers: contributions to the adaptation theory and methods ......................... 236 5.3. For policy-makers: evidence-based policy guidelines ......................................................... 240 APPENDIX A- Household Survey ................................................................................................. 242 APPENDIX B- Producers’ Interview ............................................................................................. 246 APPENDIX C- Livelihoods’ Factor Analysis (SPSS Outputs) ...................................................... 255
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REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................ 258 1.
Primary Data Sources .......................................................................................................... 258
2.
Secondary Data Sources ...................................................................................................... 258 2.1.
Literature reviewed ..................................................................................................... 258
2.2.
Literature cited in the text ........................................................................................... 261
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. The Sonora and Yaqui River Basins in Sonora, Northwest Mexico .................................. 17 Figure 2. Conceptual elements of the DEF ....................................................................................... 49 Figure 3. Modified version of the DEF with explicit institutional change ........................................ 52 Figure 4. Procedure for collection and filtering of literature ............................................................ 54 Figure 5. Distribution of reviewed journal articles per year of publication ...................................... 58 Figure 6. Spatial distribution of adaptation studies in the region ...................................................... 59 Figure 7. Distribution of reviewed journal articles per the SESs analyzed ....................................... 61 Figure 8. Distribution of studies per exposure unit within the SESs................................................. 62 Figure 9. Number of studies that included each type of stressor/shock ............................................ 63 Figure 10. Number of studies that included each of the theory approaches identified ..................... 64 Figure 11. Water volumes concessioned in Sonora in 2014 and 2008.............................................. 86 Figure 12. The San Miguel Watershed and the Sonora River Basin ............................................... 100 Figure 13. Distribution of households among the Livelihood Profiles or LPs ................................ 106 Figure 14. An acequia to the north of the head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas .................... 124 Figure 15. Scores of stressors and shocks identified by households in the SMW .......................... 147 Figure 16. Scores of macro-categories of stressor/shocks identified by households in the SMW .. 149 Figure 17. Relative importance of stressors and shocks identified per LP ..................................... 151 Figure 18. Scores of macro-categories of stressor/shocks identified per LP .................................. 152 Figure 19. “Have you ever heard about climate change?” .............................................................. 153 Figure 20. “Do you think climate change is affecting your locality?” ............................................ 155 Figure 21. A pick-up truck carrying forage bales and a water container of one cubic meter ......... 157 Figure 22. “What do you and the people in your community do to adapt to these changes?” ........ 157 Figure 23. “What do you and the people in your community do to adapt?” (per strategy)............. 160 Figure 24. Acequia of “El Sahuarito” in the Saracachi river in front of Cucurpe ........................... 192 Figure 25. The Rayon Valley .......................................................................................................... 198 Figure 26. Governmental, private, and social actors across governance levels in the SMW .......... 199 Figure 27. Sign forbidding collection and/or hunting of wildlife in the ejido SMH ....................... 222
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Searching criteria for literature collection ........................................................................... 53 Table 2. Variables included in the review ......................................................................................... 55 Table 3. Strategies included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension .................................. 66 Table 4. Barriers included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension ..................................... 69 Table 5. Enablers included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension .................................... 72 Table 6. Outcomes included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension.................................. 75 Table 7. Features of the municipalities of the SMW ....................................................................... 100 Table 8. Collective land management in the municipalities of the SMW ....................................... 101 Table 9. Characteristics of survey informants ................................................................................. 102 Table 10. Households per LPs in the SMW municipalities and the total sample............................ 117 Table 11. Access and tenure of agricultural and grazing land per LP ............................................. 121 Table 12. Households cultivating food and forage crops per LP with agricultural land ................. 123 Table 13. Sources of water for irrigation among households with agricultural land ...................... 128 Table 14. Water rights and irrigation among households with agricultural land ............................ 132 Table 15. Demographics of the households and heads of households ............................................ 135 Table 16. Income composition among households ......................................................................... 138 Table 17. Membership in land collective organizations and local associations .............................. 143 Table 18. What makes a resource regime more adaptive? .............................................................. 175 Table 19. Characteristics of the main municipalities within the SMW ........................................... 181 Table 20. Governmental institutions and actors for resources’ governance in the SMW ............... 185 Table 21. Ejidos and Comunidades in the three municipalities of the SMW.................................. 201 Table 22. Institutional mismatches in the governance of resources in the SMW ........................... 207
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ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS CEA CEDES CICESE CONABIO CONAFOR CONAGUA CONAPO COTAS CPR DDR DEF DOF ENCC EPA GHG GWI IADF INDC INEGI IPCC LAN LDCs LGCC MCM NAFTA NAM NAPAs NCA OCNO PEACC
Comisión Estatal del Agua en Sonora (Sonora State Water Commission) Comisión de Ecología y Desarrollo Sustentable del Estado de Sonora (Commission of Ecology and Sustainable Development of Sonora State) Centro de Investigación Científica y Estudios Superiores de Ensenada, Baja California (Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Baja California) Comisón Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity) Comisión Nacional Forestal (National Forestry Commission) Comisión Nacional del Agua (National Water Commission) Consejo Nacional de Población (National Council on Population) Comité Técnico de Aguas Subterráneas (Technical Committee for Groundwater) Common Pool Resource (Recurso de Uso Común, RUC) Distrito de Desarrollo Rural (Rural Development District) Double Exposures Framerowk (Marco de Dobles Exposiciones) Diario Oficial de la Federación (Mexican Official Bulletin of the Federation) Estrategia Nacional de Cambio Climático (National Strategy for Climate Change) Environmental Protection Agency (Agencia de Protección Ambiental de Estados Unidos) Greenhouse Gases (Gases de efecto invernadero) Global Water Initiative (Iniciativa Global Hídrica) Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Marco de Análisis y Desarrollo Institucional) Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (Contribuciones Previstas Determinadas a Nivel Nacional) Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Panel Intergubernamental sobre Cambio Climático) Ley de Aguas Nacionales (Law of National Waters in Mexico) Least Developed Countries (Países Menos Desarrollados, PMD) Ley General de Cambio Climático (General Act on Climate Change in Mexico) Million Cubic Meters (Millones de Metros Cúbicos) North America Free Trade Agreement (Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, TLCAN) North American Monsoon (Monzón de Norteamérica) National Adaptation Programmes of Action (Programas Nacionales de Acción para la Adaptación) National Climate Assessment (U.S.) (Evaluación Climática Nacional- Estados Unidos de Norteamérica) Organismo de Cuenca Noroeste (Northwest Basin Organization) Programa Estatal de Acción para el Cambio Climático
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PROCAMPO PROCEDE PROGAN RAN REPDA RHA SAGARHPA
SAGARPA SARH SEDATU SEDESOL SEDESSON SEMARNAT SES SLF SMW SNIM SRA SRB UGRS UN UNAM UNEP UNFCCC URDERALES
(State Action Program for Climate Change) Programa de Apoyos Directos al Campo (Program of Direct Support to the Countryside) Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares (Program of Certification of Ejido Rights and Titling of Lots) Programa de Apoyo para Ganadería (Program for Livestock Support) Registro Agrario Nacional (National Agrarian Registry) Registro Público de Derechos de Agua (Public Registry of Water Rights) Regiones Hidrológico-Administrativas (Hydrologic-Administrative Regions) Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Recursos Hidraúlicos, Pesca y Acuacultura del Estado de Sonora (Sonora State Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Hydraulic Resources, Fisheries, and Aquaculture) Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación (Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food) Secretaría de Agricultura y Recursos Hidráulicos (Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources) Secretaría de Desarrollo Agrario, Territorial y Urbano (Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development) Secretaría de Desarrollo Social (Ministry of Social Development) Secretaría de Desarrollo Social del Estado de Sonora (Sonora State Ministry of Social Development) Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment) Social-Ecological System (Sistema Socio-Ecológico) Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (Marco de Medios de Vida Sustentables) San Miguel Watershed (Cuenca del Río San Miguel) Sistema Nacional de Información Municipal (National System of Municipal Information) Secretaría de la Reforma Agraria (Ministry of the Agrarian Reform) Sonora River Basin (Cuenca del Río Sonora) Unión Ganadera Regional de Sonora (Regional Ranchers’ Union of Sonora) United Nations (Naciones Unidas) Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico) United Nations Environmental Programme (Programa Ambiental de las Naciones Unidas) United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (Convención Marco de Naciones Unidas para el Cambio Climático) Unidades de Riego para el Desarrollo Rural (Irrigation Units for Rural Development)
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ABSTRACT
Climate change has varying effects across the world. In North America, arid and semi-arid regions are subject to creeping warming together with more extreme climate variations, decreasing precipitation, and decreasing river flows that risk livelihoods of human populations living in these areas, and push their capacity to adapt beyond known boundaries. Environmental impacts act together with effects of socio-economic globalization and challenges imposed by institutional and policy events. These multiple forms of globallydriven changes interact with local communities and produce winners and losers depending on their levels of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, as well as on the specific stressors and shocks affecting the livelihood resources on which they depend. Rural communities often are hot spots of global change impacts because many livelihoods depend on the community’s natural resource base, and in several cases, they are also subject to market fluctuations and crashes due to their participation in international chains of food and producer goods. They will face a larger burden of the global change impacts due to this multi-tiered exposure. The socio-economic and institutional changes affecting rural communities have also produced de-agrarianization of livelihoods. Diversified livelihoods based on extractive industries and manufacturing or urban-based jobs coexist with traditional small-scale ranching and farming. In terms of water and land access and use, the modifications in user sectors and necessities, combined with increased demand by social and ecological components of the watershed systems, creates more complexity of environmental governance regimes and institutions. The purpose of this research is to identify and understand how rural communities of arid Northwest Mexico—with reference to the San Miguel Watershed (SMW) in central 13
Sonora State—experience and respond to globally driven environmental, socio-economic, and institutional changes. The SMW is in a rapidly changing arid transboundary region, and exhibits a variety of institutional arrangements for land and water management, which makes it a case suitable for the study of adaptation in the face of global change. The study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies in three municipalities representing the upper, middle, and lower SWM. Rural households and producers, governmental agents, and local leaders were the participants of direct data collection, while documentary analysis and a broader literature review on rural adaptation in Mexico and the arid Southwest United States complemented primary data. The main contributions of the research are: 1) identifying multiple types of rural livelihoods and their importance in understanding adaptation to global change; 2) emphasizing institutional events and factors acting as both stressors and regulators in these adaptation processes, 3) describing how interactions between institutions can produce diverse governance outcomes in terms of access and management of resources for livelihoods’ adaptation; and 4) providing empirical evidence for improving adaptation policies in rural arid Northwest Mexico, and other rural arid communities of the world. The study also includes a series of findings and lessons regarding advances in understanding human adaptation in rural communities, contributions to the theory and methods of adaptation science, and policy guidelines based on the findings. Key words:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Rural livelihoods Northwest Mexico Southwest United States Water resources Adaptation
6. Multiple exposures 7. Global change 8. Environmental governance 9. Institutional mismatches 10. Adaptive governance 14
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: A PERSONAL ROADMAP FOR RESEARCH “… the stubborn persistence of millions of hectares under traditional farming is living proof of a successful indigenous agricultural strategy and constitutes a tribute to the ‘creativity’ of small farmers throughout the developing world” (Wilken 1987, in Altieri and Koohafkan 2008, p. 2)
1.1.
Background
This research is about people’s adaptation to multiple stressors driven by global change understood as the set of changes in environmental, socio-economic, and institutional settings that are happening on a global or planetary scale. The study focuses on the people that live in rural communities and share the ecosystems and resources of one of the most beautifully diverse and lively areas of North America: the Sonoran Desert region in arid Northwest Mexico.1 As a native to the area, and before starting my doctoral program, I was interested in understanding how people survive in such an extreme region as the Sonoran Desert and its buffer area, which, even if not completely desertified, has several limiting factors, especially regarding water and land. With precipitation between 250 and 500 millimeters per year (Hutchinson et al. 2009), arid and semi-arid areas of the world have historically been at the edge of difficult humannatural interactions. Environmentally and socially-driven water scarcity, degrading land resources, climate variability and extremes, hard-won food security, among other features, make these areas suitable only for very resourceful, resilient, and brave human groups
1
The Northwest Mexico region is defined by the Mexican National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO) based on ecologic and physical features; and it includes the territories of Baja California Norte, Baja California Sur, and Sonora; and partial territories of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango. http://www.conabio.gob.mx/conocimiento/regionalizacion/doctos/terrestres.html (Access: November 27, 2016). The Southwest United States region mentioned later in the text is the area defined by the National Climate Assessment (NCA) in its section on the Southwest (Garfin et al. 2013). It includes the territories of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.
(Tschakert 2007, Yila and Resurreccion 2013). Historical studies of this region have demonstrated that native peoples maintained very organic relationships with this harsh environment, which allowed them to survive over the long term (Radding 1997, Sheridan and Parezo 1996). In turn, these same conditions made it difficult for Spanish conquerors to advance colonization over Northwest Mexico, and this fact defined much of the post-colonial development in this region. As a young researcher, it is not surprising to me that the Mexican side of this arid area has attracted much academic attention. It has some of the most developed irrigation districts of the country concentrated in large coastal valleys. One of these—the Yaqui Valley— (see Figure 1) was the birthplace of the Green Revolution in 1950-1970, a turning point that would change the ways in which people, food, and the environment are connected. There, the large, commercially-oriented irrigation districts coexist with small-scale irrigation systems and small landholders’ communities devoted to ranching and subsistence agriculture in the mountainous zone of the Sonoran Basin and Range Province (Camou-Healy 1998). In addition to the coexistence of large commercial agriculture and small scale subsistence production, Mexico was the first country in Latin America to pursue a broad distribution of land among peasants through the creation of ejidos. Ejidos and comunidades agrarias are both forms of communally-based land access and administration. They are known as the “social sector” of rural producers. Sonora is one of the states with proportionally less land in the hands of the social sector and more private tenure. This situation produces social-ecological interactions different from those in more communallyoriented localities in central and southern Mexico, where land under the social sector’s production system is prevalent.
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Figure 1. The Sonora and Yaqui River Basins in Sonora, Northwest Mexico
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Additionally, we are the fortunate heirs of many endemic species of animals and plants. The Sonoran Desert is arguably considered the most botanically biodiverse of all the world’s deserts (Zolotokrylin et al. 2016). It also has a great variety of social practices, traditional knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and people—including several Indigenous Tribes (Sheridan and Parezo 1996; Spicer 1980, 1982)—and multiple nested ecological and social networks across boundaries (Scott and Buechler 2013, Weiss and Overpeck 2005). Climate change is expected to add an additional burden to the already challenging social-environmental conditions of the region. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014a) indicates that, at the global scale, every decade during the last 30 years has been progressively warmer than any other previous decade since 1850, and that between 1850 and 1985 there has been an average increase of 0.85°C in comparison to the average recorded temperatures. Although an increase of less than 1°C could seem negligible, for an arid region with extreme temperatures this can have very serious consequences. The impacts of warming are overreaching and affect every socialecological system important for human lives. Literature offers many definitions of units of analysis to study adaptation. In this research, the general approach adopted is that of social ecological systems (SES). These are linked human-natural functional structures whose capabilities to adapt –and to be resilientto stressors and shocks depend on the interactions between the natural and social elements constituting the system. These elements or variables interact across the temporal and spatial scales in which the SES is nested or embedded (Berkes et al. 2003, Walker and Salt 2012). The SES approach allows for integrated visions of the impacts affecting the system, the responses given to those, and opportunities to achieve continuity and survival. Although this
18
general framework can be difficult to operationalize in real-world studies, it is one of the most comprehensive approaches to human-natural interactions in changing contexts. The initial opportunity to study the San Miguel Watershed (SMW) from the point of view of adaptation and resilience of social-ecological systems came from my participation as a research associate in the project “Strengthening Resilience of Arid Region Riparian Corridors: Ecohydrology and Decision-Making in the Sonora and San Pedro Watersheds”, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Coupled Natural-Human Systems Program (NSF-CNH). As a research associate working part-time on this project at the Udall Center, I was offered complete freedom to choose any topic and area to develop my dissertation research. The San Miguel Watershed within the broader Sonora River Basin (SRB) were cognitively and emotionally very attractive to me since the beginning. The lower SRB is the place in Mexico that I call home. Hermosillo city, the capital of Sonora State, is just south of the geographic point where the Sonora river and the San Miguel river merge before reaching the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Dam. As a master’s student, and later as a research assistant at El Colegio de Sonora in Mexico, I learned the details, perils, and hopes of water resources management (and mismanagement) in Hermosillo, and the urban settings of Sonora and Mexico, so I felt that this knowledge and my research networks could help me to achieve a better understanding of the water uses and discourses not only in Northwest Mexico, but also in Arizona, and the U.S. Southwest. It is very interesting to explore how human beings can share an eco-region, while having very different management outcomes depending on their socio-economic conditions, and particularly, on their institutional frameworks. At that time, my targets were rural communities because, as a naïve young researcher, I thought I knew enough about urban water. By turning to the countryside, I would have “both sides of the coin.” 19
Now I realize that urban and rural distinctions are artificially constructed, and that what constituted a “romantic” view of the countryside—as depicted in social imagination, literature, and public discourse—has gone through very profound environmental, socioeconomic, and institutional transformations (Carton de Grammont 2004, 2009). Rural communities are not only a place of agrarian development, but they are closely related to urban centers, and are part of extended global chains for raw and manufactured goods, as well as participants in the sharing of cultural content, information, and communication, e.g., via Facebook. This fact changes in meaningful ways the structure and composition of rural livelihoods, and with this, the worldviews of rural people and the ways in which they connect to their environments and social-environmental resources. This must be incorporated in our approaches for studying contemporary rural communities and, most importantly, this should modify how we understand local human adaptation. I had started with water resources management, but as I was disentangling the huge ball of yarn that water itself represents, other topics started to appear, particularly those of livelihoods, adaptation, climate change, land tenure, and poverty. By then, I had taken a course on Anthropology of Rural Mexico, so I knew that natural resources constitute a complex unit, like a “package” that is subject to power conflicts and bargaining, which determine the shape of human development. It is true that devolution of rights to resource’s users is critical for adaptation in rural communities (Berkes 2010). But land access without interlinked access and rights to water and financial resources is useless in arid Northwest Mexico. So, I couldn’t draw a line around “just” water or “just” land, and this reasoning was supported by the responses of the participants in my research. The interdisciplinary repercussions of this decision were and still are huge. There is so much to learn about water,
20
land, rural development, and livelihood adaptation and governance in Mexico, that I just hope to have been wise and comprehensive enough in defining the scope of my study.
1.2.
Why study multiple exposures and adaptation to global change in arid and semi-arid rural communities?
In addition to the aridity component of the Northwest Mexico area, there is a constellation of rural communities whose conditions and social-ecological dynamics have not been comprehensively addressed in scientific research regarding human adaptation to climate change. This is an important gap for rural communities of the region, which struggle to access financial and natural resources, have lower levels of socio-economic and human development than their urban counterparts, and lack political and decision-making power to participate effectively in higher levels of governance of their resources. These combined aspects burden these rural communities with a relatively larger share of the social vulnerability associated with climate change impacts. Most of the rural poor live in areas that are resource-scarce, highly heterogeneous, and risk-prone, as those included in this research. Furthermore, “the worst poverty is often located in arid or semiarid zones, and in mountains and hills that are ecologically vulnerable” (Conway 1997, cited by Altieri and Koohafkan 2008, p. 5). My first step was to collect all the bibliographic materials that I could find in the physical archives and online databases of the University of Arizona, and the Mexican libraries of the Universidad de Sonora (Unison), El Colegio de Sonora (Colson), and the Centro para la Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo (CIAD). As I was collecting these materials, I kept discussing the topics with Mexican and U.S. colleagues, and thinking about the best ways to process the collected information. At some point after reviewing numerous
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books and articles, it became clear that I needed an organizing framework in which I could categorize each element and research finding of this literature. From my course in Adaptation and Resilience in Water Resource Systems, and the Global Change Workshop from my minor program, I learned several conceptual frameworks that could potentially help me to systematize the many categories and factors that were popping up as I advanced. I used a combination of heuristic tools from four well-defined bodies of knowledge that are described in detail in the following chapters: The SocialEcological Systems (SES) framework with emphasis on resilience and adaptation (Berkes et al. 2003, Ostrom 2009); the Double Exposures framework, focusing on multiple globallydriven ecological, socio-economic and institutional factors affecting adaptive responses, outcomes, and system’s feedbacks (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008); the Sustainable Livelihoods framework that deals with the combination of multiple capitals to achieve ways of living in socially and environmentally dynamic rural settings (Bebbington 1999, Chambers and Conway and 1991, Scoones 1998); and finally, the Adaptive Governance perspective, which is not a framework per se, but a collection of principles and diagnostic guidelines for institutional design to achieve adaptation, long-term resilience of social-ecological systems, and social equity in access and distribution of resources for adaptation (Folke et al. 2005; Ostrom 2005; Pahl-Wostl 2009; Young 2002, 2010). What I discovered from my early searches is that there are several groundbreaking works in Mexico and the Southwest U.S. regarding the ways in which human populations interacted with their environments and created rules to access, distribute, and use resources; but the majority corresponds to the period between the eighteenth and the second half of the twentieth centuries. Although these studies can feed valuable information into vulnerability and adaptation science, they are not explicitly aimed at adaptation of social-ecological 22
systems to global change, but at the interactions between human beings and the environment in arid Northwest Mexico (Camou-Healy 1998, Perramond 2010, Sheridan 1988). They barely used vulnerability and adaptation concepts, in part because these were uncommon until the late twentieth century, and used instead approaches from social or political ecology. This does not mean than vulnerability and adaptation ideas were not present in these earlier works, though. There also exists literature on famine, drought, and agricultural and rural vulnerability in Mexico, but the body of work tends to be theoretical or national-level analysis, rather than empirical investigations of specific communities (Appendini and Liverman 1994; Liverman 1990, 1999). This applies as well to studies on climate impacts or climate projections at the national or regional level that do not address specific adaptation strategies at the local level (Cavazos and Arriaga 2012, Conde et al. 2011, Gay-Garcia et al. 2006, Magaña et al. 2000). Another related body of knowledge refers to institutional changes regarding the agrarian reform and ejido land tenure in the second half of the twentieth century (Barnes 2009, Padilla 2012, Warman 2001), institutional decentralization of the water sector (Scott and Banister 2008, Wilder and Romero-Lankao 2006), as well as socio-economic liberalization in North America, and the impacts of these changes on agriculture and livestock farming (Camou-Healy 1998, Hewitt de Alcantara 1976). However, no explicit connection has been made between these socio-economic and institutional processes and adaptation of small-scale producers to broader environmental and socio-economic change. In the case of Mexico, this connection of multiple stressors is critical because the combined institutional changes in water and land management in the 1990s and early 2000s had important consequences on the capacity of small-scale producers to adapt to broader environmental and socio-economic change. Few more recent works have addressed these 23
connections in a comprehensive and empirical way; for example, Buechler (2009) looked at small-scale orchards’ production and gendered livelihoods in connection to water and land in the rural transboundary area of Magdalena-Imuris-Nogales; Cruz-Torres (2004), studied transitioning livelihoods in two ejido communities in Sinaloa; Vasquez-Leon (2009a) analyzed the combined effects of water and land policy on the capacity of small-scale farmers to adapt to drought in central and northern Sonora; and Wilder (2002) reviewed decentralization of the water sector and its impacts on ejido production in irrigation districts in Caborca and the Yaqui Valley in Sonora. A challenge in studying adaptation in rural communities is their changing nature, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Thirty years ago, a rural community in Mexico could be understood within the logic of agricultural livelihoods, related to both “modern” agriculture and “peasant” agriculture (Hewitt de Alcantara 1976, cited by Appendini and Liverman 1994). To be a rural habitant meant to be an agricultural worker in some way or another. However, the Mexican countryside has been experiencing essential changes whose general outcome is that no single rural community is untouched by a process of “deagrarianization” (Bryceson et al. 2000; Buechler 2009; Carton de Grammont 2004, 2009). Considering this, a model of rural adaptation focused primarily on agriculture—as has been the case for a major proportion of studies on the Mexican countryside—will underestimate the important role of industry and services in rural communities today. In the Southwest United States, with progressive urbanization and new federal policies regarding wildlife and grazing in public lands, rural communities are also experiencing new types of challenges. Examples of these are the acequia communities in New Mexico that are facing urban development, disintegration of acequia institutions, and more frequent droughts (Cox and Ross 2011, Cox 2014, Fernald et al. 2015, Mayagoitia et 24
al. 2012). Coles and Scott (2009), and Sheridan (2001) also refer to the competing land uses in agricultural and ranching areas of Arizona, in which pressure to subdivide land for residential and urban-based development, and competition for water, sometimes supersede the capacity of producers to keep their traditional livelihoods. Considering the changes that have been happening in rural locations, and the approaches developed by other researchers before me, my research interests deepened, but also diversified. For me it was unknown which of these lessons could improve our understanding of adaptation at the local scale in rural communities. I found in the Double Exposures Framework (DEF) a good departure point, because it assumes that people are not only exposed to global climate or environmental events, but to multiple stressors interacting at the same time (Adger et al. 2005, Eakin et al. 2014, Smit and Wander 2006). Global Change is defined by the authors of the DEF as the “collective set of actions or activities that are continuously or intermittently producing large-scale transformations” (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008, p. 33). An important clarification with regards to global change, and particularly to globalization, is that these processes are not “new”; globalization did not start in the late twentieth century. Economic, political and socio-cultural integration across nations, as well as global-scale events leading to great transformations, have been progressively occurring through the world’s modern and contemporary history. However, what is different about contemporary globalization is the rate, magnitude, and scope with which these events happen, and the capacity of social-ecological systems to keep up with them. Most importantly, Leichenko and O’Brien (2008) argue that “although processes of global change entail global-scale transformations, they ultimately emanate from and are shaped by local activities, actions, and decisions” (p. 34).
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This starting point permitted me to define the first set of questions guiding my research. RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
1) How have scientists working in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest United States approached empirical adaptation to global change encompassing environmental, socio-economic, and institutional changes? 2) What are the nature and scope of adaptive strategies of rural people in this region? 3) What environmental, socio-economic, and institutional factors hinder and enhance adaptation in these rural communities?
To answer these questions, I conducted a literature review on empirical studies of human adaptation to global change (encompassing environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change) in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest United States between 1980 and 2015. I decided to include articles published in this period because, even if my interest centered on the effects of socio-economic and institutional changes in the transition between the twentieth and twenty first centuries, literature indicates that many of the current trends in Mexico started before the entrance in force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the Mexican agrarian reform’s completion in 1992, or the water sector’s liberalization in 1989. However, I found studies on adaptation to global change published in academic journals only as of 1990. Another aspect that requires explanation is the spatial scope of the review. My original research questions included studies conducted only in Mexico. However, as the search advanced, the geographic distribution of the studies I encountered was skewed toward the humid south of the country, with little representativeness of the arid north. Furthermore, 26
the types of social-ecological systems most analyzed were predominantly coffee farms and small-scale maize farms, with very few articles on ranching systems. That was the main reason to expand the spatial scope to the Southwest United States, which shares more commonalities with Northwest Mexico than the south of the country. The explanation of procedures and results of this review constitute the second chapter of this document. While this review was conducted, I was developing the instruments for data collection for my own empirical study on sources of vulnerability and adaptation in the upper, middle, and lower San Miguel Watershed. Although the topics and contents of my project had already expanded beyond water resources, I kept utilizing the watershed as the analytical frame because of its social-ecological significance. Through the literature review, I identified common factors facilitating or hindering adaptation, as well as the nature and scope of the strategies utilized by people, and the main gaps in scientific knowledge on these topics. Then I utilized this information to complement the second set of questions guiding the empirical component of the research project:
4) What are the main environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors and shocks associated with global change in rural communities with reference particularly to the SMW? 5) What are the livelihood profiles that exist in these communities and how do these vary in their dependence on different types of capitals or resources? 6) What are the combined effects of global changes on the rural livelihoods in the communities of the SMW? 7) How do rural households with different livelihood profiles perceive and adapt to stressors and shocks in the SMW? 27
8) What policy lessons can be derived from the study of the SMW in terms of adaptation policies for rural communities in arid Mexico, and in the arid regions of the world?
From this empirical study, I discovered the diverse portfolio of livelihood combinations in the SMW and the large -and usually hidden- complexities that constitute the uncertain lives of rural communities. The procedures and results of this empirical study are explained in detail in the third chapter of this document, and the interviews were also input for the study on institutional mismatches presented in the fourth chapter. Data collection for the empirical component of this project required many hours of fieldwork through the summer of 2015 and spring of 2016. My field co-worker and I were out in the town of San Miguel de Horcasitas at the lower watershed one summer day of 2015, when Sonora had record-breaking temperatures above 120º F and the place looked like a ghost town. Fortunately, people were always up for the task and they generously shared their time and knowledge, showed me proudly their land titles or the products that they manufactured at home, posed for pictures and signed with suspicion the release forms (they were unfamiliar with copyright or IRB procedures), or even invited me and my team (my mother, and sometimes my brother) for a cup of coffee, some snack, breakfast, or lunch. While some researchers can fairly argue that my attachment to this place and its people could prevent “objectivity,” I think that the fact that I was a young Sonoran woman, who was given a scholarship “para estudiar con los gringos,” and work on my dissertation with my family as fieldwork mates, was precisely what created a sense of confidence in most of the participants. This and the appreciation that they were helping another Sonoran to achieve her educational goals. It also helped me that before my fieldwork, I had been conducting rapid rural appraisal in the watershed during 2015 with a one of our colleagues 28
at El Colegio de Sonora, and one of my student colleagues in the Arid Lands program. Also, I visited the town of Rayón several times between 2014 and 2016 with Stephanie Buechler as part of another study we were conducting on gendered livelihood decision-making by the youth, and with the team of the NSF-CNH project for conducting workshops with the ranchers during several years. So, I was not strange to the area and to these communities. Many times, I could feel people’s honesty, but some distrust in their tones and responses at other moments. I tried to conduct data collection with a strong sense of respect for people’s knowledge and recognition of their capacity to co-produce this research with me. I asked them how I could improve data collection, what types of questions they think should be asked, and what type of knowledge they would like to see coming from this. I could see how they enjoyed talking about their challenges, and how they liked some of the activities required in the interviews (see, for example, the circular calendars in the semistructured interview for producers attached at the end of this document). All these reflections are contextual for my study, but I expect to discuss them in the future. At the same time, I was aware of the value of systematic and rigorous scientific methods and clarity of my conceptual frameworks. More than arguing whether I was objective or not, I prefer to state here the conditions in which this research was conducted, and my personal position regarding the study area and the Sonoran people. Throughout the fieldwork, another feature that constitutes one of the axes of this research also emerged: the value of institutions in promoting adaptive capacity. Institutions are understood here as both the formal rules and frameworks for resources’ governance, as well as the socially shared practices regarding the access and management of these resources (Ostrom 2005, Pahl-Wostl 2009). Although I had planned to study social networks as key elements promoting local adaptation (Adger 2003), I decided to scale up the variable and 29
include several types of interactions within and between levels of governance and social organization. This would allow me to understand the outcomes generated from the institutions set for governance of resources, and the interactions between these institutions. This shift came from the responses of participants during the first part of my fieldwork in regards to the challenges in accessing material and financial support, the disadvantages in markets and commercialization, the lack of knowledge on regulatory frameworks and policy changes, and the complaints about the discretionary and unequal access to resources that otherwise would help people to have more adaptive livelihoods. Therefore, this project was completed in an iterative cycle of conceptualization-fieldwork-reflection and reconceptualization. The last set of questions guiding the research were: 9) How are the governance regimes for water, land, and rural development structured across levels of social organization and sectors in the San Miguel Watershed? 10) How do informal institutions (socially shared rules and practices) for the governance of these resources interact with formal institutions (governmental and private frameworks) and what kind of outcomes do these interactions have? 11) How do these institutional interactions affect the adaptive capacity of rural producers facing global change in the upper, mid-, and lower San Miguel Watershed?
These questions were addressed in the last part of the dissertation, a chapter on institutional mismatches that produce outcomes with different degrees of adaptiveness in the governance of resources for livelihoods’ adaptation in the SMW. In the section below, I present a summary of each of the three chapters of this dissertation, indicating the questions each part was intended to answer, and the number of chapter where the details and results can be found. The reader will find in these chapters 30
detailed accountings of the theoretical frameworks and literature background. Contributions of these chapters and future research directions are addressed in the last part of this introductory chapter, and in more detail in the fifth chapter of the document.
1.3.
The chapters in this dissertation
1.3.1. Addressing rural adaptation to global change in Mexico and the Southwest U.S. between 1990 and 2015 (Questions 1 to 3, chapter 2). Chapter 2 presents the methods and results of the first part of the research. This is a critical review of empirical studies dealing with strategies to adapt to global change (encompassing environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change) in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest United States, 1990-2015. Published journal articles on rural livelihoods and social-environmental interactions in the region inadequately address concrete or empirical adaptive strategies. In this chapter, the Double Exposures Framework (DEF) was used to analyze 41 papers, from which information was captured, codified, and analyzed in a database built for this purpose. The database is available on request. This chapter identifies the spatial, temporal, and conceptual distribution of the papers; the adaptive responses, and the factors fostering or hindering adaptation; the outcomes and feedbacks derived from these responses; and the main knowledge gaps from the studies. Furthermore, I added an explicit institutional dimension to the DEF differentiated from the categories of socio-economic globalization and environmental change proposed in the original framework, because institutional and policy change is powered by social and governmental responses, which imply a restructuring in human practices through their regulation. Therefore, institutional change evolves in a different way than environmental and
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socio-economic change. However, institutional change is closely connected to environmental and socio-economic dynamics too, and it can be an adaptive response by itself. Institutional change cannot be simply subsumed within the category of “socioeconomic globalization” originally proposed by the authors of the DEF. Human institutions and shared practices (which are governmentally and/or socially driven) are qualitatively different from the behavior of markets and private spheres that drive socio-economic globalization. Institutional change needs to be recognized and treated as a separate category that interacts with other types of changes affecting these rural communities. Furthermore, in the three main chapters of this document, empirical evidence is presented to support the addition of institutional dynamics as a category conceptually different, since rural households recognized these factors as separated from climate or socio-economic events. From the analysis of these studies several gaps emerged regarding the nature and scope of empirical research conducted in the region, as well as the potential of the DEF to elucidate rural adaptation to global change. Future empirical research on adaptation in rural communities needs to address: 1) the increasing complexity of diversified rural livelihoods that combine urban- and industrial-based economic activities beyond the more traditional ranching and farming livelihoods; 2) a better integration of land and water policy factors and changes in understanding adaptation options in rural communities; 3) an improved understanding of the feedbacks that strategies have on the rural social-ecological systems in the medium and long term; and, related to that, 4) the development of empirical indicators to measure or evaluate the effectiveness of rural adaptive strategies and advance research beyond mere identification of adaptive actions. The first two gaps were targeted and addressed in the research presented in chapters 3 and 4.
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1.3.2. Adaptation to global change by agrarian and non-agrarian livelihoods in the San Miguel Watershed (Questions 4 to 8, chapter 3). Rural Northwest Mexico is going through environmental, socio-economic, and institutional transformations that modify access to land and water, and ultimately, the structure of rural livelihoods. These changes have not been fully incorporated into accountings of rural vulnerability and adaptation to global change. With the use of multiple data sources and methods, this chapter attempts to close some of the gaps identified through the literature review reported in the second chapter by defining livelihood profiles in rural municipalities of the upper, mid, and lower San Miguel Watershed. Through the combination of the modified Double Exposures and the Sustainable Livelihoods frameworks, this chapter focuses on the differential impacts of globally-driven stressors, contextual sources of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, as well as adaptive responses by people with different types of livelihoods in the context of global change. Livelihoods are understood in general as ways of making a living. Results indicate that differences between livelihoods depend on: 1) the type of social-ecological capital endowments each locality has; and 2) the level of reliance that livelihoods have on these capitals with varying degrees of geographical and institutional dependence. The livelihood profiles extend beyond farming and ranching, and are highly coupled with international and regional dynamics impacting the rules to access water, land, expertise, investments, and markets. Rural producers also experience differentially the deficiencies in access to productive and public services, and infrastructure for enhancing adaptation, and they count on different combinations of capitals to pursue adaptive strategies. The findings also indicate that broader educational and climate change knowledge coproduction and dissemination is highly necessary, and that policy making must be framed 33
within the components of global change that are significant for each type of livelihood profile. Finally, this study stresses the necessity to develop in both science and policy, new understandings of rural-urban interactions, rural economic diversification, and water and land issues resulting from globally driven dynamics.
1.3.3. Institutional mismatches and their effects on resources’ governance outcomes in the San Miguel Watershed (Questions 9 to 11, chapter 4). Scholars have identified features of environmental governance (the collection of institutions and actors that deal with environmental resources’ management) that enhance the resilience of social-ecological systems in the face of global change. Institutions (understood as formal and informal rules and practices) are critical since they regulate interactions between these resources and social groups, the level of exposure to stressors and shocks, and the human capacity to respond. Conditions that in this study are called institutional mismatches originate from the interaction between institutions, and act as traps in the development of adaptive governance of evolving SESs. Chapter four describes how documentary analysis and semistructured interviews with local producers, leaders, and governmental officials in the San Miguel Watershed, were used to understand how the horizontal and vertical interactions within and between governance levels and sectors, and across regimes for water, land, and rural development, influence governance outcomes. This chapter complements chapters two and three to emphasize the importance of institutions in achieving rural adaptation, and to identify and describe the problems that may arise in complex systems for managing natural resources and rural development in the context of global change. Through a mixed strategy based on previous literature on governance systems and grounded theory analysis, four types of institutional mismatches were identified and 34
examples detailed in the fourth chapter: 1) an organizational level-based mismatch occurring when institutions at the federal, regional, and local levels do not fit because their nature and scope are non-coincident, there are asymmetries in power and resources, and they lack the intermediate or bridging organizations that would reduce these asymmetries; 2) a spatial scale-based mismatch that happens when multiple resource regimes coexist in the same geographical space but they do not have matching focus areas, or the boundaries of action are defined in different ways depending on the regime; 3) a formal regulation-based mismatch originated in the incongruities among multiple formal regulatory institutions that are part of different resource governance regimes, and 4) a practice-based mismatch that happens when the formal institutions are non-coincident or do not organically integrate with the concrete practices and behaviors of people. Furthermore, the chapter identifies aspects of adaptive governance that are affected by these mismatches, and proposes some ways of reducing them. These mismatches undermine cross-level and cross-regime communication and collaboration, affect equity in access to resources and knowledge, promote contradictory results between development and conservation, or produce ineffective resource management in the long-term. Analyses indicate that adaptive governance needs to integrate in a balanced and coherent way the multiple formal frameworks at upper governance levels with the local practices and rules to access and use these resources through the creation of common arenas where all the involved actors across levels, sectors, and regimes can participate.
1.4.
Contributions of this study
The chapters that constitute this dissertation are diverse and sustained by a variety of conceptual approaches and academic traditions, which I think is one of the expectations of 35
an interdisciplinary doctoral program, such as Arid Lands Resource Sciences. However, they are united by at least three common axes, which also relate to the contributions of my study: 1) emphasizing the complexity of multiple types of rural livelihoods in understanding local adaptation to global change; 2) bringing back formal and informal institutional factors acting as both stressors and regulators in the interactions between social groups and their environments, and how they affect adaptation processes; and 3) providing fist-hand, empirical evidences and guidelines for better design of adaptation policies in rural arid Northwest Mexico, and -with caution- in other rural arid communities of the world. Recognizing the complexity of rural livelihoods is very important since most of the academic literature so far has focused on impacts and adaptation of agriculture, barely recognizing that agriculture is just one of the multiple elements that coexist with people and ecosystems in contemporary rural communities. The cognitive bias emerging from equating the rural and the agricultural has serious consequences: we have a gap in the understanding of vulnerability and adaptation of people who, although they live in rural communities, do not have agricultural lands, animals, or any of the traditional assets to pursue the livelihoods historically considered as “rural.” Because adaptation is essentially a local event, and a large proportion of the world population lives in changing (i.e., globalizing and urbanizing) rural settings, addressing this gap is critical. Second, bringing back formal and informal institutional factors to the analysis of rural dynamics resulted in interesting and more comprehensive approaches to vulnerability and adaptation. Although institutions have been usually considered as factors regulating the interactions between people and their environments, in the study of SESs they also have been identified as stressors by themselves, and this idea received empirical support in the three studies that form this research. What is more important is the conceptual differentiation 36
between “socio-economic” change and “institutional” change. This distinction may seem difficult to justify in the eyes of many researchers because “institutions” are also “social”. However, by putting them together in the same category, a lot of details are lost. This document argues that what drives socio-economic change is essentially different from what drives institutional change. The former is powered by social and economic globalization, market dynamics, the capitalism system, and information technologies. The second is powered by the changes in rules and frameworks created and agreed upon by social groups, which can be formal (as the government), or informal (as a group of CPR users). These changes happen through some form of decision-making and sharing of power, with the purpose of acting upon the natural and built environments. Another way to look at this separation is by reflecting on the world’s current environmental problems. Environmental change, and particularly climate change, is considered as a separated dynamic from socio-economic change in the DEF. However, it is difficult to argue against the fact that climate change has a strong anthropogenic driver fostered precisely by our socio-economic development and our intensive use and disposal of goods and resources. Then, why wouldn’t we put together socio-economic and environmental change in one single category? I defend this same logic for the distinction between the socio-economic and the institutional dynamics: they are part of different domains of reality. As scientists, we need a closer look on how these factors contribute or not to adaptation. The explicit emphasis on institutions helped me to understand the combined effects of water and land policies on adaptation; and the role of institutional interactions in promoting or hindering adaptive governance of livelihood resources. Finally, this research relied on a great richness of direct and documentary data sources that gave me enough empirical evidence to sustain robust recommendations for adaptation 37
policies targeting rural communities of arid Northwest Mexico. This region has not been comprehensively studied in terms of rural vulnerability and adaptation from the point of view of diverse livelihood systems, multiple interacting stressors, or cross-regime governance systems. I hope this dissertation and its derived outcomes will become a useful reference for future research in this beautifully diverse and lively area of North America.
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CHAPTER 2. BEYOND GRAINS AND CATTLE: A LITERATURE REVIEW ON LIVELIHOODS AND ADAPTATION TO GLOBAL CHANGE IN RURAL MEXICO AND THE SOUTHWEST UNITED STATES, 1990-2015
2.1.Introduction
Anthropogenic climate change represents one of the biggest challenges that human societies face during the twenty first century. Rockström et al. (2009) refer to climate change as one of the nine planetary-scale processes in which society has already surpassed the threshold that defines the “safe operating space” for human beings (they refer to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide -CO2- and radiative forcing as the key threshold indicators).2 The impacts of global warming on agricultural and water social-ecological systems are not evenly distributed across the world, but there are consistent observations that include -but are not limited to- changed precipitation patterns, melting ice and snow and altered hydrological cycles, geographic shift of species habitat, decreasing crop yields with notable effects on staple foods -wheat, maize, and rice-, and increasing extreme events that impact specially the livelihoods of the poorest and less prepared populations (IPCC 2014b). These impacts are critical because water and agriculture are the backbone of global food security, and essential to the basic living standards of rural communities that account for 46 per cent of the world population (United Nations, UN, 2014). The food-water-climate nexus pose wicked challenges for these communities, particularly in developing countries characterized by inadequate policies and institutions (Eakin 2005, Scott 2011). Wicked problems are issues with boundaries difficult to define; they are persistent and have no straightforward “correct”
2
For an explanation on radiative forcing, please refer to the glossary provided by IPCC, 2007, at https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-2.html (Access: November 30, 2016).
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solutions, single goals, or a well-known limited set of rules. These are issues on which people can have contrasting perspectives, all of them equally valid. Usually environmental policy and planning problems are wicked (Coyne 2005, Rittel and Webber 1973). Leichenko and O’Brien (2000, 2008) argue that in studying human adaptation, it is necessary to consider not only the effects of climate change or global warming per se, but the double exposures to two global-scale simultaneous processes: global environmental change, of which climate change is one manifestation; and globalization, which includes socio-economic, cultural, and policy change usually driven by economic liberalization. The interaction between these processes generate multiple stressors that elicit different types of responses by human populations, depending on their assets, and the ecological and socioinstitutional conditions operating at the several scales in which they are embedded. For example, low prices in international markets for an agricultural product can combine with low yields due to a pest outbreak and the lack of water, and pose novel and complex challenges for a rural community dependent on commercial agriculture of this product. However novel or wicked these combined challenges are, rural people are not passive subjects. Literature has evidenced the high variety and creativity of responses to both components of global change (environmental-climatic and socio-economic) from rural communities engaged with small-scale ranching and farming (Altieri and Nicholls 2013). When talking about the climatic component of change, these responses are generally grouped in mitigation and adaptation actions. Mitigation is any technological, managerial, or social organizational measure intended to prevent or reduce greenhouse gases’ (GHG) emissions and concentrations, and therefore to reduce warming (United Nations Environment
40
Programme, UNEP 2015).3 Meanwhile, adaptation is defined as the “adjustment of socialecological systems in response to actual, perceived, or expected environmental changes and their impacts” (Janssen and Ostrom 2006, 237). Although these actions are assumed to be exclusively climate or environment related, empirical research demonstrates that people exhibit complex adaptations to several events at the same time, and it is difficult to distinguish separated dynamics (Adger et al. 2005; Harmer and Rahman 2014; Smit and Wandel 2006). There is also a recognition of the capacity of local peoples to produce these events too, and to become more active agents in the generation of both, stressors and contextual conditions facilitating or hindering adaptation, not only as passive “respondents” to external events. This is the main reason the present study inquiries about interactive rural adaptation to double or multiple exposures instead of only focusing on adaptation to climate change seen as an external event (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008). As a concept, adaptation has been given many different classifications and operational definitions in scientific studies (Smit et al. 2000). Autonomous when it is driven by communities without external interventions, or planned when there are deliberate actions by the government or other organizations towards this goal (Leclère et al. 2013); reactive when it happens after a stressor or shock, or proactive when it happens as a preparation before the stressor or shock (Eakin 2005); and long-term or short-term depending on the time horizon of the adaptive actions and their effects (Boomiraj et al. 2010; Vásquez-León 2009). The IPCC has summarized the experience on adaptation across the world in its Assessment Reports (IPCC 2014a), and also the United Nations Framework Convention for
3
Available at: http://www.unep.org/climatechange/mitigation/ (Access: November 30, 2016).
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Climate Change (UNFCCC) has developed databases on adaptive actions in many countries.4 During the last decade there is also an emergence of review studies on adaptation in critical sectors, such as health (Cheng and Berry 2013), agriculture and farming (Boomiraj et al. 2010, Harmer and Rahman 2014), and cities (Hunt and Watkiss 2011). These studies are characterized by their reference to specific local or regional geographies because adaptation strategies, as a set of observable responses, depend on the opportunities and constraints posed by the physical environment, as well as the social-institutional dynamics that are site-specific. Whatever is the type of adaptation occurring, the understanding of what fosters or hinders it at local levels is crucial in achieving continuity of a rural SES (such as a rural watershed, or a farming community), or in transitioning it to a more sustainable state. The objective of this chapter is to critically review the findings of scientific journal articles on human adaptation to global change in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest United States between 1990 and 2015. This study aims to address the gaps that exist in the empirical scientific knowledge on adaptation to global change in these rural communities; how these studies have conceptually approached rural adaptation; what people do for adapting to multiple changes; what are the critical variables facilitating or hindering these adaptation processes; and what outcomes and feedback cycles can be expected in the future considering creeping and sudden global changes. The analysis of these elements can give some directions in terms of knowledge gaps in the existing literature on this topic. Mexico and the Southwest U.S. are hotspots for climate change in North America. It is projected that the region will experience longer and hotter summer heat waves, decreased average precipitation, declines in river flows and soil moisture, more severe and frequent
4
UNFCCC. 2016. Adaptation Knowledge Resources- Databases. Available at: http://unfccc.int/adaptation/knowledge_resources/databases/items/6996.php (Access: November 30, 2016).
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droughts, and more extreme floods in some areas while decreasing in others (Overpeck et al. 2013). For the rest of the Mexican regions there are few updated systematic climate projections. Those that exist are compiled or conducted mostly at the Center of Atmospheric Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Center of Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Baja California (CICESE). A study published in 2000 concluded that moderate temperature changes could be expected with big impacts on precipitation patterns, but different levels of confidence (and high uncertainty) over 18 climatic regions in Mexico (Magaña et al. 2000). Another more recent study indicated that precipitation in the North American Monsoon (NAM) region, which roughly includes Northwest Mexico and a big portion of the Southwest U.S., could be weakened by 20 per cent during winter, spring, and summer. After 2050, a significant reduction of precipitation is expected in the area (Cavazos and Arriaga 2012). Projections indicate that livelihoods in rural communities engaged in agricultural and mixed rural-urban activities could be highly compromised due to these changes. Second, the papers reviewed include the U.S.-Mexico transboundary region, which is one of the most distinctive border regions in the world because of its ecological, economic, and social interlinkages (Lee 1995, Lopez-Hoffman et al. 2009, Varady and Ward 2009). The area concentrates 14 million people living in complex twin urban centers known as “borderplex cities” (Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources in Mexico, SEMARNAT 2013). With the entering in force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the number of manufacturing plants increased in 65 per cent between 1990 and 2006, with 80 per cent of them installed in Mexico. The borderplex cities (San Diego-Tijuana, Ambos Nogales, El Paso-Ciudad Juarez, Ambos Laredos, and Brownsville–Matamoros) will disproportionately 43
suffer the added impacts of global change on their already challenged social-ecological systems (Overpeck et al. 2013, Wilder et al. 2012). In this study, several papers focused on this area are also included. Finally, most of the adaptation efforts have been devoted to urban conglomerations, although rural centers still concentrate around 46 per cent of the world population (UN 2014). A fifth of the Mexican people live in rural communities (INEGI 2010, World Bank 2015), while in the Southwest United States, less than 10 per cent of the population remains in rural communities and villages (US Census Bureau 2010, World Bank 2015). Although a smaller proportion of the Mexican and Southwest U.S. populations live in rural communities, these have kept growing in absolute terms. Beyond that, these are the caretakers of natural resources, especially the catchment areas of the most important limiting resource in this rapidly urbanizing arid region of the world: water. Comprehensive study of rural adaptation to global change has been relatively neglected, probably because the rural has been equated to the agricultural, which today is only partially true (Bebbington 1999, Bryceson et al. 2000, Buechler 2009). With broader policy and market changes occurring in North America in the late twentieth century (changes in legal frameworks for land and water management and market liberalization), rural communities have seen big shifts in their connection to the global markets and modern lifestyles (Buechler 2009, 2016a). The stark contrast between urban and rural populations at the beginning of the last century is currently blurred by a progressive urbanization of all spaces. Rurality can be better understood in a continuum of social complexity that include mixes of modern and traditional life, cultural and economic exchanges due to international migration, as well as interactive agricultural, industrial, and service-oriented livelihoods
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(Carton de Grammont 2004, 2009). Because of this, a comprehensive analysis of this rurality in transition is necessary to target adaptive strategies for rural communities in this region. From this literature analysis several outcomes follow: a) a digital database of literature on global change and adaptation in these rural communities; b) an accounting of adaptive strategies for rural livelihoods with particular attention to barriers and enablers of adaptation; c) a description of the empirical treatment and the categories of analysis employed in addressing these processes; and d) an identification of main knowledge gaps on adaptive strategies for rural livelihoods beyond ranching and farming. In doing this review a modified version of the Double Exposures Framework (DEF) (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008) was used as conceptual tool, independently of the approaches that the reviewed studies used in their own analysis. In the original inception of this framework, two main processes are described by the authors in terms of global change impacts and adaptation: environmental change and socio-economic globalization. Under the general category of “socio-economic” change, policy and institutional factors are included. However, in this chapter, the author proposes to widen the framework’s scope to include multiple exposures associated to three globally driven processes: 1) environmental change, 2) socio-economic globalization, and 3) institutional and policy change. The rationales of this are explained throughout the document. This chapter is organized as follows: the next (second) section introduces the Double Exposures conceptual framework that guided the review, and an explanation of the modifications regarding institutional dynamics. The third section describes the methodology of the study consisting on online database searches and building of a literature database for compiling and analyzing the studies. The original conception of this analysis was focused only on Mexican rural communities, but as the review was advancing, it was evident that arid central and northern Mexico was socio-ecologically very distinct from the south and 45
southeastern areas, dominated by studies on small-scale production of vegetables, maize, and coffee. Northwest Mexico is better understood from the point of view of higher aridity and large dependency on irrigation (in many cases, traditional irrigation systems coexist with large-scale, technology-based irrigation districts) (Banister 2010). Livestock farming dominates over food crops production in a similar way to how it does in the Southwest United States (maybe except for California, that has highly developed and intensive agriculture). It was necessary to include the studies on the Southwest U.S. to have a better regional understanding. The study utilizes the delimitation of the Southwest United States per the National Climate Assessment (NCA) as explained in the first chapter (Garfin et al. 2013). The fourth section presents the main results of the review focusing on the most common rural systems studied; their spatial, temporal, and conceptual distribution; the adaptive responses, enablers, and barriers to adaptation; and the outcomes and feedbacks derived from these responses. From this analysis, knowledge gaps and suggestions for future research are summarized in the last section.
2.2.Double or multiple exposure of rural communities? The Double Exposures Framework focuses on how global change encompassing environmental and socio-economic changes combine in different ways and have local effects that can be positive or negative depending on the pre-existing context of the affected localities and their capacity to respond to these impacts. Negative results include increased vulnerability, reduced adaptive capacity, loss of livelihoods, cultural homogenization, ecological degradation, human/environmental insecurity, and decreased quality of life in general. In the long term, all these results increase the gaps in economic inequalities and polarization, and make a social-ecological system less resilient overall (less able to resist 46
stressors without changing its functionality or identity). In this regard, the DEF makes a connection between vulnerability and resilience approaches with political ecology perspectives (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008). The double processes can also offer opportunities for different social groups or countries, such as better access to goods and services, higher educational levels, better interconnection between distant places of the world, opportunities to enhance human rights protection, sharing of knowledge on better adaptation strategies, among others. The idea underlying the DEF is that, due to the complexity of the interactions between global processes, the impacts, responses, and final outcomes of these actions can (and do) significantly vary across place and scales, generating “winners and losers” of global change. This framework was selected because the researcher’s experience from previous fieldwork indicates that a) climate change and socio-economic change have been happening in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest U.S. with local manifestations that are partially unknown, or have not been comprehensively considered in studying empirically human adaptation; b) these dynamics influence access to water and land resources, modifying the communities’ adaptive capacity through affectations on the natural capital available to pursue livelihoods, and c) no other research or policy effort regarding a review of studies on human adaptation to multiple environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors has been pursued so far in the rural communities of this region. The DEF has six main components (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008) (see Figure 2). These were used as categories of analysis for the literature review:
1) The global processes refer broadly to global environmental change (particularly climate change), and socio-economic change in the form of cultural, economic, and social 47
globalization, producing stressors (progressive affectations) and shocks (rapid events altering SES’s well-being) that affect communities.
2) The exposure frame refers to the geographical, social, political, or ecological delimitation of the space that is affected by the double processes. It can be a watershed, a community, a country, or an ecosystem, among others. The exposure units within that frame are social and/or ecological elements that receive the impacts, such as an individual or household, a plant or animal species, or other ecosystem elements.
3) The contextual environment is the set of social, economic, biophysical, technological, institutional, political, and cultural conditions that influence the level of exposure of the frame and the responses that the exposure units develop towards global change processes. In this literature review contextual elements have been classified as barriers (or elements increasing vulnerability), and enablers (elements increasing adaptive capacity), as indicated in the methods section.
4) The set of responses include all the decisions, behaviors, or policies developed by any of the exposure units with the aim of mitigate, cope with, or adapt to the effects of global processes locally manifested. As explained above, these strategies or responses can exhibit different characteristics (reactive, pro-active, autonomous, etc.).
5) The outcomes are observable or measurable effects of the combined global processes that interact with the responses to stressors or shocks. In the modified DEF model (see Figure 3) the outcomes have been relocated to better reflect their nature as products of the interactions between global processes and local responses by the exposure units in 48
the broader context of the exposure frame (larger rectangle around unit exposures) and the general context (the oval shape in the figure).
6) Finally, the feedbacks constitute the interactive connections between elements of the model (the arrows in both figures). Through feedbacks, the events or characteristics of one component can become a driver of events, characteristics, or results of another component across temporal and spatial scales.
Figure 2. Conceptual elements of the DEF. Source: Leichenko and O’Brien 2008, p. 39.
I utilized a modified version of the DEF (see Figure 3). Since early stages of the literature review it was evident that global changes include not only environmental change and socio-economic globalization, but people in rural communities are also exposed and respond to changes in the institutional arena. The original conception of the DEF included
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policy change and political power relationships as part of these processes; and several researchers have pointed to the importance of institutional factors influencing adaptation, or institutional factors acting as stressors, but these have been grouped within socio-economic change, and a formal category for institutional change has not been explicitly proposed (Buechler 2009, Eakin 2000, Eakin and Conley 2002, Eakin et al. 2005, Liverman 1990, Vasquez-Leon 2009a, 2009b). In this chapter, I argue that institutional change should be a separate analytical category in parallel with socio-economic globalization (market-driven), and environmental change (socio-biophysically driven). Institutional change (policy-governance driven) is defined here as the shifts in formal and informal rules and practices defining the interactions within social groups, and between society and the natural environment (i.e. access to and use of resources, response to environmental conditions including hazards, equity in distribution of resources and risks, and trade-offs) (Agrawal and Perrin 2008, Ostrom 2005, Young 2002). Institutional and policy change can be considered also as a global process connected to local interactions because international currents in conservation, adaptation, and mitigation have an impact on decision-making within countries and communities. For example, climate adaptation and mitigation policies have a strong international driver since the UNFCCC sets the general guidelines and directions for these purposes. Also, there has been an emergence of procedures and structures for governance of resources that involve more than one country, or even the entire planet, for example, Global Water Initiatives (GWI) (Varady and Iles-Shih 2009, Varady et al. 2008).5 This trend toward global governance -however benignly it is
5
Global Water Initiatives are broadly defined by Varady et al. 2008 as “institutional frameworks, organizations, special-events, and awareness-raising campaigns that focus on global water-resources management” (p. 20) (cursives added).
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intended- is increasing as the world becomes more interconnected and the scope and speed of social-ecological problems increase. It also means that institutions are progressively becoming globally determined, although they can also emerge and change as a product of global-local interactions, as explained in the fourth chapter of this document. In addition to the above, there is increasing recognition that socio-economic globalization affects the capacity of nation-states for governing natural resources and globally determined problems (Eakin and Lemos 2006). Traditional sovereignty of nationstates is made permeable as they participate in global decision-making arenas that require a commitment towards common goals (Held 1995, 2009). This modifies policy making and legal frameworks within the boundaries of countries and poses new challenges to the population. Also from the point of view of society and non-governmental institutions, the increasing interconnectedness have brought together international and national NGOs with communities that in the past were socially and culturally autonomous or relatively independent. This may have an effect in local practices too. In many of the papers reviewed, institutional change was created by social groups, but also stands on its own in eliciting concrete responses from rural populations. Further refinements to the DEF also include a specification of levels of analysis. These levels were defined inductively from the papers according to the most critical levels of the system where responses are occurring, or where contextual factors facilitating or hindering adaptation have most of its impact for the communities. Temporal, spatial and social scales are critical concepts in the framework because they define what is important and when it is important in terms of adaptation responses and their effectiveness. In the methods’ section, it is explained how these additions were operationalized in the review, and how levels of social organization are differentiated from spatial and temporal scales. 51
Figure 3. Modified version of the DEF with explicit institutional change. Source: adapted by author from Leichenko and O’Brien 2008, p. 39.
2.3.Methods 2.3.1. Data collection A systematic literature collection started in 2015 through the searching engines ProQuest Summon and Google Scholar. I applied several criteria to searches in both databases to make the procedures as similar as possible, within the limits imposed by each engine (see Table 1). I built more than 85 query sentences combining the root of concepts pertinent to the research: adaptation (i.e. adapt*, and so on with the rest of words), vulnerability, resilience, rural, climate change, farming, pastoral, livestock, agricultural, basin, and watershed. “Mexico” and “United States” were added to the query sentences in subsequent searches for gaining precision.
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Table 1. Searching criteria for literature collection Searching Criteria Period Type of material Language
Selection procedure
Use of query sentences
ProQuest Summon Google Scholar Papers published between 1 Jan. 1980 Papers published between 1980 and and 3 Aug. 2015. 2015. Peer reviewed journal articles. Journal articles in general. English language (occasionally Spanish language papers were retrieved by the searcher engine and included in the analysis). The first 200 results ordered by relevance in each of the searches were In each of the searches, the first 30 extracted through RefWorks provided results provided by Google Scholar by the library system of the university, were revised, contrasted with previous and titles and abstracts were reviewed selection in Summon, and those papers later to improve filtering. RefWorks not previously found were included in allows the managing of references and the general Excel database. basic operations, such as identification of duplicates and basic features of documents. The terms were searched for in the title The terms were searched for in all the and abstract of the articles. document.
Figure 4 describes the procedure for searching and filtering literature. The first search returned more than 3,000 papers with the search terms in the title or the abstract, indicating the broad distribution of these topics in the scientific literature during the last decades. However, many papers not addressing specifically adaptation to climate change were also included in this first group. For the second iteration, both the titles and abstracts of the articles were reviewed. A total of 390 journal papers was identified. Most of these studies were conducted in African countries and the approaches combine livelihood frameworks and economic and human development together with broader adaptation to environmental change (many of them focus on farming households’ responses to droughts and flooding). A third iteration was conducted to identify which of these studies corresponded to Mexico and the Southwest U.S. states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah). From this procedure 75 papers were identified, but only 34 were empirical studies dealing with concrete human adaptation to climate and socio-economic change in specific communities. Studies presenting only policy proposals, documentary/theoretical analysis, 53
modelling past, present, or future climate, or modelling people’s behavior with no reference to concrete communities were excluded.
Figure 4. Procedure for collection and filtering of literature
To guarantee that no critical literature was missing, the references of the 34 sampled papers (primary sample) were reviewed, and pertinent papers were reviewed. Seven new papers (secondary sample) were added through this snowball technique for a total of 41 articles. A database was built in Microsoft Excel to capture all the references included in the review, with fields describing general information of the papers and the six components of the DEF. The database is available on request. The list of the papers reviewed appears as a subsection in the references’ section at the end of this document.
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2.3.2. Literature analysis The analysis of literature was guided by the framework of Double Exposures. Each of the six components of this model was identified in the text and captured in the database. Later, this information was coded and classified according to the categories indicated in Table 2. The operational indicators for each component are not pre-determined, but were built inductively from the papers reviewed. For each component and indicator descriptive statistics were obtained, and graphics and organizing tables were created. The components of “context” and “responses” were further disaggregated per levels and dimensions. The level refers to the social level of the system where the contextual factor had maximum impact (for both, enablers and barriers), or where the specific type of adaptive response was more practiced, according to the reviewed studies. The levels analyzed were: the individual, the household/farm, the community/locality, the region/state, the federal/national level, and the international/global level. The dimensions are three: physical/environmental-based, social/economic-based, and institutional/policy-based. The dimension refers to the primary process or domain underlying the contextual enablers and barriers, as well as the adaptive responses, and they are related to the three global processes described before: environmental change, socio-economic change, and institutional change.
Table 2. Variables included in the review Field/Variable Year of publication
Description Year of publication of the paper
Operationalization in the Analysis Numeric value between 1990 and 2015 16 nominal categories were derived from the papers. An additional category was created for papers combining two or more of these approaches:
Theory approach
Theoretical approach(es) used in the analysis
• • • •
Vulnerability and adaptation framework Livelihoods framework Land use- land change approaches Double/multiple exposures/stressors
55
Field/Variable
Description • • • • • • • • • • • •
Global processes
Global environmental and socio-economic changes that have local impacts affecting the wellbeing and people’s livelihoods. These impacts are called stressors when they are progressive, or shocks when they are sudden.
Exposure frame
Geographical, socio-political and/or ecological delimitation of the space affected by the double processes of socioeconomic and environmental change. The specific units affected within this frame are exposure units.
Contextual environment
Integrated set of conditions that influence the level of exposure of the frame and the responses that the exposure units develop towards global change processes.
Responses
All decisions, behaviors, actions, or policies developed by any of the exposure units with the aim of mitigate, cope with, or adapt to the effects of
Operationalization in the Analysis Cognitive/information/knowledge approaches Social/psychological theory Perceptions on climate change, risk, and vulnerability Social-Ecological Systems Social networks/social capital Political Ecology approaches Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) Economic theory Gender studies/ Feminist political ecology Ecosystem services Rural sustainable development Environmental governance
Changes occurring at the local level that may have a global-scale driver: • • •
climate/environmental/variability economic/social/cultural/liberalization policy/institutional/government restructuring
Specific stressors and shocks driven by these changes were also identified. • State and country of study location • Exposure frame equated to the type of socialecological system analyzed: o Acequia system o Agroforestry o Biosphere reserve o Coffee farming o Small-scale ejido and communal farming o Irrigated wheat o Livestock farming o Small-scale rain-fed maize • Exposure unit identified: o Household o Farm o Community o Specific resources • • •
•
•
Elements of the context that function as barriers for adaptation (or increase the level of vulnerability) Elements of the context that function as enablers for adaptation (or increase adaptive capacity) Enablers and barriers were disaggregated by level and dimension All responses to the three types of changes in the component of “Global processes” and their corresponding stressors and shocks Responses were disaggregated by level and dimension
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Field/Variable
Description global processes locally manifested.
Outcomes
Observable or measurable effects of the combined global processes that interact with the responses to stressors or shocks.
Feedbacks
Interactive connections between elements of the model. Through feedbacks the dynamic events or characteristics of one component can become a driver of events, characteristics, or results of another component across temporal and spatial scales.
Operationalization in the Analysis
•
•
All outcomes were registered without classify them in general groups as done with strategies, barriers, and enablers. Outcomes also were disaggregated by level and dimension
1: The study makes a clear statement of feedback dynamics on the SES analyzed 0: The study does not make a statement on feedback dynamics on the SES analyzed
2.4.Results 2.4.1. Temporal, spatial, and conceptual distribution of studies No paper before 1990 was found for this region with the characteristics indicated in the search criteria. There are several books and materials published on the region, as indicated in the first chapter, but few of them focus on concrete adaptation of rural communities to environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change. In general terms, the number of studies dealing with these topics increased in the early 2000s. The maximum amount in one single year is a total of seven studies published in 2009. Two groups are notable in these years: one led by Eakin in southern Mexico-Central America engaged with coffee farming systems, and the other by Vasquez-Leon in northwestern Mexico-southwestern U.S. studying small scale ranching and farming.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
0
Figure 5. Distribution of reviewed journal articles per year of publication
After this, it is possible that studies keep a growing trend considering the IPCC’s call for better understanding of human adaptation processes (2014a), and the statement by global change and water researchers regarding the abundance of vulnerability-focused studies, and the necessity for empirical research evaluating “real” or actual adaptation and adaptive capacity (Lemos 2015 personal communication, Engle and Lemos 2010). In terms of geographic distribution, eight of the 41 papers refer to communities in Chiapas (see Figure 6). The second and third most frequent locations are Veracruz (7) and Arizona (6), respectively. Communities in Chiapas and Veracruz have been studied about coffee systems, and Arizona in terms of cattle ranching. Some studies included multiple locations, but those were counted separately. In general terms, 15 of the 32 states in Mexico, and three of the six Southwest U.S. states are included in the studies reviewed. This means
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that around half of the territory considered has some spatial representation in empirical studies of rural adaptation to global change.
Figure 6. Spatial distribution of adaptation studies in the region
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The larger number of studies in Chiapas and Veracruz is also related to the most frequently studied social-ecological systems (i.e. exposure frames). In this review, coffee farming in southern Mexico covers more than one quart of the papers sampled (27 per cent), followed by livestock ranching (18 per cent) and small-scale ejido and community farming (17 per cent) (see Figure 7). However, the significance of this finding can be somewhat limited considering the small size of the articles’ sample. There is overlap between some of the rural SES categories since coffee farming, livestock raising, and small scale rain-fed maize (15 per cent of studies) are also conducted in small scale ejido and community, in acequia systems (5 per cent), or in Biosphere Reserves that combine conservation with production systems (5 per cent). However, these categories were built based on the emphasis given by the studies to certain SES over others. In the case of coffee farming and livestock farming, these are more specialized SES than the nonspecified, subsistence-oriented, mixed maize and vegetables production in ejidos and traditional communities. Most of the studies that emphasized ejido communities focused on land tenure dynamics as constraints to production or adaptation, while papers with more specialized rural SESs focused on market processes affecting strategies, because specialized rural SES usually participate in global commodity chains. Maybe a better way of specifying the complexity of rural SESs in this region of the world is through a continuum with varying levels of subsistence-oriented, generic, diversified, and specialized or commercially-oriented production, but this is beyond the scope of the present analysis. The relative importance of coffee SESs over other systems can be connected to the economic importance of coffee for Mexico, since it represents one of the main sources of agricultural income from international agricultural commerce. The areas were coffee SESs exist are also subject to extreme climatic events very susceptible to global 60
warming, such as hurricanes, together with creeping dryness. Finally, the coffee region also concentrates some of the poorest areas in the country (Tucker et al. 2010).
Small scale rainfed maize 15%
Acequia system 5%
Agroforestry 10% Biosphere reserve 5%
Livestock farming 18%
Irrigated wheat 3%
Coffee farming 27% Small scale ejido and communal farming 17%
Figure 7. Distribution of reviewed journal articles per the SESs analyzed
The exposure unit more studied within each of the SES was the household (25 papers) (see Figure 8). This could be expected given the fact that studies concentrate on actual local adaptation, and many of them were interested in studying adaptation of livelihood systems, commonly analyzed at the household level. In two articles, more than one exposure unit was included (in one case, the additional unit was the genetic seed base of a community, and in the other it was the regional natural resources of the study area).
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30
25 25
20
15
10
8
7
5
3
0 Household
Farm
Community
Specific resources
Figure 8. Distribution of studies per exposure unit within the SESs
Figure 9 depicts the most commonly analyzed stressors. As could be expected for this region of the world, drought was identified as the main stressor in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest U.S., with 24 of 41 papers including this stressor. This was followed by market and economic stressors (23), and variable and extreme temperatures (21). Although drought and variable precipitation could be considered as similar events, drought has a very specific set of features not only related to lack of rainfall, but to changes in hydrology, soils, and vegetation (Velasco et al. 2005). A single factor can be considered a stressor or a contextual element depending on the focus and scale of analysis, and these were usually defined by the researchers in the papers reviewed. For example, policy factors were identified as stressors in 12 of the 41 papers; but in other studies, these were analyzed as part of the contextual factors facilitating or hindering adaptation to global change. The same happened with socio-economic and demographic 62
change (a stressor in three of the papers, and a contextual factor in the other cases), as well as with climate factors. For the purposes of this study, the fact that policy and institutional factors are identified as stressors in empirical studies support the addition of the explicit category of institutional change as part of the global processes in the DEF.
25
24
23
21
20
19
15
12
12 9
10
4
5
3 Socio-demographic changes, urbanization
Floods
Other environmental stressors
Policy and institutional regulations
Hurricanes, hailstorms and other meteorological extremes
Variable precipitation patterns
Variable or extreme temperatures
Market volatility, local and international prices, production costs
Drought , multi-year droughts
0
Figure 9. Number of studies that included each type of stressor/shock
Finally, in terms of conceptual approaches, the most frequent theoretical background in the studies reviewed was the vulnerability and adaptation framework (32 papers), followed by livelihood approaches (12) (see Figure 10). This could be expected given the local and empirical nature of the studies. However, the variety of approaches and coupled methodologies is notable, as well as the levels of interdisciplinary effort, since almost 70 per cent of the papers (28) combined two or more of these approaches. In the Figure 10, the theory approaches were counted separately. 63
35
32
30 25 20
12
15
3
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
1
1
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Economic theory
Gender studies/ Feminist political ecology
Ecosystem services
Rural sustainable development
Environmental governance
4
Political ecology
4
Social networks/social capital
4
Social-Ecological Systems
4
5
Perceptions on climate change, risk, and vulnerability
10
Social psychology theory
Cognitive/information approaches
Double/multiple exposures/stressors
Land use- land change
Livelihoods framework
Vulnerability and adaptation
0
Figure 10. Number of studies that included each of the theory approaches identified
2.4.2. Multiple exposures and adaptation in rural Mexico and the Southwest U.S. 2.4.2.1.Responses to stressors: strategies for adaptation/mitigation to global change Table 3 shows the adaptive responses identified in the studies. This is a cross table in which the columns indicate the dimension on which the strategy relies or is driven by (environmental-based, socioeconomic-based, or institutional-based); while the rows are ordered according to the social level of each response. Within each row and column, the responses are listed from the most to the least frequently included in the studies. For example, 14 studies included “Crop management/ improving cropping practices/ adjust cultivation timing and manipulate phenology”, and this corresponds to a physical/environmental strategy
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at the household/farm level. The next most frequent in this same cell is “Shift to more environmentally viable/resistant livestock or crops” with 13 studies, and so on. Table 3 shows a great variety of responses occurring in the rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest U.S. However, a closer inspection reveals that concrete responses are focused on the levels and dimensions in which rural people can exert more control, or in which they have more decision-making capacities: the environmental and socio-economic aspects of their own farms and households. As we move to higher scales, to more complex forms of social organization, or to more expensive endeavors, the number of strategies decreases (compare the amount of different strategies in the first column to those in the third one). These results support the idea that adaptation is a local event (Adger et al. 2005), and in these communities, it is also a low-cost effort in both economic and social terms. Overall, the most frequent strategy pursued by rural households is related to crop management (29 papers mentioned this type of response). For example, changing mixes of commercial and subsistence crops, planting higher value crops, or shifting to forage. These are forms of crop diversification. Crop diversification, as well as income or livelihood diversification (25 papers included it), and migration (20 papers), are pursued in response to multiple market, institutional, and environmental stressors. Several studies found that even if farmers and ranchers have been historically aware of environmental and climatic challenges, the priority in decision-making, or the most salient factors for livelihood decisions at the household level are economic and market related (Eakin et al. 2014). On the other hand, 13 of the 41 studies made explicit connections to environmental challenges as the main reason for practicing crop diversification (see first column in Table 3, where “shift to more environmentally viable/resistant livestock or crops” (13) was categorized as an environmental-based strategy in the first column, while “diversify 65
crops/ plant higher value or commercial crops/ plant forage crops/change crop mix” (29) was categorized in the second column as a market-driven strategy. If both forms of diversification were summed up, this would be the most frequent form of strategy. Results in Table 3 could be influenced by the abundance of papers regarding coffee production in southern Mexico. This can be seen in the little amount of papers that mentioned “partial or total shift from agriculture to ranching and livestock farming” (6), which is a more common strategy in the arid central and Northwest Mexico- Southwest U.S. Also, strategies related to ranching systems and water management were mentioned in fewer studies, probably because water is not such a limiting factor in southern areas as it is in the north. Notably, the communities in arid environments, where water is the main limiting factor, have a tradition of very varied and flexible agronomic practices that allowed them to keep agricultural livelihoods during droughts and extreme events, as indicated by Doolittle (1980), Sheridan and Nabhan (1978), and Radding (1997). As mentioned above, these strategies were not framed in the context of adaptation to global change, but in more disciplinary theoretical approaches, such as environmental anthropology, political ecology, or rural sociology. Some of these agronomic practices are still used by rural communities to face new types of complex challenges (Mayagoitia et al. 2012, Cox and Ross 2011, Cox 2014).
Table 3. Strategies included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension Levels
Physical/ Environmental
Temporal or permanent migration (20)
Individual
Household/ Farm
Social/ Economic
Crop management/ improving cropping practices/ adjust cultivation timing and manipulate phenology (14) Shift to more environmentally viable/resistant livestock or crops (13)
Diversify crops/ plant higher value or commercial crops/ plant forage crops/change crop mix (29) Diversify income/ off-farm employment/ tourism / remittances (25)
Institutional/ Policy Political engagement for improving access to resources (1) Look for governmental support and subsidies for agriculture/ livestock/ conservation (7) Rely on/improve local networks for obtaining help
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Levels
Physical/ Environmental
Social/ Economic
Institutional/ Policy (labor force) and economic or material support (5)
Change to water-saving irrigation technologies/ practices/ rainwater harvesting/water reuse (12)
Productive upgrading Participate in local (improve efficiency of associations and organizations production or improve the (3) product, i.e. organics or products for special niches) (8)
Improve soil quality through management and use of fertilizers (9)
Use formal or informal credit/loans (7)
Reduce livestock numbers (usually by selling) (7) Use irrigation if possible (6) Plant more area/intensify inputs and production (6) Land fallow or permanent abandonment/ move production to other areas (5) Build or deepen wells (5) Build greenhouses (5) Use genetically improved seeds (4)
Partial or total shift from agriculture to ranching and livestock farming (6) Buying supplemental feed/ renting pasture lands (3) Use of crop insurance (3) Buying/ hauling water for animals during drought (3) Home gardens to improve food security (3) Sell the land to urban and residential developers (2) Storage of forage crops for later use or selling (1)
Plant less area (3) Build spatially-distributed water storage systems/ improve water storage (3) Improve livestock management/ rotational grazing (3) Use natural shading for cooling and/or warming cropped areas (3) Manage amounts of inputs (3) Use traditional land management techniques (2) Infrastructure development for water supply and management/ continuous maintenance and investments (2) Get other sources of water (1)
Community
Switch to dry-land farming (1) Integrated pest management Develop community-level and surveillance (requires cooperatives for economic organization within more than support (3) one farm) (2)
Education on climate and adaptation topics/ better practices (2)
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Levels
Physical/ Environmental Improve local/communitylevel experimentation with resistant species (3) Build water infrastructure on larger scales (1) Rationing/rotating water supply for public use in rural communities (1)
Control forest fires (2) Region
Social/ Economic
Institutional/ Policy
Use pooling of resources (1)
Strengthen traditional management institutions (1)
Develop local insurance organizations (1)
Hands-on training (1) Improve collective autoorganization (1) Improve legal and operational knowledge on policies (1) Make climate information and forecasts available (1)
Forest conservation (2) Larger-scale infrastructure for water and production (1)
Federal/ National
Support and conservation programs matched with economic benefits (4)
*The numbers between parentheses indicate the number of papers that included the strategy in their analyses, the strategies listed in each column are ordered per higher frequency at each level and dimension. **The response “do nothing” was registered for one paper, but not included in the table.
2.4.2.2.What makes rural communities more vulnerable: contextual factors acting as barriers to adaptation While strategies were concentrated on local scales and related to physical and economic management of household/farm resources and assets, contextual elements that hinder adaptation are more evenly distributed across levels and dimensions; although in all levels, the socio-economic dimension had the most frequently mentioned barriers (poverty, risky markets, and lack of access to assets are the common contextual factors for these communities). Rural populations can exert varying levels of control over these barriers. The most frequently mentioned contextual factor that increase difficulties to adapt in the rural communities of Mexico and Southwest United States is the lack of household assets and resources (20 papers included this factor) (see Table 4). This was followed by “variable/low international prices and high market risks for agricultural products” (10) in the global or international level. 68
Two
other
factors
that
were
also
mentioned
were
“insufficient
knowledge/information of climate dynamics/ lack of forecasts” (7) at the individual level and physical/environmental-based dimension; and “lack of access to technical support/ technology/ extension services” and “high costs of agricultural inputs/ production/ water/ energy for pumping” (8 each) at the household/farm level and socio/economic dimension. The factors indicate the importance of developing adequate sources of climate and adaptation information for rural communities, not only urban centers. While in the Southwest U.S. extension personnel actively participate in rural SESs (Brugger and Crimmins 2015), in Mexico extension services conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture are lacking or are poorly developed in the cases where they exist. A factor important in the socio-economic dimension and the regional level was “urban-rural conflicts/ inter-group competition for resources” (5). Competition for resources was especially critical in studies of the transboundary Mexico-U.S. area, where population growth rates tend to be higher than their respective country averages, and consequently, put more pressure on arid ecosystems. Table 4. Barriers included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension Levels
Individual
Physical/ Environmental Insufficient knowledge/information of climate dynamics/ lack of forecasts (7) Inadequate perceptions of climate-related risks or effects (2) Sickness and health issues of elderly producers (1)
Social/ Economic Low educational levels/ lack of specific skills and literacy (3) Ethnicity/racism/identity issues (3)
Institutional/ Policy Mistrust and skepticism regarding governmental and social organizations/ low levels of trust in general (3) Lack of political power by small land holders (2)
Gender differences in accessing resources (2) Difficulties to migrate (1) Reluctance to try new strategies or to innovate (1)
Household/ Farm
Lack of water sources/ high dependence on groundwater and irrigation water (6)
Lack of household assets and resources/ poverty (also
Limited access to subsidies and other governmental support (7)
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Levels
Physical/ Environmental
Lack of additional land for pursuing agricultural diversification/ extension/ intensification (6) Variable/low soil quality or yields (4) Mono-cropping practices (3) Physical location of community is detrimental to the livelihood goals (2) Lack of access to improved landraces or better genetic material (1) Lack of pastures (1)
Low environmental quality/ environmental degradation/ landscape fragmentation (3) Variable water supply (1) Community
Pests’ outbreaks (1)
Water extremes: drought, flood, and multi-year droughts in a row (3)
Region
Unexpected or abrupt environmental changes (1)
Social/ Economic poverty at the community level) (20)
Institutional/ Policy
Lack of access to technical Lack of access to decisionsupport/ technology/ extension making processes (3) services (8) High costs of agricultural inputs/ production/ water/ energy for pumping (8) Lack of access to credit and farm insurance (6) Lack of technology for improving processing of products towards higher-end markets (2)
Lack of knowledge on legal aspects of natural resources management and policies (3)
Food insecurity (2) High dependence on intermediaries for commercializing products (2) Instability in income sources (1) Reduction of agricultural labor Incapacity for collective organization/ low levels of force due to migration of the social capital (4) youth (7) Disintegration of traditional Lack of access to markets / governance and management migration/ off-farm jobs/ urban systems (i.e. new comers in centers (5) acequias, or in ejidos) (1) Changing demographics of rural households (elders) (4) Lack of public services/ inadequate infrastructure for water treatment and distribution (3) Lack of formal financial services (1) Water and land´s structure of Urban-rural conflicts/ interentitlements or rights is group competition for detrimental for disadvantaged resources (5) populations or groups (3) Urbanization/ population Lack of institutional support growth (4) for climate adaptation (3) Inequality in natural resources Policies fostering suburban distribution (3) development (1) Narcos, money laundry, and illegal activities (2) Land prices for residential development (1)
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Levels
Physical/ Environmental
Social/ Economic Lack of markets for new/diversified agricultural products (1)
Institutional/ Policy
Land policy, conservation Low oil prices (in Mexico) and regulations (in the U.S.) and less money for public land tenure systems (i.e. expenditure (1) PROCEDE in Mexico) (5) Federal water policy and Lack of coordination between regulations in Mexico, state productive sectors (1) Federal/ regulations in the U.S. (2) National Lack of coordination between development and adaptation policies (2) A paternalistic/ clientelistic relationship between rural people and the government (1) Variable/low international Creeping environmental or prices and high market risks climate change/ climate uncertainty (6) for agricultural products (10) Market uncertainties/ International/ behavior/ structures (7) Global Liberalization of international agricultural markets (2) Market oversupply of products (2) *The numbers between parentheses indicate the number of papers that included the barrier in their analyses, the barriers listed in each column are ordered per higher frequency at each level and dimension.
2.4.2.3.What makes rural communities more adaptable: contextual factors acting as enablers of adaptation Less factors enhancing adaptation were mentioned in the studies in comparison with the contextual factors acting as barriers or increasing vulnerability of the rural communities. As in the case of barriers, enablers included in the reviewed studies are evenly distributed across dimensions and levels, but the number of papers mentioning each enabler are more centralized towards fewer factors that increase adaptive capacity (see Table 5). It is difficult to determine if barriers are more site-specific and enablers more generic, or if there is more agreement on the enablers than on the barriers among studies. The most frequently mentioned factors facilitating adaptation were three. At the household/farm level and socio/economic dimension “access to private or social capital/ 71
credit/ insurance” and “secure access to additional land if required”, and at the community level and institutional dimension the existence of “diversified and dense social networks” (18 of 41 papers included each of these contextual factors). Access to governmental support (15); access to “climate-free” income, or income that is relatively independent of environmental assets impacted by climate change (Finan et al. 2002) (11); and access to additional sources of water (11), were other factors with high frequency of mentions in the studies, most of them at the level of the household/farm in social/economic and institutional/policy dimensions.
Table 5. Enablers included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension Level
Individual
Physical/ Environmental Access to climate-related information and knowledge (including forecasts) (6) Knowledge on the SES where the person lives (2) Awareness of climate change/ perception of climate risks (2)
Social/ Economic Better levels of education/ specialized knowledge to diversify (5) Capacity to face risks/ longterm planning/ manage uncertainty (3)
Institutional/ Policy Trust in organizations and sources of information (1)
Younger age (2) Perceived economic benefits from environmental conservation (1)
Secure access to additional land if required (18)
Household/ Farm
Community
Secure access to additional water sources and waterrelated infrastructure and technology (11) Optimal physical features of landscape for pursuing diversified activities (4) Capacity for in-site experimentation with innovative practices or improved species (1)
Access to other communities and urban centers (2)
Access to private or social capital/ credit/ insurance (18) Availability of diversified sources of income/ access to “climate-free” income (11) Access to technology and machinery (7)
Access to governmental support policies and programs (15) Membership in local organizations (access to all kinds of livelihood-related capitals) (10) Access to local decisionmaking (1)
Family connection to water and land (1) Household demographics (more people in productive age in the household) (1) Availability of extension services and technical support (5)
Diversified and dense social networks (18)
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Level
Region
Federal/ National
Physical/ Environmental Social/ Economic High levels of local traditional Availability of agricultural knowledge regarding natural work-force (4) environment (2) Capacity for cross-community experimentation with resistant species (1)
Institutional/ Policy Capacity for collective organization and mobilization (7) Flexibility in water management (2)
Autonomy in decision-making regarding natural resources/ enhanced local environmental governance (1) Access to markets/ buyers/ Equitable entitlement clients for diversified products structures for natural resources and services (6) access (land and water) (2) Legal frameworks fostering conservation/ sustainable development/ climate adaptation (also at the international level) (2) Capacity for institutional coordination (also at the international level) (1)
*The numbers between parentheses indicate the number of papers that included the enabler in their analyses, the enablers listed in each column are ordered per higher frequency at each level and dimension.
2.4.3. Outcomes and feedbacks: vicious or virtuous rural futures? Outcomes of adaptation responses were made explicit in 31 of the 41 papers, but only six papers moved forward in explaining how these outcomes feedback to the entire system that is exposed to global change. In Table 6 a summary of outcomes categorized by level and dimension is presented. Feedbacks are described for those cases in which they were made explicit. In contrast to the tables summarizing responses, barriers, and enablers in the sections above, in Table 6 the papers were not counted for each outcome because most of the outcomes analyzed were unique to the locations studied, and dependent on a specific combination of stressors, responses, and contextual elements. Therefore, these outcomes are not listed in order of frequency as the factors in previous tables. As complexity of processes increase, it becomes more difficult to generalize based on concrete case-studies.
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The majority of the outcomes refer to four results: 1) decreasing flexibility to execute new responses once a course of action has been selected (this situation that has been recognized as “rigidity trap” (Gunderson et al. 2014) or “path-dependency maladaptation” (Barnett and O’Neill 2010) in management of social-ecological systems, and in this review it was especially evident in those cases where irrigation technology or certain kinds of crop decisions and agricultural practices were pursued); 2) general tendency to biodiversity loss, degradation, and loss of ecosystem services; 3) decreasing social capital and disintegration of traditional governance structures (ejidos in Mexico and traditional communities such as acequias and ranching towns in the Southwest U.S.); and 4) further conflicts and inequity in access and distribution of natural resources, specially land and water. These outcomes are connected to a broader result that also feeds back on the systems: varying levels of vulnerability with a trend towards decreasing adaptive capacity in the long term. One of the aspects found to be very important in defining the outcomes is the time frame considered for analysis. Many responses can be considered effective in the short term. For example, groundwater irrigation buffers crops’ yields during drought years. But if things are kept this way and the effects of multi-year droughts and overdraft accumulate, that would cause groundwater depletion, land subsidence, loss of ecosystem services, and inequity between those able to dig deeper wells and those without the money and capacity to do it. A response that is adaptive, or at least “buffering” in the short term (Vasquez-Leon 2009b), can be less adaptive or have mixed outcomes over longer timescales (Barnett and O’Neill 2010). Regarding the social level, it is important to note that, while responses, barriers, and enablers were most frequent at the household level, the outcomes and feedbacks identified by the studies were more frequently referred to the community and regional levels. This could be indicative of the transference of outcomes of responses towards the higher levels in which 74
the local system is nested, which is coherent with the conceptual definition of embeddedness of social-ecological systems (Berkes et al. 2003; Ostrom 2007).
Table 6. Outcomes included in the reviewed papers per level and dimension Levels
Physical/Environmental
Social/Economic
Individual
Crop diversification could imply further use of water and agro-chemicals, accelerating processes of soil degradation and loss of agro-ecosystem services Insurance and subsidies promote that farmers in regions with water scarcity keep producing crops that are highly water-consuming Availability of additional water for irrigation fosters clearing of land for agriculture expansion Household/Farm
Community
Improved agricultural technologies can buffer climate shocks
Efficient irrigation technologies can buffer agricultural yields during drought years
Institutional/Policy Discretional distribution of policy resources has generated mistrust and apathy among rural people Through changes in social organization farmers shift individual impacts of climate to higher orders of social relationships, such as taxpayers or insurance companies
Low food security due to focusing on commercial/ international markets and lack of additional natural assets International or domestic migration increases income of the household through remittances Bank loans increase vulnerability in the long term because of interest rates and irregular agricultural income
Orientation to commercial agriculture means less Availability of irrigation flexibility for shifting crops or facilitates entering practices when environmental commercial agriculture shocks occur Agricultural and livestock livelihoods will be weakened by drought and inadequate policies Commitment to irrigation limits the flexibility of the household/ farm to pursue other adaptive responses Climate and market risks are Diversification/ intensification associated to loss of with inadequate land traditional heritage and management can produce land identity in ranching and degradation/ soil low quality farming communities Diversification produces Decreasing availability of fragmentation and water and land will atomization of landscape with disproportionally affect
Liberal policies in the land sector together with market forces are associated to more concentration of land Policies consisting in direct subsidies, transfers, or support prices that do not build
75
Levels
Physical/Environmental consequent impacts on wildlife and biodiversity
Social/Economic women due to power relationships affecting them
Institutional/Policy capacity, can foster passivity and dependence of rural populations
Feedback: Atomized landscapes translate to more general vulnerability for smallholders Multi-year droughts, policies allowing groundwater use, and differential households’ financial capacity promote that only better-endowed farms use groundwater and more land, increasing the gap in natural resources access
Lack of natural assets due to climate change coupled with Inter-sectorial competition for management inadequacies will cause loss of agricultural water, improved irrigation livelihoods, and general technologies, and extended poverty in the communities: droughts will reduce water further unemployment, further seepage coming from Feedback: Inequity in traditional irrigation practices. migration resources distribution This will reduce recharge and increases the gap in loss of environmental services Feedback: migration-lost labor force further constrains livelihood alternatives towards the future. Rich agricultural livelihoods become richer, the poor become poorer Only large landholders have benefited from specialized Lack of water and arable land agricultural options because due to climate change and smallholders have little degradation weaken social resources to make institutions devoted to its investments, and have less distribution and management access to high-end agricultural policies from the government Market forces influencing the Economic and agricultural arrival of new-comers to diversification could provide communal organizations for better jobs and improved land and water management socio-economic conditions for disintegrate traditional the entire community governance systems Massive migration debilitates social fabric in communities, this diminishes overall social capital Subsidies for agriculture and conservation under inadequate Feedback: weaker social rules or discretional networks will translate into distribution increase reduced community cohesion clientelistic relationships and and reduced control over corruption community development processes. Also, greater vulnerability for women who heavily depend on them Buffering programs that Adequate policies and social protect farmers from climate organization can foster change prevent the emergence community empowerment
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Levels
Physical/Environmental
Social/Economic of innovative agricultural practices
Institutional/Policy promoting further adaptation and sustainability
Feedback: political-economic considerations outweigh climatic ones in decision making. Climate factors become secondary and this affects adaptation priorities Necessity for diversification has driven requirements for collective organization and risk-sharing
Prolonged drought and climate change together with reduction of allowed animal units in public lands will increase pressure in other grazing systems (in the U.S.)
Region
Environmental challenges and lack of official support for adaptation can foster collective action and participative decision making
Reliance on groundwater sources for irrigation is associated with lowering levels of groundwater and land subsidence
Feedback: overexploitation of water sources leads to losing ecosystem services, which turns to lower overall resilience of the SES Climate change and Livelihood transitions have large impacts on land-use/land inadequate policies and change, i.e. deforestation and agricultural practices will clearing of land for extensive foster conflict/ competition for land and water agriculture and ranching Deforestation and clearing of land to pursue commercial Migration could shift ecological footprint of agriculture or ranching also economic activities to urban diminishes carbon centers sequestration and hydrological functioning Economic diversification that implies migration from agricultural centers is associated to recovery of forested areas Homogeneity of the landscape due to commercial practices and mono-cropping
2.5.Discussion and conclusions The critical literature review conducted through the Double Exposures Framework allowed the identification of the case-specific impacts of global processes, exposure frames and units, contextual factors, people’s responses, and outcomes and feedbacks associated to adaptation 77
to global change in rural communities of Mexico and the Southwest United States. Furthermore, from the early stages of the review it was evident that an explicit institutional dimension was needed in the framework to improve the analysis. The consideration of institutional change as a globally-driven process parallel to environmental and socioeconomic change, and the specification of several nested social levels of analysis were proposed to capture the complexity of global change realities in rural communities. From this analysis, several gaps and pathways for future inquiry were also identified. In terms of the temporal, spatial and conceptual distribution of the studies, the results indicate that empirical studies on vulnerability and adaptation in rural communities of this region of the world are very recent (most of them date from 2000 to 2015). Most of these studies use vulnerability and adaptation frameworks, but seven of every 10 included two or more combined theory approaches, which indicates their highly interdisciplinary nature. There is an overrepresentation of crop-farming systems, while livestock farming (historically the centerpiece of rural livelihoods in arid North America, before the advent of groundwater irrigation) and other types of rural endeavors receive secondary attention. Coffee systems comprise more than one quart of the Mexican studies, while ranching is better addressed in studies of the Southwest U.S. region. The underrepresentation of ranchinglivestock adaptation in Mexican studies is maybe connected to the perspective of coffee, rain fed maize, or other crop systems in the south of the country as being more vulnerable than northern, richer, ranching Mexican states, that have better access to groundwater to buffer drought risks in the short term. For Mexico, most of the studies are concentrated on crops’ production, no matter that the central and northern arid regions have been progressively shifting to livestock raising as a form of adaptation (this is also happening in southern Mexico as crops’ agriculture becomes more vulnerable and less profitable). 78
In relation to adaptive responses to global changes, a bigger proportion of the responses were concentrated in the scales and dimensions over which the rural producers and inhabitants have most control (the physical and socio-economic aspects of the household and the farm). The most studied adaptive strategy is related to crop management at the farm/household level. There is an abundance of strategies identified in lower levels of social organization in comparison to strategies at higher levels. This could be indicative of a social vicious cycle or long term “governance trap” (Gunderson et al. 2014) associated to low levels of trust and lack of civil organization, especially in Mexico (Lutz-Ley and Salazar Adams 2011b). Long-term adaptation may require increased social organization and stronger social networks connecting rural communities with higher governance and decision-making levels, as well as external sources of support (Adger 2003). However, in these empirical studies, as costs of social transaction increase, the strategies pursued at the community or regional level, or strategies based on institutional factors, decrease in number. Another problematic aspect in dealing with empirical rural adaptation is that most of the studies equated “rural” adaptation with “farming” adaptation, as evidenced in the strategies and types of SES described in the results. As indicated above, the most frequently studied adaptive strategy in the reviewed literature was related to crop management and agricultural diversification. In contrast, livelihood groups that are not agrarian, have no land or animals, but still live in rural communities, are largely neglected. This happens even though de-agrarianization and mixed farming and off-farm livelihoods in rural Mexico and the Southwest United States are evident in economic and demographic statistics (Carton de Grammont 2009, Coles and Scott 2009, Eakin and Conley 2002, Sheridan 2001). Renewed and comprehensive understanding of the rural-urban interactions, the “new rurality” (Carton
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de Grammont 2004), and what this means in terms of global change impacts and adaptation is a pending issue in academic and policy agendas. In relation to this, most of the studies recognized off-farm income and economic diversification as important strategies for adaptation to global changes, but none specified what happens to these mixed or transitioning livelihoods when they enter in dynamics driven by combined climate, socio-economic, and institutional change. These non-agrarian -but still rural- groups will face special types of challenges related to the lack of services and inadequate infrastructure if further changes continue. Fieldwork conducted by the author during summer of 2015 in rural communities of the San Miguel Watershed, indicated that these challenges will be different between agrarian and non-agrarian households, as indicated in the following chapters. The level of affectations and the opportunities for adaptation depend on the specific mix of agrarian and non-agrarian livelihoods in which a household is engaged, and how global change impacts these capitals (Campos et al. 2014, Scoones 1998). In terms of the contextual factors facilitating and hindering adaptation, while almost all the studies conducted in rural communities of Mexico included economic liberalization (i.e. NAFTA), land tenure dynamics (ejido land), and the agrarian reforms of the 1990s as critical process-type variables affecting rural capacity to adapt, the effects of water policy on this capacity are barely analyzed, and water issues are considered mostly in binary terms, as having or not access to water for irrigating6, and this is not explicitly connected to human adaptation. This could be related to the fact that most of the studies refer to coffee production in rain forest ecosystems or rain fed maize in milpas in eastern and southern Mexico, where
6
There is an exception in the work of Wilder (2002) and Moreno (2006), but their studies refer particularly to large irrigation districts in Caborca, the Yaqui Valley, and the Costa de Hermosillo in Sonora, which are mostly engaged in commercial-scale operations, and not on small-scale irrigation in rural communities with strong subsistence profiles, or livestock rearing.
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water is less critical than land. However, in central and northern Mexico groundwater rules and regulating policies are central for understanding adaptation (Scott 2011), as they define inequalities in access to these resources. In the Southwest U.S., formal institutional arrangements for water management (i.e. the Colorado River Compact) and local rules to access and manage water (i.e. acequia systems in New Mexico) were fully considered and integrated within the studies’ approaches. Also, one of the studies conducted on small scale livestock farming in Sonora has reference to the water institutional change in Mexico (Vasquez-Leon 2009a). Except for these papers, water institutions have not been fully incorporated in empirical research published between 1990 and 2015 regarding adaptation of rural communities to global change in Mexico. This is an important gap as water resources are the most evidently affected by climate change, and the critical limiting factor for productivity in the region. The factors associated to water policies and institutions could have an increasing importance in future studies because, as demonstrated in this review, the most frequently mentioned stressor was drought. However, drought is still seen as a meteorological event partially disconnected from human action and institutions, therefore there is not an explicit conceptual relationship between drought adaptation and water policy. Additionally, although awareness of environmental factors exists, several of the reviewed studies indicated a predominance of economic and livelihood security factors over climate change or environmental considerations in local decision-making. As stated by Eakin et al. (2014), “we find that climatic stress is a feature in decision making, but not the dominant driver” (p. 124). This is even more evident for rural people not engaged in agricultural livelihoods. Also, many contextual factors hindering adaptation were related to economic constraints and market prices, risks, and uncertainties, instead of purely climatic or environmental factors. 81
In terms of the scope of the studies from the point of view of the DEF, virtually all the studies included considerations of the global processes, the contextual factors acting as barriers and enablers for adaptation, the specific adaptive responses by households and communities, and several outcomes from the interactions between stressors and responses. The majority of outcomes identified refer to four general categories: 1) decreasing flexibility to pursue new strategies once a course of action has been chosen; 2) biodiversity loss, degradation, and loss of ecosystem services due to intensification of activities; 3) decreasing social capital and undermining of traditional governance structures as these enter in contact with liberalizing policies and market forces; and 4) further conflicts over resources and inequity in access and distribution. Outcomes were very site-specific and dependent on the interactions between impacts and responses in varied socio-political, cultural, institutional, and geographic contexts across the region analyzed, indicating that, as complexity of processes increases, generalization based on concrete cases becomes more challenging. Finally, few studies made explicit descriptions of the feedbacks on the general SESs. Additionally, none assessed or evaluated the effectiveness of the adaptive strategies in the long term. The problem with adaptation is that its evaluation can happen only after it has occurred. There are proxies of adaptive capacity identified in literature, but those exist as a “potential capacity” realized only after the SES face a shock or stressor. The fact that adaptation can be considered “effective” because it is “adaptive” leads to a cycle of selfexplanation very difficult to break methodologically (Finan et al. 2002). It is no surprising that adaptation effectiveness or its long-term consequences are barely evaluated. In other knowledge areas, there exist proposals to understand adaptive capacity, and those can be used as models for evaluating rural adaptation in complex arid environments (see, for example, Engle and Lemos 2010, Füssel 2007), but their analysis is beyond the scope of this study. 82
In using the concepts of the DEF, it is difficult to clearly identify the point at which an outcome becomes a feedback for the larger system, a definitional challenge recognized but not adequately resolved conceptually in SES’ approaches. It is also challenging to identify which factors are part of the broader contextual environment and when they become stressors. This in part depends on the time and spatial frames selected for the analysis. Temporal and spatial scales are critical in defining the role of each DEF component, and the effects on the overall adaptability of the SESs to global change. Most of the studies reviewed were case-based and cross-sectional (the methodological characteristics were not included in the results section, but they were also included in the literature database). While this type of designs is enough for capturing the concrete nature of the stressors and responses, they do not allow for following up the long-term outcomes of adaptation, or the feedback cycles over the systems. These aspects would require longer analysis of vulnerability trajectories, or longitudinal designs, which translates to more expensive, but required, types of research. Finally, in terms of the additions proposed for the Double Exposure Framework, the necessity to include institutional change as a separate analytical category in parallel to environmental and socio-economic change was evident through the review of the empirical studies. Institutional change requires its own category because it adopts different shapes depending on the local characteristics, and have varying local impacts in a similar way as do environmental and socio-economic changes. There are, at least, three reasons why institutional change, analytically speaking, deserves its own treatment. First, institutional change nowadays has a strong international driver, especially when it comes to natural resource governance and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Second, as globalization reaches all world spaces, the national sovereignty of traditional nation-states is permeable to these dynamics influencing nation-wide decision-making and policies; but this permeability 83
of national institutions is different from socio-economic globalization itself. This also can happen in more informal and local social spaces through the influence of international NGOs or intensified interconnection between localities. Finally, people participating in the studies analyzed in this review responded to institutional-related stressors too. The distinction of institutional factors as stressors or as part of the contextual environment depends on who is defining the study frame. For some studies, policy change is part of the context; for others, policy change drive stressors and shocks in rural communities. Probably a good advice for research designs is analyzing the stressors from the point of view of the subjects facing them. Conceptual models that understate the multiplicity of factors and interactions that affect adaptation in rural communities promote the submission of important dynamics under static categories of variables. Static categories do not allow the researcher to identify important changes when these occur because the changes are precisely in the core of socialnatural interactions mediated by institutions (Barnes 2009); these interactions are not concentrated in one single dimension, nor in one single scale or level. The double exposures turn to triple or even multiple exposures depending on the specific rural realities considered. The next chapters offer case-based evidence to support the analytical and empirical importance of institutional factors as modulators of global change, and as stressors impacting livelihoods in rural communities of arid Northwest Mexico.
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CHAPTER 3. GLOBAL CHANGE AND ADAPTATION OF AGRARIAN AND NONAGRARIAN LIVELIHOODS IN RURAL COMMUNITIES OF A WATER-SCARCE WATERSHED IN NORTHWEST MEXICO 3.1.Introduction 3.1.1. Changing rurality in Northwest Mexico Global change -defined here as the set of globally-driven changes affecting environmental, socio-economic, and institutional conditions- is affecting the Mexican countryside and modifying the availability, access, and use of natural resources on which many rural livelihoods are dependent (Appendini and De Luca 2006; Warman 2001). These changes and their impacts need to be comprehensively accounted for in analyses of rural vulnerability and adaptation. This study tries to address this gap by analyzing how these changes impact livelihoods in three rural communities of the water-scarce San Miguel Watershed (SMW), in central Sonora State, in Northwest Mexico. Northwest Mexico is a socially and environmentally contested space. The National Water Commission (CONAGUA) has defined 13 “hydrological-administrative” regions for water management (Regiones Hidrológico-Administrativas, or RHAs). Sonora and a portion of the neighboring state of Chihuahua lie within the RHA II- “Noroeste”. This administrative region includes 78 municipalities, 2.76 million people, and contributes 2.9 per cent of the national GDP. It also receives 8,324.9 million cubic meters (MCM) of renewable water7 annually, which corresponds to 3,011 cubic meters (m3) per capita annually, on average (CONAGUA 2014). Although this RHA does not show a high level of water scarcity in
7 Renewable water refers to the maximum amount of water that can be extracted annually in a region, and that is renewed by rainfall and through the balance of water inputs and outputs in the region. It is calculated as the average natural internal surface annual runoff, plus the total aquifer recharge, plus the input and output fluxes between the region and other regions (Gleick 2002, cited in CONAGUA 2014).
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comparison with the rest of RHAs in Mexico (for example, in the RHA where Mexico City is located, renewable water is 152 m3/year/per capita), there is an environmentally and socially created scarcity arising from the competition between water uses in critical areas of Sonora, such as the agricultural valleys and the rapidly growing urban centers, together with the occurrence of multi-year droughts.
2014 (CONAGUA 2014) 2%
2008 (CEA Sonora 2008) 5%
9%
1% 1%
11%
78% 93% Agriculture
Agriculture
Public supply
Domestic
Industry
Industry
Electric energy production
Electric energy production (N/R)
Livestock (N/R)
Livestock
Other uses (N/R)
Other uses
Figure 11. Water volumes concessioned in Sonora in 2014 and 2008. Note that categories reported are different. Those categories not reported on in a specific year are marked with “N/R”.
Up to 2014, in Sonora 78 per cent of the water for consumptive uses was concessioned to agriculture (CONAGUA 2014). The apparent decrease in this proportion when compared with data from 2008 (see Figure 11) is primarily the result of changes in accounting of water concessions for thermal and hydro-electric power generation. The total volume concessioned for consumptive uses in 2014 and 2008 were 6,612 MCM and 6,575 MCM respectively. The general volume allocated to consumptive uses has increased, and there is more presence of 86
industrial and public domestic uses recently. An example of this transition is the state’s capital itself. Hermosillo city has been struggling since the late 1990s to cover the gaps in its public supply requirements by buying water rights from agricultural localities in its periphery (Pineda-Pablos et al. 2012; Scott and Pineda-Pablos 2011). However, agriculture still uses more than seven of every ten liters concessioned in Sonora. Furthermore, high dependence on groundwater for agricultural and public supply is an important threat to water security in the state (Scott et al. 2013, Scott 2011). The agricultural valleys in Caborca and Hermosillo heavily depend on groundwater extractions while Sonora concentrates one third of the 15 coastal aquifers with sea water intrusion, and around 10 per cent of the overexploited aquifers in the country (CONAGUA 2014, MorenoVasquez 2006). In addition to this, maybe except for the six large irrigation districts located in the state, there is no certainty about how many of the agricultural extractions are metered or supervised, especially in the countryside. Metering and water-use efficiency in the largest cities of Sonora is low in comparison to other cities of northern Mexico (Lutz-Ley and Salazar Adams 2011a), and domestic and agricultural water metering is almost non-existent in rural communities (Lutz-Ley 2014). The effects of climate variability and change are particularly evident on water resources. Severe droughts affecting the territory during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have been reported in literature with negative consequences for agriculture in general, and for social sector producers -ejidos- in particular (Appendini and Liverman 1994, Chavez 1999, Liverman 1990). Climate projections developed in the past indicated that Mexico would be hotter and drier in the future, and that rural communities would be highly vulnerable because of their inadequate access to assets, technology, credit, and knowledge (Appendini and Liverman 1994). More recent projections confirm that climate change will bring warmer and 87
drier seasons to the Southwest United States- Northwest Mexico region (Magaña et al. 2000, Magaña et al. 2012, Overpeck et al. 2013), but when more local or smaller scales are considered, these projections tend to be more heterogeneous and uncertain (for example, Robles-Morua et al. 2014 projected both increases and decreases in precipitation in the Sonora River Basin -SRB- depending on the area considered and the season). In the analysis of climate change impacts, agriculture is considered a large hot spot of vulnerability in the arid North American region (Frisvold et al. 2013) and elsewhere in Mexico (Conde et al. 2006, Gay et al. 2006), but almost nothing is said of the people that have non-agricultural and/or ranching livelihoods, but still live in these rural communities (Buechler 2009). Institutions for managing water in Mexico have also been transforming during the last decades of the twentieth century (Pineda-Pablos et al. 2014, Scott and Banister 2008, Wilder and Romero-Lankao 2006). Further decentralization, the creation of incipient water markets, and more integrative and horizontal bodies for managing water at regional scales, and management of transboundary water resources have been occurring in Mexico, as for example, with the creation of river basin organizations (Varady and Browning-Aiken 2005). However, local decision-making is limited, since the Federal government still retains control over allocations and substantive policies (Scott and Lutz 2016, Scott and Banister 2008). There is a high degree of complexity in the arrangements to access, allocate, and use water depending on the setting (urban vs. rural), and the size of the water operations (irrigation districts vs. small-scale irrigation; public networks of water and wastewater treatment in big cities vs. communal distribution networks and local oxidation ponds, among others). The Mexican federal administration has not been fully able to govern this complexity (Aboites 2009), as explained later in the text.
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The second critical resource for the Sonoran countryside, land, has also been subject to modifications driven by global dynamics; particularly the increase in commercial agriculture and livestock, the privatization of land that previously was part of collectively managed areas, and progressive urbanization of communities in general. Historically speaking, through the creation of the ejido, Mexico was the first country in Latin America in promoting a nation-wide land redistribution that, although imperfect, had a large effect not only on socio-economic development, but particularly in the pacification of contending social groups that participated in the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The ejido is a form of collective land concession established in the postRevolutionary Mexican Constitution. Article 27 recognize three types of land and water property: public, private, and social. Social property includes ejidos and comunidades agrarias (Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography, INEGI 2016).8 While the ejido was created by governmental decree, the comunidad is a traditional land tenure form that has roots based on self-organization of early land colonizers. For practical purposes, the Ministry of Agrarian Reform in Mexico (now restructured as Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development or SEDATU) consider all of them “agrarian units” (“núcleos agrarios”) that share similar legal frameworks. Currently there are almost 32,000 of these agrarian units in Mexico (INEGI 2016). In 1992 the federal administration ended the agrarian distribution, and the modifications to the article 27 of the Mexican Constitution allowed collective land to be transformed to full private property. Through the Program of Certification of Ejido Rights
8
INEGI 2016. Catastro de la propiedad social. Antecedentes. Available at: http://www.inegi.org.mx/geo/contenidos/catastro/presentacionpropiedadsocial.aspx (Access: November 29, 2016). A more detailed explanation on social property can be found in the chapter 4 of this document.
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and Titling of Lots (PROCEDE), around 93 per cent of the land within the agrarian units has been certified and title-like documents have been issued to individual landholders. However, these certificates only establish the official recognition of well-bounded land concessions to individuals, instead of collective bodies, and full privatization still requires additional steps. Land in Mexico has followed a cycle of shifts between collective and private tenure since colonial times (Sheridan 1988), but it was not until the late twentieth century that Mexico reached a prevalence of collective tenure. Up to 2009, more than 50 per cent of lands in the country were under some form of collective management and full privatization did not automatically follow the 1992 reforms as expected (Barnes 2009). However, on the ground, collective land boundaries have always co-existed in a constant tug of war with private property (Sheridan 1988). A powerful driver of land-use transformations and economic and institutional liberalization of land and water sectors in Mexico is related to the institutional adjustments derived from the economic crisis of the 1980s, when the government received international economic support and had to restructure its organizations and policies to recover from the crisis. A second factor tied to socio-economic globalization is the entrance in force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s (Appendini and De Luca 2006, Appendini and Liverman 1994). NAFTA institutionalized and intensified commercial exchange that was already happening across the border. For Mexican farmers and ranchers, all these changes meant the opening to international markets (in which only a minority of the peasant population could compete) and the retreat of state support programs, credit, infrastructure, and services (Appendini and De Luca 2006, Appendini and Liverman 1994, Eakin 2005). It impacted ranchers and farmers also on the U.S. side because of the oversupply of agricultural products (Eakin and Conley 2002), although today there are large 90
asymmetries between the countries in terms of the support for the agricultural sector, mostly to the detriment of Mexican producers. Another socio-economic outcome that is closely connected to the opening to international markets and NAFTA is the progressive de-agrarianization of activities in rural communities (Carton de Grammont 2004, 2009). With the impoverishment of social producers in Mexican agriculture and the opening of new industrial, manufacturing and tertiary jobs, rural communities transitioned from a predominantly agrarian economy to one in which farming and livestock co-exist with non-agricultural livelihoods. In 1970, 76.9 per cent of the economically active rural population worked in the primary and extractive sector (agriculture, animal husbandry, agroforestry, and fishing). By 2004, approximately half the economically active rural population worked in the primary sector (Carton de Grammont 2009, p. 23). Ten years later, in 2014, only 13.7 per cent of the total economically active population in Mexico (considering both urban and rural) was employed in the primary sector (INEGI 2014), meaning that more than 80 per cent was employed in secondary and tertiary activities. Mexico is not the only country whose rural population has been transitioning to non-agrarian activities; this is happening as socio-economic globalization reaches all communities in the world. This ongoing transition implies increasing complexity in the rural livelihoods’ composition. Furthermore, this also means that the rural cannot be simply equated to the agricultural (Bebbington 1999). The study of rural adaptation to global change needs to consider this new rurality; the complex interactions between agrarian, off-farm, and mixed livelihood systems; and their connections to resource-management institutions for achieving adaptive outcomes. Rural communities in Mexico are those with 2,500 or less people (INEGI 2010). The population in rural communities has never stopped growing in absolute terms, and now one 91
in every four Mexicans live in rural localities, while most of public resources are invested in cities. A constellation of deficiencies in education, health, social security, and public services of water, wastewater, sewerage, and energy (including aging infrastructure and inadequate management) deepens rural vulnerability to environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors and shocks. On the other hand, although diversification and de-agrarianization are happening everywhere in Mexico and in the Southwest U.S., farming and ranching still constitute an important economic and identity backbone, affecting directly or indirectly all rural livelihoods (Campos et al. 2014; Coles and Scott 2009; Eakin and Conley 2002). As mentioned in the introductory chapter of this document, there are important historical studies regarding native livelihoods in Northwest Mexico (Radding 1997), water control and politics (Banister 2010, Moreno 2006, Wilder 2002), and social-natural interactions in arid environments (Doolittle 1980, Sheridan and Nabhan 1978). Research also exists on the political ecology of land and water access in Sonoran and Sinaloan ejidos and communities (Buechler 2015, Cruz-Torres 2004, Padilla 2012, Sheridan 1988, VasquezLeon 2009a, Vasquez-Leon and Liverman 2004), and on the economic development of ranching and farming in the San Miguel Watershed and the Sonora River Basin during the twentieth century (Camou-Healy 1998, Padilla 2012, Sheridan 1988). However, very few of these studies incorporate perspectives on how the institutional transitions of water and land management between the twentieth and the twenty first centuries combine with environmental and socio-economic change affecting rural livelihoods, and pose new challenges and opportunities for human adaptation. This study takes some of the lessons learned from past studies and seeks to apply them to present-day water-scarce Sonora, where environmental, socio-economic, and policy
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change is accelerating, exacerbating and making these trends more complex in a context of further transboundary integration (Scott and Buechler 2013).
3.1.2. The Double Exposures and the Sustainable Livelihoods Frameworks Global environmental change has multiple manifestations, going from global warming due to GHG’s concentrations in the atmosphere, to intensive land use and marine ecosystems transformations. Environmental change is fostered mainly by patterns of resource extraction, transformation, use, and disposal by human beings in a social-institutional context that so far has been ineffective in regulating these behaviors and their impacts. These impacts have always been occurring -and early forms of globalization can be recognized even from the time of the Colonial Americas-, meaning that globalization is not a “new” phenomenon strictly speaking. But what is different now, is the rapid speed at which these changes develop, the multi-scalar nature of their impacts, and the extent to which they affect humannatural systems (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008, Leichenko at al. 2010). However, people are exposed not only to the impacts derived from these environmental changes, but also to global socio-economic dynamics or globalization, as mentioned above regarding NAFTA in North America, and to institutional and policy changes as indicated in the second chapter of this document. The Double Exposures Framework (DEF) (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008) utilizes the metaphor of double exposure of images in photography to explain how global environmental change and socioeconomic globalization are occurring simultaneously and sequentially, combining and creating pathways towards either negative or positive outcomes for social groups across locations. These outcomes feedback the systems where the impacted units are embedded. The differential combinations of stressors, shocks, and adaptive responses generate “winners 93
and losers” of global change. Some people will derive new opportunities, while others could see their livelihoods, assets, and even their lives affected or at risk. It is important to recognize that these “winners and losers” are created not only by the combined impacts of environmental and socio-economic stressors, but there is also an interaction between these stressors and characteristics that depend more on the structural shape of rural economies, and the ways in which internal and external power relations in the communities function to create combinations of stressors, shocks, and adaptive responses. In other words, the preexisting conditions of poverty and unequal access to critical livelihood resources interact with the globally and locally created environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors, and modify both, the context in which adaptation happens, and the capacity of people to respond. An analysis based on the DEF includes identifying and assessing the six components described in the second chapter of this dissertation (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008) and restructured to include institutional change as indicated in Figure 3: a) the global processes (environmental, socio-economic, and institutional) that produce stressors if they progressively affect the wellbeing and livelihoods of populations (such as creeping warming, or drought), or shocks when they are sudden or rapid events (e.g., hurricanes or flash floods); b) the exposure frame and the exposure units within this, which corresponds to the socialecological units impacted by the stressors and shocks; 3) the contextual environment that influence the level of exposure of the frame and the responses that the exposure units perform towards stressors and shocks; 4) the responses with the aim of mitigate, cope with, or adapt to the effects of global processes; 5) the outcomes, which are observable or measurable effects of the global processes that interact with the responses to stressors or shocks; and finally 6) the feedbacks that constitute the interactive connections between elements of the 94
model, and represent the dynamic influences among different components across levels, and spatial and temporal scales. These six components are detailed in the second chapter; therefore, these paragraphs only summarize the main assumptions of the DEF. The DEF provides a way to understand the interactions and outcomes of coupled environmental and socio-economic processes in different contexts, and it has been successfully applied in studies of agrarian livelihoods in the developing world (Lennox 2015, McKune and Silva 2013). In this study, the DEF is combined with a theoretical and methodological approach that focuses on the development of livelihoods in rural communities. In addition to the global processes of environmental and socio-economic change, this study calls attention to institutional change as a third type of globally-driven process whose logic is different from that of the market and the environment, because it is made of the formal and informal rules and arrangements that the government and civil society establish to regulate the interactions between people and their natural and built environments. Institutional factors are treated in the original DEF as contextual factors affecting the adaptive capacity of people, or their level of exposure. However, according to the empirical evidence of this dissertation and the results of the literature review in the second chapter, institutional factors are also stressors in the communities of the SMW. Therefore, institutional processes are considered as a third type of change in this study. Its globallydriven nature could be questioned, given the fact that institutional changes can be propelled at almost any level of social organization, going from the changes in international policy to the local changes in rules for access, distribution, and use of resources. However, this is also the case for environmental and socio-economic change that happens as results of the interactions between global and local levels instead of vertical, unidirectional effects from one level over another. 95
In focusing on the local level, and in a manner that I characterize as complementary to the DEF, the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) describes the livelihoods in which people engage as a result of combining multiple types of capitals or assets available to individuals, households, and communities, as well as the opportunities to transform those assets into benefits, and the internal and external social connections implied in this access and transformation. In the simplest terms, a livelihood is “a means of gaining a living” (Chambers and Conway 1991). The analysis of livelihoods has been applied especially for studying rural poverty and rural development. With the arrival of the sustainability ideas to the international discussion on social development, the analysis further narrowed to understand what causes a livelihood to be sustainable. In accordance with Chambers and Conway (1991), a sustainable livelihood is one “…which can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain o enhance its capabilities or assets, and provide sustainable livelihood opportunities for the next generation; and which contributes net benefits to other livelihoods at the local and global levels and in the short and long term”. For these authors, the concept of sustainable livelihood is closely connected to those of capability and equity, because it is the actual access to stores, resources, claims and assets what underlie the achievement of a livelihood. A later definition by Scoones (1998) kept the essential elements of the sustainable livelihoods of Chambers and Conway (1991), but gave less weight to the idea of protection of livelihoods for future generations and the “net benefits” among livelihoods, and centered more on the protection of the natural resource base of communities and the definition of a framework for assessing the actual outcomes of sustainable livelihoods. The elements of this model are similar to those of the DEF in the sense that they include contextual elements and potential livelihood strategies and outcomes, but not specifically in terms of global change 96
impacts and adaptation. However, these commonalities raise the need for better integration of SLF and DEF to understand how environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors interact with the local livelihoods of rural communities and generate certain types of responses and outcomes that reduce or increase the overall resilience of the rural socialecological systems. Global environmental change and socio-economic globalization drive a major proportion of the stressors and shocks faced by rural livelihoods today; at the same time, the achievement of sustainable livelihoods is one way to increase the general adaptive capacity of rural communities to these globally-driven changes. Improving the coupling between the two frameworks is therefore pertinent. Scoones (1998) also included in his model the institutional processes through which the main four type of livelihoods’ “capitals” are accessed, combined, and transformed into useful inputs for livelihood achievement (the capitals defined by Scoones are: natural, social, human, and financial, although the author explains that these are general, and more types are possible). Bebbington (1999) further expanded the institutional component of the livelihoods framework by describing the connections of rural populations to three types of actors: the state, civil society, and markets. In this context, social capital (the collection of internal and external networks to which a household or an individual has access) is a central type of capital since “access becomes perhaps the most critical resource of all if people are to build sustainable, poverty alleviating rural livelihoods” (Bebbington 1999, p. 2022) and “…access to other actors is conceptually prior to access to material resources in the determination of livelihood strategies” (idem, p. 2023). What is more important about this conceptualization of livelihoods is the fact that their sustainability -and adaptability- partially depend on the interlinkages that rural households and communities can develop toward higher or more formal levels of governance, decision-making, and commercialization networks. The access 97
to these spheres means that rural communities can have a larger share of power for determining their socio-environmental futures, through influencing formal and informal rules to access, allocate, and use livelihoods’ capitals. Utilizing the conceptual orientation of both DEF and SLF, this study aims first to identify the livelihood types or, more formally, livelihood profiles existing in the localities of the upper, mid-, and lower SMW per the combination of capitals they have access to. Secondly, this study identifies the main global change-related stressors and shocks that impact the development of these rural livelihoods. Finally, the relationships between profiles and adaptation to global change, encompassing environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change is defined.
The questions guiding this research are:
1) What are the main environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors and shocks associated with global change in rural communities with reference particularly to the SMW? 2) What are the livelihood profiles that exist in these communities and how do these vary in their dependence on different types of capitals or resources? 3) What are the combined effects of global changes on the rural livelihoods in the communities of the SMW? 4) How do rural households with different livelihood profiles perceive and adapt to stressors and shocks in the SMW? 5) What policy lessons can be derived from the study of the SMW in terms of adaptation policies for rural communities in arid Mexico, and in the arid regions of the world?
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The study’s hypothesis is that the perceived stressors, and the adaptive strategies regarding global change will be different depending on the type of livelihood profile a household has, because different capitals and entitlements are differentially affected by global change processes. These differences will play a role in the vulnerability dynamics and adaptation options available to each livelihood profile in the SMW communities.
3.2.Study area The San Miguel Watershed is a sub-system of the Sonora River Basin in central Sonora State, in arid Northwest Mexico. The watershed’s boundaries extend over six municipalities: Cucurpe, Opodepe, Rayón, San Miguel de Horcasitas (SMH), Carbó, and Hermosillo (see Figure 12). Because of geographic location and physiographic characteristics, the precipitation in the SMW shows a decreasing gradient from Cucurpe in the headwaters, to the Hermosillo valley in the lowest part (Camou-Healy 1998, CEA Sonora 2008). The region has a semi-arid regime with bi-modal precipitation in late summer (JuneSeptember) and winter (December-January) (Romo-Leon et al. 2014). The main municipalities within the watershed’s boundaries (excluding Hermosillo and Carbó) have a total population of 13,817 (less than one per cent of the state’s population), with 60 per cent concentrating in San Miguel de Horcasitas (INEGI 2010) (see Table 7). However, the lower watershed region also encompasses the state’s capital, Hermosillo city, which had almost 800,000 people in 2010 (INEGI 2010). The San Miguel river joins the main Sonora river channel before reaching the Abelardo L. Rodríguez dam, to the northeast of Hermosillo city. The entire SMW is highly dependent on water for agricultural uses, as indicated in the volumes allocated in Table 7.
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Figure 12. The San Miguel Watershed and the Sonora River Basin
Table 7. Features of the municipalities of the SMW
Municipality
2,213,344 11,452,487 11,648,350
Agricultural water uses in 2011 (m3/year)* 1,480,145 10,522,953 9,853,521
Percentage of water allocated to agriculture in 2011 (%) 67 92 85
Percentage of total State population (%)
Water allocated for all uses (m3/year)
958 2,878 1,599
0.04 0.11 0.06
Population in 2010
Cucurpe Opodepe Rayón San Miguel de Horcasitas Total in the SMW
8,382
0.31
20,921,349
14,816,181
71
13,817
0.52
46,235,530
36,672,800
79
Total in the SRB
859,703
32.29
584,348,310
378,293,062
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Source: elaborated by the author with data from INEGI 2010, and REPDA 2011 * This does not include uses for livestock ponds, only water for irrigation.
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In terms of collective management of land, in Sonora there are 997 agrarian units, and in the four main municipalities within the SMW, there are 18 of these units considering both ejidos and comunidades (See Table 8).
Table 8. Collective land management in the municipalities of the SMW
Municipality
Cucurpe Opodepe Rayón San Miguel de Horcasitas
156,799.00 223,709.00 88,036.00
Land area managed by ejidos and comunidades (hectares) 40,448.91 49,568.15 32,503.90
111,983.00
52,857.53
Municipal area (hectares)
% Municipal Number of land managed ejidos and by ejidos and comunidades comunidades
Number of members of ejidos and comunidades
% of municipal population represented by members
26% 22% 37%
3 6 5
368 757 641
38% 26% 40%
47%
4
518
6%
Source: elaborated by the author with data from INEGI 2006, 2010; and RAN 2015
The SMW is characterized by its aridity and intermittence of water flows. However, severe drought and environmental change in recent years have been threatening rural livelihoods. Also, higher temperatures and more variable precipitation with a trend to decreasing river flows are expected due to global warming in the future (Overpeck et al. 2013). Other important changes include the progressive expansion of mining activities, the rapid urbanization and agro-industrial expansion in the lower SMW, and the liberalization policies associated with removal of governmental support for the social sector of producers, transformation of land tenure, and changes in access to water (Aboites 2009, Eakin 2005).
3.3.Methods 3.3.1. Sample A total of 100 households in three municipalities within the SMW were surveyed through mixed snowball and purposive sampling technique: 33 households in Cucurpe at the upper
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SMW, 33 in Rayón at the mid-watershed and 34 in San Miguel de Horcasitas in the lower section. The surveys were conducted in the main towns of the municipalities, except for San Miguel de Horcasitas, where 80 per cent of the sample was taken from the head town (also named San Miguel de Horcasitas, n= 27) and 20 per cent from the neighboring town of Fábrica de los Ángeles (n= 7), around 10 kilometers to the south of the head locality, and with which it shares the ejido San Miguel de Horcasitas’ lands. Efforts were put to make the sample as spatially representative as possible by exploring the spatial distribution of settlements within each community (colonias) and then surveying several households in each of those. The purpose was to have the full range of livelihood activities in each locality together with the dimensions of vulnerability and adaptation associated to the livelihoods. The household is defined as the physical and social unit constituted by those that share the home and the food in this space. The survey was applied to an adult member in each household. Because the surveys were conducted usually in the morning, when most of the male members were working, around 70 per cent of the surveys were answered by women (see Table 9). This may introduce some bias, although the descriptive statistics share commonalities with the census statistics published by INEGI.
Table 9. Characteristics of survey informants Variable
Age
Gender
Years of schooling
Indicator Mean Median Max. Min. S.D. Fem. Masc. Mean Max. Min. S.D.
Full sample (n=100) 54 56 86 18 15 69 (69%) 31 (31%) 7 17 0 4
Cucurpe (n=33) 52 53 84 18 17 26 (78.8%) 7 (21.2%) 7 12 0 3
Rayón (n=33) 52 53 86 24 15 23 (69.7%) 10 (30.3%) 8 17 0 4
San Miguel de Horcasitas (n=34) 57 62 79 29 13 20 (58.8%) 14 (41.2%) 5 17 0 4
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3.3.2. Instruments and data collection In the first phase of this study, rapid rural appraisal was conducted in summer of 2015 to identify: a) main livelihood systems in the towns, b) current mechanisms to access water, land, and financial support for production, c) perceived changes in social-ecological variables, d) adaptive strategies related to climate, land and water access and control, and e) individual and organizational actors regarding access and management of these resources. After this first appraisal, the household survey was designed, piloted, and applied. It consists of 30 items distributed in three categories: A) Personal information from the interviewee and household, B) Household economic information, and C) Climate change knowledge, local impacts, and strategies for adaptation (see the survey in Appendix A, at the end of this document). The items include a combination of dichotomous, multiple-option, free-listing, and open-ended questions. The format is paper-based and the application was done individually, usually at the homes. Response time was between 20 and 45 minutes, although the respondent could talk beyond the items of the survey and notes were taken to reflect the narratives of each household type. The second phase consisted of semi-structured interviews with 27 rural producers, local authorities for the management of livestock (jueces de campo), and leaders of ejidos, comunidades, and producers’ associations in the three municipalities, and the questions covered the changes observed in socio-environmental conditions, the impacts on their activities, the changes in legal frames to access land and water resources, the strategies regarding adaptation of agrarian practices, the barriers existing for this purpose, and the connections between those aspects and future strategies to keep agrarian livelihoods and life conditions viable in the context of broader social, environmental, and institutional change
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(this interview is reproduced in Annex B). IRB approval was obtained for all instruments and procedures involved in this research. Documentary work and collection of statistical information from the Mexican Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food, the National Water Commission, the National Agrarian Registry, the Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development, and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography have been conducted since year 2012.
3.3.3. Data analysis After the household surveys were applied, a database was built and survey data captured. Analysis was conducted for obtaining descriptive statistics. Several variables regarding access to agricultural land and grazing lands, main economic activity of the head of household, and household’s income composition (how much it was agrarian, non-agrarian, or mixed) was qualitatively combined to define the four livelihood profiles (LPs) described in the results section below. Alternatively, a principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted on these variables and four factors also emerged that were coherent with the qualitatively defined LPs. The outputs of this analysis are in Appendix C. For each livelihood profile, descriptive statistics were obtained for the indicators of the four main types of livelihood capitals (Scoones 1998): 1) Natural and physical capital was analyzed through access to water, land, and infrastructure; 2) Human capital analysis include the age, gender, and educational levels of male and female heads of households in each LP; 3) Economic capital includes analyses of labor, income, and subsidies; and 4) Social capital is analyzed as memberships in local associations and land organizations (ejidos and comunidades). Comparative tables were created for these indicators. 104
In a second step, the differences between LPs in terms of the perceived stressors and shocks, as well as climate change knowledge, and adaptive strategies were analyzed. Statistical tests of the differences between LPs were also conducted. One way ANOVA was utilized for the dependent continuous variables, and chi square with Fisher’s exact tests for the categorical dependent variables, although these results are only mentioned in the text for those differences that were statistically significant. Throughout the description of results, selected examples from discourse content of the surveys and the interviews are used to illustrate specific points of the discussion.
3.4.Results 3.4.1. Livelihood profiles in the San Miguel Watershed Considering the variables defining access to agricultural and grazing land, access to water for irrigation, membership in land organizations (ejidos and comunidades), ownership of animals, and income composition of the households, four livelihood profiles (LP) were defined. A principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation including these variables was also conducted. The grouping of variables based on their factorial weights indicate that four distinguishable factors emerge from data, which are coherent with the four livelihood profiles defined qualitatively, and these explain the 75 per cent of the data variance (the main outputs of the statistical analysis conducted in STATA for the factor analysis can be seen in Appendix C at the end of this document). This partially validates the qualitative classification of profiles. The profiles differ in the distribution of capitals, as well as in how stressors and shocks are perceived, and adaptive responses performed (see Figure 13).
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Figure 13. Distribution of households among the Livelihood Profiles or LPs
In the livelihood profile 1 (LP1), “Agrarian with no or limited diversification”, the households have enough agricultural land and/or livestock to provide for the household development. The household may complement these by diversifying production or activities, but these would still happen within the boundaries of their agricultural and/or livestock enterprises, so the household’s income is totally or almost completely agrarian-based. Because of the focus on agriculture and livestock, it is highly probable that a household in the LP1 has at least a member in one of the land collective organizations (ejidos and/or comunidades), or the producers’ associations in the localities. An example of a household in LP1 is the home of J.R.D and M.V.R This is an elderly couple whose five children already migrated to urban centers in Hermosillo and Monterrey in Mexico, and Phoenix in the U.S. Only one of the children remains in Rayón; he lives in another home, works at the municipal administration, and sometimes helps J.R.D in the 106
fields. The couple live alone in one of the traditional houses close to the main town’s plaza. Their home is big, but old and partially built with traditional materials (adobe9 walls in the core rooms and block in the newest ones). They have a swamp cooler that has been enough so far to bear the heat, but they do not have much resources to repair it or make further improvements other than the strictly necessary. The husband J.R.D (male, age 75, six years of schooling, born in the neighboring town of Ures) is a medium size rancher, member of the Comunidad de Rayón and the local ranchers’ association, who owns approximately 50 cows and cultivates wheat, beans, maize, and forage in his seven irrigated hectares of private property. Wheat is for sale, while the other crops are for consumption by the household and their cattle. He is one of the few farmers in town that still cultivates food crops, while the rest has shifted entirely to forage crops. The reason is that he also has access to 400 hectares of communal grasslands, so he does not need to cultivate much additional forage since the grasslands have been sufficient. His wife M.V.R (female, age 74, six years of schooling, born in Nogales, Sonora) works at home, but during good years in which the grasslands are very productive and the cows have enough milk, she makes fresh and cooked cheese for selling at home. She is also a member of the Comunidad de Rayón, but has no land. The reported reason for this is that she has not approached yet the President of the Comunidad to do the allocation. One of M.V.R’s biggest concerns is the well-being of her children and grandchildren. Her husband’s main concern at the time of the interview was the long-standing drought that has affected the area during the last 15 years. The household has legal access to groundwater
9 Adobe is a handcrafted material made of mud and dry hay. People in the communities of Northwest Mexico and the Southwest U.S. made bricks with adobe to build up houses and other structures. The material has been progressively substituted by concrete bricks, which are more resistant and easy to manage, but less thermic.
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through water titles, but even with this water they lost several cows during the worst drought year, 2013. Almost their entire income is from agrarian activities, with small occasional contributions from their children (mostly as in-kind support). During the interview, J.R.D had some difficulties to hear the questions and to see the figures printed on the paper; he and his wife lack social security and medical services in the community. They must travel to Hermosillo, located approximately 120 kilometers to the southwest on a paved road, if they get sick, but they do not regularly access the services of specialists such as an ophthalmologist or a dentist. Most of the elder people in the towns of the SMW are in this same situation. J.R.D confided that his age, the lack of education, and poor resources are important constraints for improving their conditions because governmental support depends on grant applications with requirements that are difficult to address. J.R.D indicates that he has always been a rancher and farmer, and he does not know how to perform other activities, so everything that he does for diversification lies within the boundaries of his agrarian knowledge. Recently he tried to raise pigs by feeding them the buttermilk left from his cows’ milk, but there was not enough due to the drought, and he did not have the money to buy additional food for the pigs. This was not profitable, so he quit. During the drought, they have utilized emergency strategies, such as asking for credit (“pedir prestado”) to the buyer of their calves, and never to a banking institution, and they re-pay as soon as they have calves. Almost nobody in the towns of the SMW deems credit from a bank as a viable strategy. The reason for this is that the bank’s re-payment conditions are stable (i.e. interest rates), while the income of the homes and their capacity to address the payments vary depending on factors out of the control of people, such as rainfall or plagues. There was another example of a couple in Rayón that lost their milking cows and their ranch because they could not re-pay the bank, and had to migrate to Arizona to look for other jobs. 108
In the livelihood profile 2 (LP2), “Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian”, the household can have some agricultural land and/or some animals, but those represent a partial (and usually non-steady) income to the household. The household may rely on other forms of off-farm diversified jobs that offer a steady income, such as mining jobs in the upper watershed, or small commerce, selling domestic products, or urban-based activities in the mid- and lower watershed localities, but agriculture or livestock still provide important partial income for the household. In these cases, animals or land also work as a form of “savings account” for the households that lack financial services in their localities (none of the three municipalities has formal banking institutions). Also during droughts or crises, the nonagrarian income can help in supplying agricultural or livestock inputs, such as additional forage for cattle. Furthermore, the members of households in LP2 also may be participants of local producers’ associations, or land collective organizations, but this is not required. M.E.M is the head of a LP2 household (male, age 59, nine years of schooling, born in the town). He and his family live in a modern-looking brick house just in front of the main Rayón town’s plaza. M.E.M has a ranch in which he and his three male children work together. The household also owns and manages the only restaurant in the town; his wife L.F.V (female, age 58, and 6 years of schooling) is the manager of this restaurant in which one of her cousins helps as a waitress. The youngest of their three children lives with them and manages a little domestic store that sells machaca10 and other regional products from their ranch. The oldest children live in Hermosillo and own a butcher shop. The household owns 40 hectares of agricultural land under private property that is irrigated with groundwater from two legally registered wells for a total of 300,000 cubic
10
Machaca is beef that has been previously seasoned, dried, and shredded.
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meters of water per year. The access to secure water supply made it possible for M.E.M to lease the land during the last years to an agricultural company with U.S.-Mexico capital to cultivate zucchini squash for export. This endeavor produced 200 jobs for harvesting and packing the squash, which were fulfilled by people in the region, but mostly by daily wage agricultural laborers (“jornaleros”) from southern Mexico. In 2016 he was not able to get the contract with the zucchini producers, and lost the time window to lease the land to another agribusiness that rented several hundred hectares from producers in Rayón and Opodepe to cultivate Brussel sprouts for export too. During the survey, M.E.M mentioned that climate issues and lack of resources or support for production represent the two main problems or stressors he has faced in his activities so far. Although a very important component of this household’s income is agrarian, and many of their businesses depend on the ranch they have, the restaurant represents a facet of their livelihood portfolio that is less dependent on environmental vagaries than the ranching or agricultural activities and more dependent on the tourism fluxes in the town, which increase during special dates and holidays (summer vacations, Holy Week, the celebration of the town’s patron saint -Nuestra Señora del Nacameri or Our Lady of Nacameri-, and Christmas). This is also the case of another LP2 household lead by a woman who inherited the ranch from his late husband, and opened a little hostel in her home to supply lodging services to visitors. In part these are environmental risk-avoiding strategies, although M.E.M. also recognized that economic factors are more evident or important to them for livelihoods’ decision-making than environmental factors. Nonetheless, environmental factors are important in determining the success of further diversification activities. M.E.M also tried to
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cultivate a type of wild chili (“chiltepin”)11 for commercial purposes utilizing shade cloth in two hectares, but a freeze killed the plants, and he lost the investment. Freezes were also perceived to be more frequent lately in the three municipalities of the San Miguel Watershed. Another distinctive feature of M.E.M’s household and other households in LP2 is their progressive integration into more formal commercialization chains and market structures. M.E.M and his children created together a commercial association that has a legal figure as “Cooperative Society” (“Sociedad Cooperativa” or S.C.). The association is named after the ranch and the butcher store that the older children have in Hermosillo, which can be indicative of a process of trademark creation. The store has a Facebook page that one can follow.12 Furthermore, they are connected to other people from the same town that have other livelihood profiles (i.e. a mechanic and musician in the LP3 that was also interviewed and is part of a music band named “Santa Cecilia de Rayón”).13 Features associated to cultural and socio-economic globalization are adopted and utilized in multiple ways by the rural communities, and can burden or enhance livelihoods depending on the opportunities and constraints created by these interactions (i.e. leasing contracts that are not always positive for the producers on one hand, and Internet-based social media used for marketing purposes on the other hand, connecting the communities with potentially any other location in the world). What is important in this integration is that several of these households have been able to educate their children beyond the schooling years their parents had, and the generational knowledge and access to communication technologies is successfully integrated as part of the human capital in these households. This happens only partially in the agrarian LP1.
11
Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum “Rancho Santa Rosa”. https://www.facebook.com/SANTAROSARANCHO/ (Access: November 30, 2016). 13 “Santa Cecilia de Rayón”. https://www.facebook.com/gruposantaceciliaderayon/ (Access: November 30, 2016). 12
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In the livelihood profile 3 (LP3), “Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification”, households fully derive their incomes from steady non-agricultural jobs. The household may have agricultural land or animals, but the amounts are minimal or have non-productive functions, and there is low probability that somebody in the household is a member of a land collective organization (ejido or comunidad); or a member of local producers’ associations. There were cases in which the informant reported being a landless member of an ejido or comunidad. Although they did not receive arable land when they became members, they still hold their rights to the collective grasslands, which represent an opportunity for diversification (and transition to LP2 if they have money to buy cattle). This seems improbable, though, since arable land appears as the key factor for survival of ranchers during drought, when the collective grasslands are little productive and they use the agricultural land to cultivate forage crops. The type of jobs that are grouped under LP3 are usually miners, owners or attendants of grocery stores, hardware stores, mechanic or blacksmith workshops, folklore musicians, housemaids, among others, depending on the availability of non-agrarian job opportunities that each community has access to. These jobs are more stable than precarious daily wage jobs in the livelihood profile four. An example of a household in LP3 is that of S.Q.R and T.A.Q. They live in a house made with some adobe and block, at the periphery of Cucurpe. The spatial concentration of specific LPs households in particular areas of the towns was a characteristic observed also in the other two localities. Most of the households in LP1 and LP2 were closer to the towns’ main squares than households in LP3 and LP4; although no systematic recording of this feature was conducted to have definitive conclusions on this aspect. The income of this household comes totally from the work of T.A.Q (male, age 36, nine years of schooling), who has worked for the last four years as a miner in one of the gold 112
mines -Yamana Gold- installed near the head locality of Cucurpe around eight years ago. S.Q.R (female, age 39, nine years of schooling, born in town) works as a housewife. Per her report, she would like to work outside the home, but there are no jobs available. The lack of employment is not only a problem for women, but for the all the habitants, “si no fuera por la minera, muchos ya nos habríamos ido” (“if it wasn’t for the mine, many people would have had to go”). Before the mine came, T.A.Q worked as a daily wage laborer in temporal jobs. When Yamana Gold came to the town, S.Q.R started working in a dinner serving the mine’s employees in the locality; however, this job did not last long because later the mine opened a dinner in its own facilities, so S.Q.R and other women lost this employment source. She is also the daughter of a late farmer that was a member of the Comunidad de Cucurpe, but since she is not the only child of the family, and neither a man, she did not inherit any land. Additionally, her current household does not have animals or agricultural lands, so traditional female agrarian-related jobs (i.e. cheese-making, or small-scale orchards and fruit conserves) are not available to S.Q.R; although in most of the LP1 and LP2 households, female ownership of land and animals is also restricted. The couple lives with their two children, one of them is from a former marriage of S.Q.R, and the other from her current marriage. The younger -and usually more urban-likehouseholds in LP3 tend to be less traditional than those in LP1. Both sons are high-school students, and the eldest is planning to attend college next year. For S.Q.R, being able to send her children to study beyond high-school is a great advantage made possible by the income of her husband. The mine pays above average salaries in comparison with those available in the town for other activities, and the employees only require a minimum of secondary school (equivalent to nine years of schooling in the Mexican education system). The husband, T.A.Q, earns between 10,000 and 11,000 Mexican pesos per month (around $500 U.S. dollars 113
at the time this dissertation was written). There are, however, other LP3 households in Cucurpe whose members also work for the mine, but not through direct contracts, but on more insecure premises. They are outsourced through ascription to short-lived companies and perform non-mining services required by the mine (i.e. cleaning, cooking, driving buses, or operating machinery). Although the mines (there are other two mines in addition to Yamana Gold) represent an important source of employment allowing several households to move upward from LP4 to LP3, the security of these jobs is not guaranteed, and their existence depends on international prices of metals. This is something completely out of the control of Cucurpe’s town. In this case, in contrast with LP1 and LP2 that possess their means of production, the people with no ownership of those (i.e. LP3 and LP4, or the land-less and water-less people that in many cases are the children of households in LP1 or LP2) only have their workforce to offer in these globally-driven, market-oriented transactions. As explained in these paragraphs, each of these livelihoods relates in different ways to the globalized market system depending on their assets, and this correlates with the socio-economic and educational characteristics of its members, and indirectly with the life cycles of households. Many of the younger families in LP3 are somewhat connected (i.e. they are the children) of more agrarian and traditional households in LP1 and LP2 (Polanyi 1944). These are all interconnected rural livelihoods with varying but important degrees of market integration. The households in the livelihood profile 4 (LP4), “Non-steady diversified”, have no land or animals, they infrequently have members in producers’ or land organizations, and they lack stable jobs. They live on daily wages, in both agricultural and non-agricultural temporary jobs available in the localities. There is a significant component of gender inequality in these households. Many of them are led by single mothers that can have some 114
adult sons or daughters and their families living with them (extended households), or men that used to have some land or a few animals, but sold them because of sickness, economic crises, or water shortages. In several cases through the watershed, the households in this profile are still struggling to access public services, cooling and heating systems, and solid building materials for their homes; they lack health services and experience food insecurity. The situation of LP4 (and to some extent LP3) is also indicative of the gendered lack of access to natural capitals and livelihood opportunities reported by other studies in this region (Buechler 2009, 2015), and elsewhere in Mexico (Bee 2013, Campos et al. 2014). The most extreme case in this LP profile is a household in the lower SMW, in the head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas. The municipality of San Miguel de Horcasitas itself is also one of the poorest in Sonora (CONAPO 2000). The home is made of cardboard and lacks access to the potable water, sewage, and electricity public networks. The neighboring houses share the connections to these services with this LP4 household. The male head, F.I. (age 47, six years of schooling) works as a seasonal daily wage agricultural laborer harvesting table grapes in the neighboring locality of Pesqueira, located 13 kilometers to the northwest of San Miguel de Horcasitas on a dirt road. He also works occasionally as a mason. His wife, F.P.B (female, age 32, three years of schooling) works as a housewife and has some degree of delay in language development. They share the home with their two children, one is a girl that attends elementary school, and the other is a two-year-old girl. Also, the niece of F.P.B (age 24, nine years of schooling) lives in the home. Both parents of F.P.B were natives of San Miguel de Horcasitas, and the informant’s grandfather on her mother side was an ejidatario in the Ejido with the same name; however, the informant’s mother sold the land to another ejido man because of economic need. In this way, there was a generational shift in livelihoods related to economic stressors, and facilitated 115
by new institutions that enabled the selling of communally managed land (the PROCEDE titles facilitated this process in the case of ejidos). The most important aspect about these four livelihood profiles is that changes in environment, socio-economic conditions, and institutions and policies may affect them in different ways. For example, changes in CONAGUA’s rules to access ground- or surface water may be critical for those in LP1 and LP2, who are agricultural-dependent; not important at all for LP3 (the non-agrarian); and indirectly important for LP4 because they occasionally depend on daily wage agricultural labor. Increasing temperatures under climate change could be central to LP1 because of large livestock or crop operations, very important to LP2 households that still derive a significant portion of their income from agricultural activities; but also somewhat prominent to LP4, not because of agrarian reasons, but because they lack cooling systems and health services to address heat-related sicknesses; and some of them also rely on picking wild fruits for selling (like pitahayas, which are very susceptible to warming). The livelihood profiles are not necessarily indicators of socio-economic status, although there could be some parallels. For example, LP1 “Agrarian with no or limited diversification”, could mean that a household has enough land and/or animals to make a living from them (it is relatively well endowed). However, there may also be cases in which the household’s members have not had opportunities for economic diversification and being in LP1 means that one of the members have five cows and the household makes and sells daily a little cheese at home. It also could mean that the household has a milpa for subsistence agriculture, and all the members work as daily wage laborers harvesting table grapes, and that is why the household is categorized as LP1. The profile type refers to the income and identity composition rather than to the absolute amount of income that the household receives. An exception to this could be LP4 that includes all the households with no or almost 116
no agrarian assets, and where income is mainly from daily wage labor, both off-farm and onfarm, which results in general low income. LP4 households were usually the poorest. Almost one-third of the households were grouped in the LP4 (31 per cent of the 100 households sampled) (see Figure 13), which reflects the precarious conditions of rural communities. The higher local concentration of households in LP4 was found in Rayón at the middle SMW, with 39.4 per cent of the surveyed households in this group (see Table 10). This could be related to the fact that Rayón, in comparison with the upper and the lower SMW municipalities has less access to urban centers (like San Miguel de Horcasitas), or the border with the United States of America (as does Cucurpe), so less economic opportunities other than temporal agrarian jobs are available. However, there were non-statistically significant differences in the distribution of LPs among the three municipalities surveyed. The LP3 “Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification”, had the less households (14 of 100), with the lower local number in the San Miguel de Horcasitas municipality (8.8 per cent of the households sampled there). Urban-based, industrial activities are not yet well developed in the watershed, although some localized enterprises have emerged, or reemerged (for example, mining in Cucurpe). Table 10. Households per LPs in the SMW municipalities and the total sample
Livelihood Profiles (LP) LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian LP 3: Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification LP 4: Non-steady diversified Total households per municipality
Upper SMW
Mid- SMW
Lower SMW
Cucurpe
Rayón
San Miguel de Horcasitas
Total households per LP
7 (21.2%)
8 (24.2%)
12 (35.3%)
27 (27%)
12 (36.4%)
8 (24.2%)
8 (23.5%)
28 (28%)
7 (21.2%)
4 (12.1%)
3 (08.8%)
14 (14%)
7 (21.2%) 33 (100%)
13 (39.4%) 33 (100%)
11 (32.4%) 34 (100%)
31 (31%) 100 (100%)
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This does not obscure the fact that livelihood composition throughout the watershed is very dynamic. It is true that fully non-agrarian livelihoods are not common (as seen in the low numbers in LP3); nonetheless, the two diversified profiles (LP2 and LP4), together outnumber the fully agrarian LP1. This has been reported in literature on rural development for Mexico and other places (Bebbington 1999, Bryceson et al. 2000, Carton de Grammont 2009, Chambers and Conway 1991), and it might be considered when analyzing adaptation of rural social-ecological systems to global change. A livelihood profile is the outcome of different combinations of capitals. If these capitals are sensitive to global change in varying degrees (considering global change as environmental, socio-economic, and institutional changes) then, different livelihood profiles would be affected in different ways per the specific composition of capitals they encompass. For example, LP1 and LP2 could be very sensitive to new commercialization rules in international markets for livestock and food crops, but this also can combine with lack of credit and multi-year drought with negative overall consequences. On the other hand, LP3 could be sensitive to drought if this impacts their sources of jobs (for example, waterintensive mining operations in Cucurpe could be affected by drought too), and by international prices of goods and raw materials when those jobs are dependent on extractive industries. Furthermore, Mexican legislation regarding employment could be beneficial for large enterprises (for example, through flexible contracts), but not advantageous for local employees that deal with high uncertainty regarding the permanence and benefits of their job positions. This kind of relationships between environmental, socio-economic, and institutional drivers vary across livelihoods depending on the capitals on which they rely. San Miguel de Horcasitas, which is closer to the capital city, also presented the higher proportion of households in the LP1 (35.3 per cent of the households surveyed in that 118
municipality). San Miguel de Horcasitas has the highest proportion of its municipal territory under some form of collective management in comparison with the other SMW municipalities (47 per cent of the municipal territory is managed by four ejidos, with 518 members in total) (See Table 8). The large availability of land managed by collective organizations does not mean that more people have access to agrarian livelihoods, since the total number of members in these ejidos represent only six percent of the population size of the municipality. In the case of Rayón, the land managed by collective bodies represents 37 per cent of the municipal territory, but the number of members in these organizations equals 40 per cent of the total municipal population. In Cucurpe the land managed by collective organizations represents 26 per cent of the municipal land, and the members in those represent the 38 per cent of the municipal population size. Considering these data all together, the higher number of LP1 households in San Miguel de Horcasitas could be related to the presence of several large-scale agricultural enterprises in the San Miguel, Sonora, and Zanjón river valleys, instead of indicating that these households could fully live from their natural capital endowments (animals, crops, land, and water). These households may have some animals or arable plots for complementing their income, most of which is obtained from the activities available in nearby localities, which are also agrarian, and therefore these households are grouped into the LP1. San Miguel de Horcasitas’ residents would probably prefer those agricultural jobs (harvesting and packing table grapes; taking care of pigs, horses, or cattle; harvesting and packing pecans, among others) in the neighboring locality of Pesqueira instead of looking for urban jobs that require more qualifications and longer transportation times (the educational levels of heads of households in San Miguel de Horcasitas were the lowest of all the three municipalities surveyed). The low participation in land collective organizations and the low educational 119
levels can also be related to the fact that in San Miguel de Horcasitas the second largest number of households was concentrated in LP4 (32.4 per cent), with little or no opportunities for pursuing stable agricultural livelihoods, or off-farm steady jobs. 3.4.2. Distribution of capitals among the livelihood profiles 3.4.2.1.Natural and physical capital: water, land, and infrastructure
Land resources
Results indicate that less than half (44 per cent of the 100 households surveyed) reported having any type of agricultural land (private property, ejido, or communal) (See Table 11). As expected, the type of access/ownership varies per the type of livelihood profile, with the LP1 having the higher proportion of households with agricultural land (almost 90 per cent of the households), followed by the LP2 (64.3 per cent). However, it is notable that one third of the LP2 households do not have access to arable lands, and one quarter does not have access to grazing lands, but they still have a significant agrarian component in their income portfolios. The type of access/ownership also varied per municipality, with Cucurpe concentrating most of the communal access (there is only one ejido in the municipality -Ejido Seis de Enero-, and this is away from the head locality). San Miguel de Horcasitas concentrated the ejido tenure (there are no comunidades), and Rayón a mix of various types, with a predominance of private small-holdings (“pequeña propiedad”). More than half of the surveyed households in each town did not have any form of access to agricultural land. In contrast, more than half of the households in each locality had access to grazing lands (“agostaderos”) (54 per cent of the total sample), but these were also concentrated in LP1 and LP2 (88.9 and 75 per cent, respectively). 120
Table 11. Access and tenure of agricultural and grazing land per LP Livelihood Profile
LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification (n= 27)
LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian (n= 28)
LP 3: Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification (n= 14)
LP 4: Non-steady diversified (n= 31)
Total Sample (n=100)
Type of land ownership/access Ejido Communal Private tenure Multiple tenure Total w/access No access Ejido Communal Private tenure Multiple tenure Total w/access No access Ejido Communal Private tenure Multiple tenure Total w/access No access Ejido Communal Private tenure Multiple tenure Total w/access No access Ejido Communal Private tenure Multiple tenure Total w/access No access
Agricultural Land 9 (33.3%) 7 (25.9%) 8 (29.6%) 0 (0.0%) 24 (88.9%) 3 (11.1%) 4 (14.3%) 9 (32.1%) 4 (14.3%) 1 (3.6%) 18 (64.3%) 10 (35.7%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (7.1%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (7.1%) 13 (92.9%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (3.2%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (3.2%) 30 (96.8%) 13 (13%) 17 (17%) 13 (13%) 1 (01%) 44 (44%) 56 (56%)
Grazing Land 13 (48.1%) 7 (25.9%) 0 (0.0%) 4 (14.8%) 24 (88.9%) 3 (11.1%) 7 (25.0%) 9 (32.1%) 2 (7.14%) 3 (10.7%) 21 (75.0%) 7 (25.0%) 0 (0.0%) 2 (14.3%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 2 (14.3%) 12 (85.7%) 2 (6.5%) 4 (12.9%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 6 (19.4%) 25 (80.6%) 22 (22%) 22 (22%) 7 (07%) 2 (01%) 53 (53%) 47 (47%)
Both ejidos and comunidades provide two types of land access: one parcel for the household’s agricultural production, and access to communally managed grazing lands for livestock. In theory, the area to which each member has rights is arithmetically determined by dividing the total common allotment between the total number of members. However, it is possible to increase the area by purchasing rights from another member. There is also a limit on the number of animal units allowed per member,14 but several informants confided
14
An animal unit is usually a live cow and its calf or a grown adult bull. This is a reference of how much the land can carry in terms of productivity.
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that this is not systematically enforced, a finding reported around 30 years ago by Sheridan (1988) in Cucurpe, at the headwaters of the SMW. Not all the members in the surveyed households have agricultural plots assigned, and not all utilize the common grazing lands (around 10 per cent of the 53 households with access to grazing lands reported not using them, and this was connected to drought and lack of vegetation). Furthermore, in the case of the comunidades, since they are traditionally selforganized social structures with historic roots, the comuneros surveyed referred to their agricultural plots as “pequeña propiedad” (small private landholding) and considered it as fully private property even if, legally speaking, communal property is different from legal ownership. Ejido informants referred to their agricultural land as “milpa” (small plot usually for subsistence agriculture) and never as “pequeña propiedad”. These patterns in land access and use were also found by Sheridan (1988) in the headwaters. In terms of the use of land, many of those with agricultural land are highly focused on forage crops’ production (26 out of 44 households, or 59.1 per cent) (see Table 12). The cultivation of food crops was more common among households in the LP1 (25 per cent of the households that have agricultural land in this LP), but this is related to the fact that several households in this group are devoted to commercial production of these crops. The percentages indicate, first, that agricultural activities are not as broadly distributed as could be expected, considering that these have historically been ranching communities (only half had access to grazing lands, and less than half to agricultural land); and second, that the focus of agriculture is still ranching and livestock oriented, while food crops are relegated. This may be also connected to historical changes of the livestock industries and to wheat cultivation in the twentieth century.
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Several households in LP1 and LP2 reported that they were not producing anything in their agricultural plots (20.8 and 22.2 per cent, respectively). Most of these cases were in San Miguel de Horcasitas, in the lower SMW, and the main reason for inactivity of agricultural lands was multi-year drought. The head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas still relies on surface water distributed through an acequia system for irrigation (the system serving the head locality constitutes an irrigation unit called “El Bacajúzari”).15
Table 12. Households cultivating food and forage crops per LP with agricultural land Livelihood Profile LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification with agricultural land (n= 24) LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian with agricultural land (n= 18) LP 3: Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification with agricultural land (n= 1) LP 4: Non-steady diversified with agricultural land (n=1) Total sample with agricultural land (n=44)
Households’ producing each type of crops (use of land) Food crops 6 (25.0%) Forage crops 13 (54.2%) Total w/crops 19 (79.2%) Not cultivating now 5 (20.8%) Food crops 3 (16.7%) Forage crops 11 (61.1%) Total w/crops 14 (77.8%) Not cultivating now 4 (22.2%) Food crops 0 (0.0%) Forage crops 1 (100%) Total w/crops 1 (100%) Not cultivating now 0 (0.0%) Food crops 0 (0.0%) Forage crops 1 (100%) Total w/crops 1 (100%) Not cultivating now 0 (0.0%) Food crops 9 (20.5%) Forage crops 26 (59.1%) Total w/crops 35 (79.5%) Not cultivating now 9 (20.5%)
In accordance with the informants in the head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas, the drought started around 15-18 years ago, and the social organization for the maintenance and scheduled use of the acequias started to fail because there was no water to distribute. As drought years accumulated, less and less common activities were pursued in El Bacajúzari.
15 For an explanation on Unidades de Riego, and Distritos de Riego, refer to: Pedroza-González, E. and G.A. Hinojosa Cuellar. 2014. Manejo y distribución del agua en distritos de riego. Breve introducción didáctica. Jiutepec, Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua (IMTA).
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By the time the rains came back in 2015, it was very difficult to re-organize all the members; some of them were not even in town anymore. The canals were not cleaned on time to use the rainfall, many of them were out of service, and the president of the unit was not able to get everybody together again (see one of these acequia canals in Figure 14). There are many known cases of human organization affecting ecological outcomes in arid watersheds; but this is an example of how ecological dynamics can, in turn, undermine human organization too. The livelihood profiles most affected by this lack of water, and hence lack of organization were LP1 and LP2, and only indirectly LP4 that relies on daily wage labor provided by landholders in the town.
Figure 14. An acequia to the north of the head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas in a site known as “El Cajón”. The canal is parallel to the river bed, carved out of the rock riverbank. This part of the river has not dried up, but the canal was temporarily repaired by piling up sandbags over the earthen border (photo credit: America Lutz, date: 04-02-2016).
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Land access and use is characterized by complex dynamics. In the towns, there is a constellation of land tenure/access/use combinations. There was a case in which a producer had all forms of land ownership through purchases and inheritance. This multiple tenure was adaptive for him, and the legal framework for land in Mexico does not limit this access. He was a member of a comunidad and a private landholder in the mid-watershed, but also a member of an ejido in the lower watershed, which allowed him to use combinations of resources at different parts of the watershed when drought hit the area. He had a large livestock facility in one of these, cultivated agave for bacanora (a type of hand crafted beverage like tequila or mescal) in another, and left some land for forage crops if needed. Additional land is a key factor for enhancing adaptive capacity of ranching-based livelihoods, as established in previous studies of the area (Sheridan 1988) because arable land can be shifted from food crops to fodder production relatively easy when the monte (open grazing land) is little productive. On the other hand, when asked about this multiple ownership, the informant said that he prefers to stay as an ejidatario instead of getting full private ownership because support from SAGARPA was much better for the social land sector or the collective communities (ejidos and comunidades) than for private landholders. Considering that his household was part of the LP1 (he had more than 800 cattle heads, and other agrarian-related businesses), it can be said that support for producers of ejidos and comunidades is monopolized by applicants within the collective organizations who have advantages over poorer and less educated members (the majority). These institutional issues in accessing and governing resources are approached in detail in the next chapter. When the Mexican agrarian distribution was formally ended in 1992, a series of restrictions were put on the process for fully privatizing the land of ejidos and comunidades. Ejidatarios could sell their assigned plots, but this had to be approved by most of the ejido’s 125
committee (the “asamblea ejidal”, formed by all the members). Also, any plot of land to be sold within the boundaries of the community should have as a priority market the rest of the community members, and only after nobody there wants to buy it, can it go to external buyers. The informants through the watershed indicated that these are just mere formalities, and land succession, purchase, and selling follow a market logic and the internal rules within the ejidos and comunidades are not followed, but land ownership changes are highly discretional. For several of the current ejidatarios and comuneros, one of the most notorious consequences of this opening for privatization is the institutional fragmentation of land tenure (one can have a plot of private land among ejido plots, or vice versa). This sometimes can be followed by ecological fragmentation, since the newcomers to the communities usually have a different mindset from that of the traditional members. They do not attend the meetings concerning the ejido or comunidad, and they are usually not looking to become farmers or ranchers, but to have a second home or a vacation home in these rural locations. This was a common case in the lower watershed, just a couple of tens of kilometers away from the capital of the state, and at the mid-watershed with natives that migrated to the USA, and came back with enough money to buy a property for vacations in town. This also happened with the sons and daughters of landholders who migrated out of town and did not come back. On the other hand, there were other examples mentioned by the informants in which the newcomers used the land as part of larger concentrations devoted to large scale agricultural or livestock production. In that case, the land most probably would transition to full ownership instead of remaining as land of a collective organization, because tenure security is an important factor in materializing productive decisions. In addition to this situation, there are multiple cases in which land is leased for agricultural or livestock production with or without formal contracts; something that is also 126
common for ejido or communal land that is not cultivated directly by the right holder. In the town of Rayón at the mid- watershed, large scale contractors paid landholders for the use of land and water. Although land and water are separated in Mexican legislation as explained in the next chapter, they should be spatially together to be useful for livelihood purposes. Land that has no water access is not worthy in the eyes of the SMW people (it is scornfully called a “temporalito”, or tiny rain-fed plot). Leasing land could be better than cultivating it and large companies have productive advantages to make the business profitable and less risky because of economies of scale, while many social sector producers do not have the money and capacity to do this. During data collection in the summer of 2016, the interviewees of Rayón indicated that a large agribusiness with U.S.-Mexican capital leased land from many landholders (private and collective) for cultivating between 300 and 400 hectares of Brussel sprouts for exporting to the United States of America. These companies are mobile and they carry their own technological packages for production (seeds, chemicals, and strategies for efficient production) and the landholders have no voice in the decision-making other than what they can negotiate beforehand in usually short-term contracts. The ecological and social effects of this are not fully understood or evident yet, but there is an increasing trend in the occurrence of these type of agreements. As explained in the case example of LP2, M.E.M, the land needs secure water access to be attractive for contractors. Leasing land could be a form of adaptive strategy though reducing or avoiding the risks associated to agricultural ventures.
Water resources In terms of water access, 16 of the 44 households with agricultural land (36.4 per cent) rely primarily on surface river water by traditional acequia irrigation systems; while 25 127
households (56.8 per cent) have groundwater from wells as the primary source of water (see Table 13). The profile with the higher reliance on surface water is LP1 (45.8 per cent of households with agricultural land in this group), while LP2 relies mostly on groundwater (66.7 per cent of the households with agricultural land in this LP). Table 13. Sources of water for irrigation among households with agricultural land Livelihood Profile LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification with agricultural land (n= 24) LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian with agricultural land (n= 18) LP 3: Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification with agricultural land (n= 1) LP 4: Non-steady diversified with agricultural land (n=1)
Total sample with agricultural land (n=44)
Source of water for irrigation Surface 11 (45.8%) Groundwater 13 (54.2%) Total w/access 24 (100%) No access 0 (0%) Surface 4 (22.2%) Groundwater 12 (66.7%) Total w/access 16 (88.9%) No access 2 (11.1%) Surface 0 (0%) Groundwater 0 (0%) Total w/access 0 (0%) No access 1 (100%) Surface 1 (100%) Groundwater 0 (0%) Total w/access 1 (100%) No access 0 (0%) Surface 16 (36.4%) Groundwater 25 (56.8%) Total w/access 41 (93.2%) No access 3 (6.8%)
Depending on the source of water for agricultural production, the impacts of global change will be differentiated. For example, those relying on surface and rainfall water will face water shortages if projections of decreasing precipitation for the Southwest United States- Northwest Mexico region become a reality. On the other hand, those relying on groundwater will also go through the impacts of environmental change and water shortages, but an additional burden will come from stricter water policies. On the other hand, by relying on groundwater, households in LP2 can buffer the impacts of drought, at least in the short term. This could be associated to the fact that these households enter in more demanding livelihood combinations (usually agricultural plus commerce, or market participation) 128
because they can keep contracts and continuous supply thanks to their advantageous access to groundwater. Several of the informants reported that CONAGUA has been much more attentive to groundwater regulation than of any other form of water regulation. The ranchers and farmers that answered the semi-structured interviews in the three communities of the watershed reported that during different moments since the year 2000, agents from CONAGUA have visited the towns to explain the rules regarding groundwater, the necessity to install water meters, and have even tried to participate in the local governance of water through contacting the leaders and users of irrigation units. The attitude and responses of the producers to these approaches are mixed, ranging from cooperation to open distrust. One of the interviewees in the upper watershed said, regarding CONAGUA’s approaches, that “…no nos hemos dejado” (“…we have not let this to happen”). Others have doubts of the work of the agency and the incapacity to reach all the stakeholders and community members. “La CONAGUA hacía muchas cosas de las que ni siquiera se enteraba la gente” (“the water agency has done a lot of things that people were not aware of”). Although direct consultation to the online Public Registry of Water Rights (REPDA) was done, it was difficult to precisely determine the type of right holding that a household had to water (if any) for productive purposes through the household survey. Several explanations are possible: 70 percent of the survey respondents were women, who in most cases did not have enough or accurate information on this. Second, when male heads of households were interviewed, in many cases they did not provide this information accurately, or did not answer explicitly the question even though the researcher assured them of the confidentiality of their responses, and reiterated that she was not an employee of CONAGUA. And third, several respondents were part of associations that have right titles 129
issued to collective figures and not individuals per se. For example, for the mid-watershed municipality -Rayón- up to July 2016, REPDA enlisted 22 collective right titles distributed between the Comunidad de Rayón, Ejido de Rayón, and several irrigation units. However, REPDA data should be considered carefully, because the information lacks reliability, it is not updated regularly, and many places in the state lack water metering and surveillance. To know the actual distribution of water between members in collective management organizations, it is necessary to understand the local arrangements for distributing the resource, and these arrangements are modified depending the time of the year, the specific requirements of the crops, the number of users that cultivated something, and the availability of water at that point of time and space. This makes it very difficult to track down the internal architecture of water entitlements (Adger and Kelly 1999) in these collective bodies. A couple survey informants were comfortable enough to say that they were using wells to give water to animals without issuing a permission from the agency or any notification, which per law, they are mandated to do. Since CONAGUA calculates water balances in part by using the information on the right titles, gaps in information due to non-metered extractions are an additional challenge for an adequate analysis of water uses and distribution. Digging a well is used as an adaptive strategy by ranchers that previously relied on surface river water. Actions that prove adaptive in the short term and local scale (such as digging a well for animals), can have important negative consequences if accumulated over larger spatial and temporal scales. Even if information on water right titles was totally clear, updated, and fully available, the legal situation of the access differs from what happens in the fields. For example, a farmer who reported individual water titles for two deep wells (this was confirmed in REPDA), also reported that he shares the water and the pumping energy costs with their neighbors, or with 130
relatives in need of water. Others may sell water from their wells to people who need it for animals during drought, and the transaction is done verbally, or "by word” (“apalabramiento”) instead of formal, trackable contracts. These changes in access that depend more on solidarity and social capital cannot be properly accounted for in CONAGUA’s registries. The local level is extremely dynamic and flexible in terms of responses to climate and market challenges that these communities face. Federal governmental institutions and agencies, on the other hand, are much slower in their responses, and sometimes contradictory with local customs. More than half of households with agricultural lands still irrigate their fields by flooding techniques (63.6 per cent reported the use of “agua rodada”, “tablas”, “menglas”, or “pala y canal”) (see Table 14) no matter whether the source is ground- or surface water. A major proportion of households utilizing a technified irrigation system corresponds to LP1 (20.8 per cent of the households in the LP), but even in this group irrigation by flooding is quite common. Only those more progressive or better endowed farmers have ventured into technified irrigation systems, but this is a minority, and is concentrated especially in the midwatershed town (Rayón), where 50 per cent of the surveyed household that had access to agricultural lands were also using a technified irrigation system in parts or all their fields (numbers per municipality are not shown). For two commercial farmers in this town, these systems are “the ultimate agricultural solution” for facing climate change, and made a big difference for them during the multi-year drought that they endured for the last years. The high investment required for this type of systems imply that only those with financial resources can ultimately access them; and the investment is worth only in cases of high-value crops, such as vegetables, fruits, pecans or peanuts (although some invest in irrigation systems for alfalfa, a highly valued and productive fodder crop that requires big 131
volumes of water). Other ecological outcomes of technified irrigation systems that have been recognized in literature are lower underground infiltration of water, decreased recharge of aquifers, and increased area of cultivation (Mayagoitia et al. 2012, Cox and Ross 2011, Cox 2014, Fernald et al. 2015, Scott et al. 2014), so still in these cases of high efficiency in water use there are resilience trade-offs that is necessary to recognize.
Table 14. Water rights and irrigation among households with agricultural land Individual rights for agricultural use registered in REPDA* 5 (20.8%)
The household uses technified irrigation partially or totally 5 (20.8%)
18 (75.0%)
14 (58.3%)
1 (4.2%) 4 (22.2%)
5 (20.8%) 3 (16.7%)
13 (72.2%)
12 (66.6%)
No information
1 (5.6%)
3 (16.7%)
Yes
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
No
1 (100%)
1 (100%)
No information
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Yes No
0 (0.0%) 1 (100%)
0 (0.0%) 1 (100%)
No information
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Livelihood Profile Yes
LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification with agricultural land (n= 24)
No
LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian with agricultural land (n= 18)
No
LP 3: Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification with agricultural land (n= 1) LP 4: Non-steady diversified with agricultural land (n=1)
Total sample with agricultural land (n=44)
No information Yes
Yes
9 (20.5%)
8 (18.2%)
No
33 (75.0%)
28 (63.6%)
2 (4.5%)
8 (18.2%)
No information
* The title was searched for by consulting the online database of CONAGUA using information from the surveys. Available at: http://app.conagua.gob.mx/Repda.aspx (Access: November 30, 2016).
SAGARPA in coordination with CONAGUA, has special programs for installing technified irrigation systems, but those require the elaboration of grant proposals well beyond the literacy of the households (the average schooling years of the heads of the surveyed households was around seven years, or just above Mexican elementary school; while only seven out of 100 had some form of technical or college-level education). Additionally, many of these programs deliver the financial support after the investment has been made, so those 132
with no starting financial capital cannot benefit from them. In the words of one informant, “…esos programas son para los ricos” (“…those programs are for the rich people”).
3.4.2.2.Human capital: age, gender, and education In Table 15 the demographic characteristics of the households are summarized for the full sample and each LP. Heads of households in LP1 are, on average, older than in the other three groups. Most them are male (88.9 per cent), and they have completed six years of schooling on average. This indicates more traditional agrarian households in comparison to the other groups. These households have also the smaller size of the sample (2.8 members per household, on average). During the surveys, it was notable that many of them were composed by old couples living alone that could educate their children beyond the school degrees available in town, so they could migrate out of town and get urban-based jobs. For the members of LP1, older age and lack of further formal education were critical factors why they could not diversify out of agriculture and ranching, so they had to bear the impacts of environmental stressors and shocks, and “endure” as much as possible. Some of them even lost their cattle and sold their endowments because of the incapacity to get other source of income to support the main agricultural activity of the household during drought. Those in LP2 were in a better position to face multi-year drought when it started, because they had better abilities and resources to complement their incomes by opening new businesses, or looking for another job in the community or somewhere else in the region. Several of the better endowed households in the sample are part of LP2. In this sense, additional education and younger age could be as important assets as additional water and land for procuring a rural livelihood. The role of education in rural economic development and diversification has been reported before in literature (Bezu and Holden 2014, Ellis 1998, 133
Vasquez-Leon 2009a), and is confirmed by this study. On the other hand, informants were aware that older age represents a source of vulnerability not only because of economic reasons, but also because sicknesses and weakness make the elderly more susceptible to climate extremes. This combines with the lack of adequate medical and public services in the localities, and pose novel challenges for these populations. Heads of households in LP2 are median age (55.1 years old, on average), 75 per cent of them are male, and they have the higher educational average level of the three groups, followed by LP3 (7.9 and 7.6 years on average, respectively), which could be expected given that partial or total diversification out of agriculture in rural communities requires other set of skills, which are acquired by going beyond elementary school. LP2 and LP4 also had the higher average numbers of household members (3.6 and 3.7, respectively). The larger size of the household could mean that more members can devote labor to different activities and contribute to the global income of the household (Ellis 1998), although it also means that more resources are required to sustain all the members. Heads of household in LP3 are younger than in the other groups, and predominantly male (78.6 per cent). Meanwhile, the higher proportion of households headed by women is found in LP4 (25.8 per cent) followed by LP2 (25 per cent). This is very important in the case of LP4 because this livelihood profile includes the households that have no access to steady income, have low levels or none of natural assets and endowments, almost no membership in organizations that could add to their adaptive capacity, and the second lowest educational average of the sample. Overall, the fact that many of the female-headed households were found in the LP4 is indicative of the gendered access to natural capital for pursuing an agrarian livelihood, which is detrimental to women, especially if they are single. The livelihood opportunities of LP4 are limited to locally available daily wage labor, which 134
frequently does not have social security or benefits. In the case of economic or environmental crises, these households have the most vulnerability because of indirect impact on their sources of employment, and because they could face difficulties to access more specialized jobs that require higher education or migration to other locations with more expensive lifestyles. Finally, these households also had challenges in accessing domestic equipment to adapt to climate extremes (particularly heating and cooling systems).
Table 15. Demographics of the households and heads of households Variable Age of the head of household Gender of the head of household Years of schooling of the head of household Size of household (number of people) Population reported in surveyed households
Mean Max. Min. S.D. Fem.
56.8 84 30 12.3 21 (21%)
Livelihood Profile 1 (n=27) 65.7 84 48 8.3 3 (11.1%)
Masc.
79 (79%)
24 (88.9%)
21 (75.0%)
11 (78.6%)
23 (74.2%)
Mean Max. Min. S.D. Mean Max. Min. S.D. Fem. Masc.
6.9 17 0 3.6 3.4 9 1 1.7 171 (49.7%) 169 (50.3%)
6.0 15 0 3.5 2.8 6 1 1.3 34 (45.3%) 41 (54.7%)
7.9 17 2 4.0 3.6 7 1 1.7 51 (50.0%) 51 (50.0%)
7.6 17 1 3.7 3.5 6 1 1.7 27 (55.1%) 22 (44.9%)
6.4 12 0 3.1 3.7 9 1 1.9 59 (51.8%) 55 (48.2%)
Total
340 (100%)
75 (100%)
102 (100%)
49 (100%)
114 (100%)
Indicator
Full sample (n=100)
Livelihood Profile 2 (n=28) 55.1 77 33 13.3 7 (25.0%)
Livelihood Profile 3 (n=14) 50.9 66 30 11.0 3 (21.4%)
Livelihood Profile 4 (n=31) 53.1 78 33 11.0 8 (25.8%)
3.4.2.3.Economic capital: labor, income, and subsidies Table 16 presents the summary of the livelihood activities of the heads of households, as well as the number of sources and type of income composition per household. There is not a oneto-one correspondence between the main activity of the head of household, the income composition, and the livelihood profile because the analysis was conducted on the responses of the informants to the surveys, and there were separate questions regarding the sources of 135
income and the activity of the head and members. For example, there were cases in which the main activity reported by the head of household was “housewife” (categorized as “housework” in the table) but the main income source of the household was livestock; or also cases in which the informant said that the main activity was “rancher”, while an important portion of the income came from children’s help, the wife’s job, a pension, or an off-farm job. However, in general terms, there is coherence between the variables in the table below and the livelihood profiles defined for the analysis. The thesis on de-agrarianization is further supported by type of jobs performed by the heads of the surveyed households and the main sources of income (in almost half of the surveyed households it is a combination of agrarian and non-agrarian, or mixed sources) (47 per cent). There is also an important income source coming from governmental support, with 45 of the 100 households receiving some type of financial transfer. The main governmental programs identified from the surveys are “Prospera”, “65 y más” (previously known as “70 y más”), and support from SAGARPA. Prospera is the flagship program for social development and extreme poverty in Mexico. It is the successor of Oportunidades (20072014), Progresa (2002-2007) and the former Pronasol or Solidaridad (1988-2002). It consists of direct monetary support for households in lower socio-economic conditions to support health, education, and food security. The amounts are deposited periodically to a debit card usually managed by the female adult responsible of the household, and depend on the specific characteristics of the household (number of children, number of children in school, number of elderly people, etc.). Per the responses of the surveyed households, the amounts are just complementary to their incomes, but critical for everyday expenses in food products, or for school materials of children.
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The program for the elderly consists in money support payable every two months. “65 y más” gives $580.00 Mexican pesos per month to the beneficiaries (this roughly equals 31 U.S. dollars in October 2016). This program was formerly known as “70 y más”, but later it widened its scope to include people of 65 years old and beyond. Nonetheless, people in the communities kept calling it either “65 y más” or “70 y más”. Furthermore, 20 per cent of the households surveyed are beneficiaries of this program, which indicates the aging of the rural population in the region. This number is as high as the number of households receiving support for agrarian production from SAGARPA. SAGARPA’s flagship programs PROCAMPO and PROGAN are also longstanding and well known in the communities. PROCAMPO consists of direct support for agricultural production depending on several criteria: the agricultural season (spring-summer, and fallwinter), the type of crop cultivated, the type of system supported (subsistence, in transition, or commercial), the hydrologic regime (rain fed or irrigated), and the number of hectares. In 2014, PROCAMPO support ranged between $963 and $1500 Mexican pesos per hectare, with the financial amounts decreasing as the system goes from subsistence to commerciallyoriented. PROGAN also offers direct monetary support for cattle for production of meat, milk, or both; and for ovine, caprine, or apicultural operations. The amount payable per cow ranged between $280 and $350 Mexican pesos per animal in 2014, and the amount also decreased as the number of the animals per producer increased.16 Note that there are single households that can receive more than one type of governmental support (the categories of
16 The updated amounts of support are indicated in the Rules of Operation of SAGARPA Programs, published in the Mexican Official Bulletin of the Federation on 12-30-2015. http://www.dof.gob.mx/nota_detalle.php?codigo=5421845&fecha=30/12/2015 (Access: November 30, 2016).
137
governmental support are not mutually exclusive as are the main activity of the head of household or the household income composition). As expected, LP1 has the highest proportion of households with heads performing agrarian activities (85.2 per cent), income composition mainly agrarian (77.8 per cent), and more households receiving productive support from SAGARPA among the livelihood profiles (44.4 per cent of the households). However, another 44.4 per cent of the households in the LP1 did not report receiving any support. In turn, the descriptive statistics for the LP2 reflect the diversification pathway of this profile; half of the households in the group reported that the head had a non-agrarian job (50 per cent), followed by heads with agrarian activities (32.1 per cent). The income composition of LP2 households was mixed in 71.4 per cent of the cases, although agrarian income was also somewhat frequent (17.9 per cent). In the other diversified profile, LP4, most households reported to have mixed income composition (67.7 per cent). However, in the LP4 cases, more heads of households also reported having mixed activities (48.4 per cent), mostly as on-farm and off-farm daily wage laborers. Finally, all LP3 households’ heads were working on non-agrarian activities, the income composition was fully non-agrarian, and they did not receive governmental support other than for social development (Prospera). From all the LPs, proportionally more households in LP4 received social development support, which is related to their poverty. Table 16. Income composition among households Main activity of the head of household
LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification (n= 27)
Number of income sources of the household Mean 2.6
Agrarian
23 (85.2%)
Nonagrarian
0 (0.0%)
Max
4
Mixed
0 (0.0%)
Min
1
Household’s income composition
Household receives governmental support
Mainly agrarian
21 (77.8%)
Mainly nonagrarian Mixed
0 (0.0%)
Elderly
7 (25.9%)
6 (22.2%)
Sagarpa
12 (44.4%)
Prospera
1 (3.7%)
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Main activity of the head of household
LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian (n= 28)
LP 3: Nonagrarian with no or limited diversification (n= 14)
LP 4: Nonsteady diversified (n= 31)
Total Sample n=100)
Housework
3 (11.1%)
Retired/No activity
1 (3.7%)
Number of income sources of the household SD 0.89
Agrarian
9 (32.1%)
Mean
Nonagrarian
14 (50.0%)
Household’s income composition
Household receives governmental support Other
2 (7.4%)
No gov. support
12 (44.4%) 5 (17.9%)
3.0
Mainly agrarian
5 (17.9%)
Prospera
Max
5
3 (10.7%)
Elderly
10 (35.7%)
1 (3.6%)
Min
2
Mainly nonagrarian Mixed
20 (71.4%)
Sagarpa
7 (25.0%)
Housework
4 (14.3%)
SD
Retired/No activity
0 (0.0%)
Agrarian
0 (0.0%)
Nonagrarian
11 (78.6%)
Mixed
Mixed
Mean
0.79
Other
1.7
Mainly agrarian
0 (0.0%)
Max
3
14 (100%)
0 (0.0%)
Min
1
Mainly nonagrarian Mixed
Housework
0 (0.0%)
SD
Retired/No activity
3 (21.4%)
Agrarian
1 (3.2%)
Mean
Nonagrarian
7 (22.6%)
0 (0%)
0.83
1 (3.6%)
No gov. support
9 (32.1%)
Prospera
1 (7.1%)
Elderly
0 (0.0%)
Sagarpa
0 (0.0%)
Other
0 (0.0%)
No gov. support
13 (92.9%)
Prospera
7 (22.6%)
2.5
Mainly agrarian
2 (6.5%)
Max
5
8 (25.8%)
Elderly
3 (9.7%)
15 (48.4%)
Min
1
Mainly nonagrarian Mixed
21 (67.7%)
Sagarpa
1 (3.2%)
Housework
7 (22.6%)
SD
Other
0 (0.0%)
Retired/No activity
1 (3.2%)
Agrarian
33 (33%)
Mean
Nonagrarian
32 (32%)
Mixed
16 (16%)
Mixed
0.93
No gov. support
21 (67.7%)
2.6
Mainly agrarian
28 (28%)
Prospera
14 (14%)
Max
5
25 (25%)
Elderly
20 (20%)
Min
1
Mainly nonagrarian Mixed
47 (47%)
Sagarpa
20 (20%)
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Main activity of the head of household Housework
14 (14%)
Retired/No activity
5 (5%)
Number of income sources of the household SD 0.95
Household’s income composition
Household receives governmental support Other No gov. support
3 (3%) 55 (55%)
In addition to the analysis per livelihood profile, analysis of the distribution of income and support programs per municipality was conducted, but those results are not included here. That analysis showed that, with similar proportions of agricultural and grazing lands among the sampled households in the three municipalities, in Rayón three times more households received individualized productive support from SAGARPA as compared with Cucurpe, and six times more than San Miguel de Horcasitas. Online registries of the beneficiaries of PROCAMPO and PROGAN, showed that some communities receive support collectively (i.e. a large PROGAN disbursement for the entire ejido), but this goes through collectively decided distribution and management instead of stablishing a direct connection between the agency and the individual producer, as it happens in Rayón. Also, the type of support received in SMH was more focused on social development (poverty alleviation) than in the upper and middle watershed towns. In terms of productive support and subsidies from SAGARPA, while PROGAN and PROCAMPO are direct transfers that depend on the amount of land or livestock that the applicant has, the support for machinery or infrastructure building requires elaboration of special proposals where the investment needs to be properly described and justified. Only those with better knowledge, connections to agricultural advisors, and computer literacy can use them. Their privileged access is used as a means for establishing asymmetric power relationships with the rest of the community. There were no few occasions in which the
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informants of the surveys indicated that municipal authorities, leaders of producers’ associations, or leaders of land collective bodies were the most benefitted. In one of the localities, the people that supported the elected municipal president expected that this political support would be paid back by providing informal loans, advising on proposal elaboration, and accessing networks to facilitate productive grants, given the high social capital that the new municipal president had at different governance levels of SAGARPA. For households with non-agrarian livelihoods, the perspectives were more limited, although they also connected the possibilities to access social development support with the political power shifts in the municipality. The head of a non-agrarian household in LP4 indicated that programs from the Federal Ministry for Social Development (SEDESOL) operate through municipal management in his town. The municipal officials make a registry of households in need, and suggests the priorities of support, so the federal program allocates resources depending on these suggestions. From the point of view of this informant, his household never had received support in despite of being in a low socio-economic level because the past local administrations were from a political party different from his own. Several other through the three municipalities pointed to this kind of condition as unfair, and as local corruption. This is critical, especially for LP4 households with non-stable livelihoods, since they depend on governmental transfers for household’s daily expenditures. During the rapid rural appraisal in summer of 2015, many elderly members complained about the lack of support from the SEDESOL program “70 and more” because this was put on hold during state elections in Sonora that year. People argued that the government wanted to prevent the electoral o proselytism use of them. The overall result of this is that people in most necessity lacked these resources for a couple months while elections were finalized and new official authorities installed. 141
On the other hand, those with high dependence on agrarian-based income and subsidies could be more vulnerable to environmental shocks and stressors, because the support for agricultural production is given based on actual number of animals (in the case of PROGAN), or actual cultivation during a season or year (in the case of PROCAMPO), with little or no control on weather and water variables by producers. Finally, it is important to note that, except for some components of Prospera, the financial support provided by the government to these communities is directed mostly to poverty alleviation and enhancement of productivity, rather than to capacity building for sustainable and adaptive livelihoods.
3.4.2.4.Social capital: membership in local producers’ and land organizations Social capital has been operationalized in multiple ways by different authors (Adger 2003, Bebbington 1999, Scoones 1998, Putnam 1993). In this analysis, membership in land collective organizations and in local producers’ associations were the main indicators of social capital. In 57 of the 100 surveyed households there is, at least, one member of a land collective organization, 24 in ejidos and 32 in comunidades, while one of the households had a member with both types of membership. In turn, the membership in the local producers’ association (that in all cases was the local ranchers’ association) was much less frequent, with only 36 per cent of the households having at least one member in these associations. This could be expected given that membership in ejidos and comunidades is the key for land access and, most of the time, for water access too.
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Table 17. Membership in land collective organizations and local associations Municipality Livelihood Profile LP 1: Agrarian with no or limited diversification (n= 27)
LP 2: Steady diversified agrarian + non-agrarian (n= 28)
LP 3: Non-agrarian with no or limited diversification (n= 14)
LP 4: Non-steady diversified (n=31)
Total Sample (n=100)
Membership in social sector land organizations 13 (48.1%) Ejido 11 (40.7%) Comunidad 0 (0.0%) Both types 24 (88.9%) Total w/member 3 (11.1%) No membership 7 (25.0%) Ejido 15 (53.6%) Comunidad 1 (3.6%) Both types 23 (82.2%) Total w/member 5 (17.8%) No membership 0 (0.0%) Ejido 2 (14.3%) Comunidad 0 (0.0%) Both types 2 (14.3%) Total w/member 12 (85.7%) No membership 4 (12.9%) Ejido 4 (12.9%) Comunidad 0 (0.0%) Both types 8 (25.8%) Total w/member 23 (74.2%) No membership 24 (24%) Ejido 32 (32%) Comunidad 1 (1%) Both types 57 (57%) Total w/member 43 (43%) No membership
Membership in local producer’s associations
Total w/member No membership
16 (59.3%) 11 (40.7%)
Total w/member No membership
17 (60.7%) 11 (39.3%)
Total w/member No membership
0 (0.0%) 14 (100%)
Total w/member No membership
3 (9.7%) 28 (90.3%)
Total w/member No membership
36 (36%) 64 (64%)
As expected, the LPs with a major proportion of households with, at least, one member in a land collective organization are LP1 and LP2 (88.9 and 82.2 per cent, respectively). Nevertheless, also in LP4 a quart part of the households has, at least, one member of an ejido or comunidad. However, this does not guarantee that they have access to the full allocations provided by these organizations. For example, several informants of ejidos mentioned that they were land-less members waiting for land to be available. LP1 and LP2 concentrate most of the households with members in local producers’ associations. However, these numbers are lower than those of membership in ejidos and 143
comunidades. During the surveys, some informants regarded the membership in the local producers’ associations as useless, even during drought times, because they are mandated to pay an annual fee (usually 100 or 150 pesos in the three municipalities, which roughly equals 6 to 8 U.S. dollars in 2016), but they reported that these associations had no capacity to adequately and timely help the ranchers. They have no medicaments, continuous veterinary services, or other agrarian products. Maybe the only significant contribution, per informants’ report, is that the association buys forage bales from somewhere else during the dry times of the year, or “las secas” (late July- August) and sell those below the regular market prices. On the other hand, membership in the local producers’ associations is also a bridge to other sources of knowledge and resources, although this was not openly recognized by the members. SAGARPA agents usually contact these local associations for communicating information on programs and policies to the ranchers instead of doing it on a one-to-one basis. If the membership of agrarian households is low, then the scope of knowledge dissemination will also be shrunk. This is an indicative of the type and extension of formal knowledge systems in the towns of the watershed (McCullough and Matson 2016). When asked about other local organizations, the informants did not have positive answers in any of the towns, which reflects the low capacity for formal civil organization in Mexico in general, and particularly in this region (Lutz-Ley and Salazar Adams 2011b). In the past, the mid-watershed locality of Rayón had a religious leader that could organize a cooperative that hired mostly women for manufacturing home-made cookies (Gracia Sain and Horbath Corredor 2014). They had small-scale production, but also bought inputs locally, such as mesquite pods (ground as flour) and sap (used as a sweetener). While the production continues and these products can be found regionally, the priest was posted to another town because of internal conflicts, and the social organization around the cooperative 144
lost momentum. Other than this, no local organizations were found as social capital enhancers beyond the usual kinship networks that exist in the localities. Even in those cases, when asked about support from others during droughts, people in many of the SMW households complained about how “envious” everybody was in their communities, and the fact that each one must deal with his/her own issues (“nadie te ayuda…aquí cada quien se rasca con sus uñas”). One local leader identified social division due to political reasons as one of the main barriers for economic development in the mid-watershed, indicating that political conflicts (especially during election years) are so strong that can separate entire families for a long time. For him, the saying “pueblo chico, infierno grande” (“small town big hell”) is literal. Regarding the dissemination of knowledge to enhance adaptive capacity, more than 90 per cent of the informants also reported that nobody from the government so far has talked to them about climate change; what it means to their livelihoods; what it means in terms of water, land, and environmental resources in general; and how they can adapt to those changes. The population in this region has always been subject to extreme and variable climate, so adaptation is a fact of life. This has, at least, two results. First, the fact of experiencing high climatic variability make these communities skeptic about climate change. This has also been reported as problematic for communities in Southwest United States, but because climate change is a politically loaded theme (Brugger and Crimmins 2015). Second, people in the region have historically developed strategies to deal with climate challenges, which have allowed them to maintain their livelihoods in the face of change. They have built, in many ways, very resilient social-ecological systems and have a great portfolio of practices and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) regarding food, water, and livelihoods security, which has been documented by researchers in the region (Doolittle 1980,
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LaRochelle and Berkes 2003, Nabhan 2013, Perramond 2005, Sheridan and Nabhan 1978, Sheridan 1988, Yetman and Van Devender 2002). On the other hand, the thresholds that, if crossed, would change the composition and risk the survival of these different livelihoods is unknown. The characteristics of the households, the communities and the entire watershed play a role in defining these thresholds, but these may be different for each exposure unit (i.e. each household and community) across different levels of social organization. However, these multiple livelihood profiles and varied portfolios of practices evidence that communities have been generally adaptable in pursuing ways of living although many things have changed in their environmental, socio-economic, and institutional contexts during the last decades. However, the description of capitals above depicts a population that do not have the means of pursuing better paid jobs if the rural livelihoods already in place fail when faced with further or deeper globally-driven challenges and impacts. Many of the ejidatarios and comuneros are older people, not only in the SMW, but in rural Mexico in general (Warman 2001). They have low literacy levels, high dependence on governmental financial support, and low access to social networks connecting them with higher levels of governance and decision-making. However, they also have characteristics that enhance their adaptive capacity, such as their flexibility in field decision-making, their TEK on climate and environmental indicators, as well as on regional biodiversity for economic and livelihood purposes; and a fair capacity for organizing, at least at the level of their localities.
3.4.3. Livelihood profiles and multiple exposures 3.4.3.1.Perceived stressors and shocks
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Through free-listing technique (Campos et al. 2014), the survey informants were asked to identify the three main issues that their households and communities were dealing with. For practical purposes, these responses were equated to the stressors and shocks that affect these exposure units. Each verbal response was codified within one of 16 categories of stressors and shocks defined a-posteriori the survey data collection. A specific weight was given to each category depending on the position in which each respondent had mentioned it. The first received three points, the second received two, and the third received one. In this way, the categories that were mentioned more times in the first place appear as more noteworthy in the analysis. The first six categories of stressors and shocks are shown in Figure 15. The category “other” groups the sub-categories that received a score of 10 or less points. 200
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Inequity in access to public resources, corruption
Lack of water for domestic use
Drought and water scarcity
Lack of employment
Crime, drugs, and insecurity
Low public expenditure/deficiencies in public services and infrastructure
0
Figure 15. Scores of stressors and shocks identified by households in the SMW
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The general sample of 100 households identified more frequently the lack of public investment and the inadequacy of public services and infrastructure as the main issue to deal with in the rural communities of the SMW (score 182). Within this category, the lack of adequate public infrastructure (roads, buildings), the lack of education and health services in the communities, and problems with energy supply were mentioned very frequently. In second place, crime, drug addiction and public insecurity occupy an important place in the perceptions of the households’ informants (score 96), and this is connected to the first category (lack of public expenditure) due to the lack of police officers and public surveillance and lighting in the towns (in the lower SMW locality there were no police officers at all at the time of the surveys). People in the mid- and lower SMW municipalities mentioned that insecurity has increased because of the newcomers from southern Mexico that work as agricultural daily wage laborers in the table grape and zucchini fields in the agricultural valley surrounding Hermosillo city. Usually in small communities “everybody knows everybody else”, but with many new people in place, these relationships are somewhat disintegrated, and control and accountability associated to social networks is lost. The lack of water in both, the fields and the homes, was recognized as an important stressor (scores 36 and 24, respectively), but not the priority one. This confirms a finding already reported in literature on agrarian livelihoods in southern Mexico, in which farmers considered economic variables as more important than climatic ones in defining farm decision-making (Eakin et al. 2014). The president of an ejido in the mid-SMW indicated “… we already knew that this place is arid, so there is not much more that we can do about that…”. The capacity to do something in regards to an issue seems to be a factor to consider it a “real” problem. If climate change is confounded with natural variability (as it seems to be the case) and self-adaptive capacity is perceived as worthless in facing it, then it could be 148
more difficult to empower rural people to implement actions to mitigate or adapt. This result has important repercussions because, as reported by Grothmann and Patt (2005), even if most of the literature on adaptation considers resources as a critical factor for adaptation, individual cognitive processes regarding risk and climate perceptions can play a big role in defining the adaptive strategies pursued by people.
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0 Institutional
Socioeconomic
Environmental
Figure 16. Scores of macro-categories of stressor/shocks identified by households in the SMW
Another observation from the results is the importance of institutional factors acting as stressors for the households surveyed. Corruption and inequity of access to public resources received a score of 14, but also the top category -low public expenditure and inadequacy of public services and infrastructure- is closely connected to institutional factors. It is not only the lack of economic resources for public investment what drives these issues (a socio-economic driver), but primarily the power relationships and decision-making processes occurring at the governmental level that prioritize certain types of investments 149
(urban services and large infrastructural projects, such as aqueducts) over other more localized, locally-managed projects (Scott and Lutz 2016). In Figure 16, the categories of stressors and shocks were further grouped in three macro-categories. The two included in the DEF (environmental and socio-economic stressors), plus the institutional category as evidenced by the responses of SMW people. Considering the importance of each perceived stressor and shock by the households within each livelihood profile, a more refined picture emerges. The Figure 17 shows the most salient stressors and shocks as identified by households of the four LPs. In this case, the percentages represent how much of the total score given by the entire sample to each of the five most important stressors corresponds to responses given by households each LP. For example, the category “drought and water scarcity” received a total score of 36 (see Figure 15), and 81 per cent of all that score (which roughly equals 29 points) corresponds to responses by households in LP1 indicating this stressor as priority (see Figure 17). This analysis allows to see the relative importance that each stressor has among LPs. The chisquare test for the differences in stressors and shocks perceived between livelihood profiles was statistically significant at the 0.01 level (χ2= 76.320, p = .001). No single household in LP3 and LP4 mentioned drought and water scarcity as a priority stressor, in contrast to LP1 for which it had the most salience. This could be expected given the fact that LP1 households are fully depend on agrarian activities, and therefore their livelihoods are more exposed to drought and decreased precipitation. In turn, the lack of domestic water supply was most frequently mentioned by people in LP3. Almost half of the times this stressor was mentioned as important, it was by people in this LP (46 per cent).
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Figure 17. Relative importance of stressors and shocks identified per LP
For the households in LP4 “Non-steady-diversified”, as could be expected, the lack of employment had the most salience (68 per cent of all the times this stressor was mentioned in first place, it was mentioned by people in LP4). For households in LP1 this was not an issue at all. If they can conserve their full allocations of natural capitals, they will selfgenerate their own employment. Crime, drugs and insecurity were important for all the LPs too, but these were especially critical for LP4, which relates to their lower socio-economic status and poorer access to all kinds of capitals. This is the same situation of “deficient public services”, that was evenly distributed among the profiles, although with major salience for people in LP2. This could be connected to the fact that these household have diversified toward local commerce and non-agrarian businesses, for which it is critical that public
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services in towns work properly, so they can keep providing these services to the community (for example, a hostel managed by a rancher woman in her house at the mid- watershed depends on continuous energy services to keep its clients). In Figure 18 all the categories of stressors and shocks were grouped in the three macro-categories indicated by the DEF framework plus the institutional dimension added. In this case the distribution of stressors is coherent with the type of livelihood profile of the households. LP1 and LP2 households identified the three types of stressors, with prominence of the environmental ones by LP1, which is the non-diversified agrarian livelihood. LP3 and LP4 did not give any priority to environmental stressors, and LP4 was the only profile of the group for which socio-economic factors were the most important. This is coherent with their precarious capital conditions. Both Figure 15 and Figure 17 support the necessity of including institutional factors as stressors that elicit responses in rural communities, in combination with environmental and socio-economic dynamics.
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10 0 LP1
LP2 Institutional
Socioeconomic
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Figure 18. Scores of macro-categories of stressor/shocks identified per LP
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3.4.3.2.Perceptions of climate change More specific questions regarding perceptions and knowledge of climate change were also asked given that climate factors did not appear spontaneously in the responses of all the informants. Answers to the question “Have you ever heard about climate change?” are summarized in Figure 19 for the four livelihood profiles.
Figure 19. “Have you ever heard about climate change?”
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There were no statistically significant differences between LPs in the responses to this question. In 52 per cent of the households surveyed the informants reported that they had heard about that, which means that around half of the sample (and possibly half of the rural population in the communities of the SMW) do not identify this concept, although this does not mean that they don’t see changes in their natural surroundings. In a connected question not analyzed in this chapter, plenty of indicators of change associated to Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) were mentioned by the informants; however, they did not associate them with broader scale, long term climate change. In addition, when this 52 per cent was asked what climate change means, most responses were inaccurate, incomplete, confusing, or people just said “I do not know”. Also, the majority had heard of climate change in television news. In all the LPs, except by LP2, more than half of the households had heard about climate change. In the cases where the answer was negative, a short and simple explanation of climate change and global warming was provided to continue with the next question of the survey. The participants were asked if climate change was affecting their communities in some way. Figure 20 summarizes the answers to this question. In all LPs, except for LP4, more than 75 per cent of the households’ informants thought that climate change was indeed affecting the community (especially in LP1, the fully agrarian profile, with 92 per cent of the households). The higher proportion of informants that answered “no” is concentrated in households of the LP4. This could be connected to the perception of stressors and shocks indicated above; the households in LP4 identified a major proportion of socio-economic stressors in comparison with environmental ones. However, no statistically significant differences between LPs were found for the answers to this question either.
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Figure 20. “Do you think climate change is affecting your locality?”
There were cases in which the narrative of the informants during the survey indicated that they were equating climate change with climate variability, and that they see climate change as part of the natural cycle of the earth’s environment, or that heat and cold were connected to the year seasons instead of broader scale changes. Although the researcher explained that climate change implies climate behavior that goes beyond natural variability in the long term, and that it is partially caused by human behavior, the scope and objectives of the survey did not allow for deeper discussion of this specific topic. This aspect, and the 155
topics regarding TEK not explored in this chapter, represent opportunities for future research and collaboration with these communities.
3.4.3.3.Adaptive strategies The final section of the household survey asked informants what they and the other people in their communities do to adapt to climate-related challenges. This means that respondents were informing about two things: 1) what they do, if anything, and 2) what they think the other people in their communities do, if anything. The question was framed for climate challenges in general and not particularly for climate change to capture all the possibilities in terms of adaptive strategies. The strategies identified showed a great variety, and 21 types were identified after the survey application. All responses were given a score of one, independently of the order in which they were mentioned, so the numbers in Figure 22 indicate the actual number of times a strategy was mentioned. The category “other” groups 11 types of adaptations with five or less mentions in the total sample. Considering the complete sample (n= 100 households), the most commonly mentioned strategies were to “buy food for cattle” and to “haul water for cattle” (scores 48 and 32, respectively), which is indicative of the high salience that these actions have in SMW people’s lives, no matter the type of LP (see Figure 21). In fact, some informants in LP1 and LP2 utilized the amount of money invested in supplemental food and forage bales as an indication of how good or bad that year’s weather had been. Comments like “…this year I have spent 300 pesos in bales; at this same time, last year I had spent around 1500 pesos” (“…este año nomás he gastado 300 pesos en pacas, el año pasado por estas mismas fechas ya había gastado como 1500”) were quite common through the SMW.
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Figure 21. A pick-up truck carrying forage bales (left) and a water container of one cubic meter to carry water for livestock (right) standing next to a domestic hose. Both pictures were taken in La Fábrica de los Ángeles, (photo credit: America Lutz, date: 08-13-2015).
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Endure
Sell the cattle
Haul water for cattle
Buy food for cattle
0
Figure 22. “What do you and the people in your community do to adapt to these changes?”
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While buying bales or supplement food for cattle is a strategy with economic repercussions at the household level, hauling water had affectations for the entire community, especially in the lower SMW. People there reported that during drought the ranchers took water from the public network for carrying it to the places where the cattle was grazing. Because this was done daily, the electric pumps to fill the town’s public tanks were working long hours (overusing the electric network, which was reported to fail a lot too) and the water’s pressure lowered down frequently. A woman in the San Miguel de Horcasitas town emphasized this local competition by saying that “when the ranchers take water for the cattle, everybody else in the town can’t take a shower…” (“…cuando los rancheros agarran agua del pueblo, los demás ni nos podemos bañar”). Literature has documented urban-rural water competition in this area of Sonora; for example, when Hermosillo city bought water rights from San Miguel de Horcasitas at a site known as “Las Malvinas” (Pineda-Pablos et al. 2012). But less is known about the internal competition within the towns. The competition between agrarian and non-agrarian livelihoods in terms of water resources can be guessed from the quote above, but systematic studies regarding this internal rural competition should be conducted. In the previous section about perceived stressors, the lack of domestic water was among the top concerns for LPs. The next most frequent answers were to “sell the cattle”, and to “endure” (“aguantarse”) with 14 points each. While the first one seems to be the logical action after the first two main strategies fail, the option of “enduring” could be indicative of the lack of assets and entitlements for adaptation. This lack of assets, public services, and entitlements could relate to certain disempowerment regarding what one can do if the options are already limited under “normal” conditions. However, this also needs to be further explored.
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When considering the most frequently mentioned strategies per type of livelihood profile, coherent patterns emerge in relation to perceived stressors and livelihood characteristics. In Figure 23 the adaptive strategies identified by each livelihood profile are summarized. As in the case of perceived stressors per LP in Figure 17, the percentages indicate how much of the total score of a specific adaptive strategy corresponds to the responses given by households in each of the LPs. Therefore, these percentages are indicative of the relative salience of each adaptive strategy between the different livelihood profiles. Chi-square tests conducted on these responses indicate that there were no statistically significant differences between LPs in this aspect. In the surveys, there was a great diversity of adaptive responses particularly among households in LP1 and LP4, who mentioned 18 types of strategies each, while LP3 mentioned less than half of that. This could indicate that in rural communities the cognitive connection between adaptive actions and climate has a stronger presence in agrarian livelihoods. This is further supported by the comment by many informants, especially in LP3 and LP4, that changes in precipitation and temperatures were bad for those who had animals and crops, while they did not think that these changes would affect the rest of the people with nonagrarian livelihoods. On the other hand, it is important to note that all the strategies mentioned referred to actions and decisions at the domestic or local level, and activities requiring further social organization or interaction with higher levels of governance or institutions were never mentioned. This confirms the findings of the literature review presented in the second chapter of this document in regards to adaptive strategies that occur more frequently at the levels and dimensions on which rural people have most control. While almost all the strategies refer to livestock management and are equally distributed among the LPs, the strategy of “enduring” was more commonly mentioned by 159
informants in LP4 and LP3. This could be connected to lack of empowerment and lack of assets to foresee other adaptive strategies (especially in LP3 that reported the higher score for this specific “strategy”). “To endure” was included as a category because of its salience, and because it is an important signal of perceived low self-efficacy regarding adaptation.
Figure 23. “What do you and the people in your community do to adapt?” (per strategy)
3.5.Discussion Around half of the surveyed households in the rural communities of the San Miguel Watershed did not have agricultural land or access to grazing lands and, in turn, most had 160
some dependence on non-agrarian sources of income. This indicates that rural livelihoods in the SMW currently have some independence from environmental and climate vagaries, although many households’ income is indirectly dependent on agrarian activities through insecure daily wage labor. It is also notable that 45 per cent of the households receive some form of financial transfer through governmental programs, mostly devoted to poverty alleviation or agrarian production, with little or no resources for capacity building. In the medium and long term this would increase the rural vulnerability to both environmental and socioeconomic stressors and shocks, because of the relationships of dependence (and sometimes clientelistic, per informants’ reports) established between governmental agencies and rural communities. There is an ever-evolving diversification process in the SMW, first within the agrarian practices in those cases where the household had access to land and water, and then in the general household economic portfolios. The households in the four livelihood profiles defined in this study showed differentiated perceptions of stressors and shocks operating in the communities, as well as varied adaptive strategies depending on the requirements and assets’ endowments of households in each livelihood profile. Most importantly, there were coherent patterns identified between the livelihood profiles, the perceived stressors, and the adaptive strategies pursued by rural people. This is a critical contribution for the study of rural adaptation to global change, and for the design of policies that are better targeted to the specific conditions of the multiple social groups that co-exist in rural communities. This finding also supports the affirmation made by researchers that “one-size-fits-all” solutions can be counterproductive, useless, or even contradictory with long term adaptation goals when applied in complex and diverse contexts (Young 2002).
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Nonetheless, there were commonalities in perceived stressors associated to the lack of adequate public services and low public investment, as well as the increasing rates of crime and insecurity in the communities. However, the importance given to different stressors depended on the type of livelihood profiles’ capitals and necessities (for example, environmental stressors appeared at the top of concerns for livelihoods with agrarian components). Importantly, institutional factors emerged as stressors for households in all the livelihood profiles, providing empirical support to the inclusion of institutional change as an additional process together with environmental and socio-economic changes affecting these communities. More than double exposures, these communities are subject to multiple exposures occurring simultaneously at different temporal and spatial scales. In the upper watershed diversification has been possible thanks to mining developments during the last decade, but that also have other social-ecological impacts not fully known yet (i.e. potential ecologic impacts of the mining operations themselves; the pressure of growing populations on the public systems for water, energy supply, and sewage in the head town; agrarian-domestic, and now industrial competition for variable water resources; and the presence of newcomers in a traditional community that has been relatively closed and self-organized). The mid-watershed remains mostly agrarian, but the scale and nature of operations is changing: there is an important participation of large (usually international) agribusinesses producing food crops for exporting, which carry their own technological packages and use the local resources according to ad-hoc contracts established with all kind of landholders (historically private holders, but increasingly with ejidatarios). This has been driven by both, changes in the environment that make difficult to benefit from production, and programs facilitating the shifts, such as the end of the agrarian distribution, the progressive privatization of land, and the access to productive support by a minority of 162
farmers. Diversification is happening even in the case of wealthy homes that are fully agrarian, but whose ranching and/or farming enterprises have been at risk because of the drought experienced during the last decades in the watershed. Diversification is accompanied by new economic opportunities that these households have foreseen in specialty niches. Institutional support for diversification and specialization remains concentrated in the better economically endowed households because the rules of operation of these programs usually benefit those with starting capital and capacity for project development. Drought has severely impacted ranchers with medium size livestock operations and no money to invest in additional land, new water wells for irrigating pasture (or purchasing or getting water rights, since CONAGUA banned new groundwater extractions for agricultural purposes), or for buying forage. Meanwhile, those with additional land and enough water resources (usually those with deep wells) have been able to venture into other businesses that could be more profitable under stressed climatic conditions, such as organic vegetables, bacanora, wild chiltepin peppers, pecans, forage crops for selling bales to those with no more land, or moving upwards in the productive chains (for example move to commercialization of products, instead of actual production, which helps them to shift some environmental-related risks to the lower links in the productive chains, where the poorest and more vulnerable producers are). Finally, the lower municipality in the SMW has gone through two types of paths: diversification towards services and industry through their participation in the urban economy of Hermosillo, the capital city; or diversification through participating in large scale agricultural production in the same San Miguel de Horcasitas municipality; not in the head community, but in the neighboring locality of Pesqueira, that utilizes big volumes of groundwater from the El Zanjón aquifer (to the east of the SMW) to produce table grapes, 163
pecans, citrus, and other specialized crops. This second path appeared more frequently in the households surveyed in this municipality, because people had low educational levels and few opportunities of mobility to Hermosillo city. The agricultural jobs that they pursue are usually low-paid, and the job market is dominated by the presence of migrants from southern Mexico, who are also progressively moving to the area of Rayón in the searching of daily wage jobs. In all the communities, there were observations of the progressive concentration of land and water (informally or legally) due to the difficulties associated to environmental change and economic crises, which promote that only those with enough financial capital can keep benefiting from resources’ extraction and primary activities. This tendency towards inequitable distribution of resources is associated in the literature on climate change with lower resilience of the overall social-ecological systems. In all the cases, there were evidences of the entering of these rural communities into specialized market networks for extractive activities (mining in the upper watershed, agrarian and industrial-based in the mid and lower watershed) whose effects are not totally understood or perceived yet. Legal changes in the procedures to access and use both, water and land, together with the low literacy and lack of informatics technology in the communities, as well as the aging of the landholder population and the out-migration of the better educated young population, make more challenging to engage in fully agrarian livelihoods in these rural communities. Finally, although more than half of the informants of this study had heard about climate change, and more than 70 per cent thought their communities are affected by climatic challenges and variability, it is difficult to decide what adaptive options would have optimal results. Most of the adaptation alternatives reported by the households in the livelihood profiles were circumscribed to the realms where rural people have most control: the household, the farm, and in rare occasions, the community. Strategies requiring interaction 164
with higher levels of social organization or government, or strategies requiring high resources’ investment were absent. Buying additional food for cattle, or hauling water for the animals were the most commonly mentioned strategies, followed by others that were more specific to each livelihood profile assets and characteristics. However, many of these strategies were concentrated in short-term buffering of climate-related impacts, and less on building long-term adaptive capacity and resilience.
3.6.Conclusions and policy implications
•
The complexity of livelihood profiles found in the SMW suggest that academic and policy accountings of rural vulnerability and adaptation to global change should include considerations beyond just the agrarian dynamics. The processes of environmental, socioeconomic, and institutional change generate both, new rural conditions and economic opportunities, and novel types of multiple challenges for these rural communities.
•
A more focused approach regarding climate change education is necessary for the rural communities in general. No matter to which livelihood profile each household pertained, people reported TV as the main source of climatic information in their towns, as well as the fact that nobody from official agencies has approach them to talk about this. The coproduction by formal agencies and rural populations of common understandings of what climate change is, how it combines with other socio-economic and institutional changes, and what are the feasible options for local adaptation could result in more adaptive outcomes in the long-term, since this co-production is a baseline for capacity building.
•
The three communities exhibit an interesting portfolio of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Although the analysis of these responses was not included in this
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chapter, it represents a rich source of information for adaptation purposes that can be formally integrated in planned adaptation from the point of view of the Mexican government and civil society initiatives. However, ever less people in the SMW towns seem to possess this type of knowledge. Those mentioning wild plants for human food and cattle fodder, or traditional indicators of environmental and climate change, were just a few ranchers and farmers in their elderly years. Further research is required in this front for the SMW watershed, the Sonora river basin, and other arid basins in the region. •
The framing of global change, and specifically climate change, must be coherent with the rural communities’ perspectives and the practical implications for everyday lives of the households with different livelihood profiles. Most of the governmental decision-making on climate adaptation (and some academic research!) is still conducted under the assumption that climate change means the same for all social groups. Acting on the basis of climate change will depend on how much it affects the capitals on which each livelihood relies. Impacts on water, land, and quality of public services are not equally significant for all, especially in such heterogeneous places as rural communities, where not everybody is a rancher or a farmer. In this sense, the “agrarian” and the “rural” cannot be equated in future research and policy design.
•
In terms of the use of DEF and SLF as heuristic tools, the novel challenges associated to globally-driven processes of change (environmental, socio-economic, and institutional) are interacting with previously existing conditions of poverty and marginalization in the rural localities of the SMW. The usefulness of combining both frameworks lies in the recognition of the different ways of experiencing global change, their associated stressors
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and shocks, and the possibilities for adapting depending on the asset endowments and entitlements that households in each rural livelihood profile have. •
Because the livelihood profiles, the stressors they experience, and their preferred and possible adaptive strategies are different, also the policy actions need to be differentiated depending on the features of each rural target group. What is common to all rural livelihood profiles is the requirement for capacity building, social learning, and coproduction of climate change knowledge with concrete socio-economic implications.
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CHAPTER 4. INSTITUTIONAL MISMATCHES AND GOVERNANCE IN THE SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF THE SAN MIGUEL WATERSHED
4.1. Introduction Historic conditions of poverty and marginalization of rural communities in developing countries interact with globally-driven environmental, socio-economic, and institutional changes, and together they generate novel challenges for these communities and the socialecological systems in which they are nested (Leichenko and O’Brien 2000, 2008). Environmental stressors would impact the natural capital or natural resource base of SESs, affecting rural livelihoods in two ways: by reducing the available livelihood options because of reductions in the availability of critical resources; and by increasing the variability and unpredictability of livelihood benefits through the changes in temporality and patterns of ecological cycles (for example, changed hydrology) (Agrawal and Perrin 2008). In this way, natural resource-dependent rural households are likely to share a larger burden of the impacts of environmental (i.e. climate) change in comparison with other households less dependent on these resources. In parallel, globalization, demographic growth, and urbanization, are increasing the complexity of rural-urban relationships and the expansion of diversified and non-agrarian livelihoods, which coexist with the traditional ranching and farming ones (Bebbington 1999). These changes imply that all rural livelihoods evolve in a dynamic environment that produces opportunities and barriers for adaptation depending on the level of reliance that they have on the impacted resources or capitals (Chambers and Conway 1991, Scoones 1998). The reality of climate change, and specifically global warming, has been progressively recognized by scientists, political and spiritual leaders, and policy makers 168
(Heald 2016; IPCC- AR5, 2014b). Awareness of its dynamics, and policy guidelines to mitigate and adapt to climate change have emerged in recent decades in international arenas. This is demonstrated in part by the increasing number of planning documents submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), such as the Least Developed Countries’ (LDCs) National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs), the 162 Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) for reductions of target GHG’s emissions, or the Paris Agreement of 2015.17 Governmental responses are happening at the national and regional levels too. In the case of Mexico, for example, in 2012 the General Law of Climate Change (LGCC) was enacted, and a National Strategy for Climate Change (ENCC) was published in the Mexican Bulletin of the Federation in 2013 (Diario Oficial de la Federación, DOF, 06-03-2013), followed by the publication of state-level climate change plans (PEACCs), although not all states have submitted one. Sonora state does not have a PEACC, but as this document was prepared, a law on climate change was discussed by the state’s congress in October 2016. Because of the centralized and hierarchical governance structure in Mexico, the local level is the most excluded from planning, not only in terms of climate change adaptation, but from natural resources’ decision-making in general. However, this does not mean that the local level lacks governance structures for these purposes, as explained in the following sections. For governments, entering the realms of climate change planning has meant that traditional management of natural resources must be modified to integrate goals toward the achievement of adaptation and mitigation outcomes. Some researchers and practitioners have called for the “mainstreaming” of mitigation and adaptation into the regular policies of
17
UNFCCC 2016, available at: http://unfccc.int/2860.php (Access: November 30, 2016).
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countries as an intent to make this happen, particularly in developing nations (Huq et al. 2004, Klein et al. 2005, Smit and Wandel 2006, Swart and Raes 2007). On the other hand, while the nature and scope of environmental change and socioeconomic globalization call for coordinated actions at the international and national levels, there is mounting evidence that most adaptation to all kinds of stressors occurs autonomously from government efforts in local settings. Autonomous adaptation refers to the adjustments in behaviors and decisions that happen independently of official or direct governmental assistance (Buechler 2016b, Leclère et al. 2013, Raymond and Robinson 2013). But these autonomous local adaptations may or not be directly related to climate change (Eakin et al. 2014; Smit and Wandel 2006; Tompkins et al. 2010, Raymond and Robinson 2013). Environmental and socio-economic changes may be global in nature with local manifestations that vary across places, while adaptation is a local event responding to those very site-specific events (Adger et al. 2005). Folke et al. (2005), argue that “self-organized local responses for active adaptation to environmental change have emerged among communities and societies that have survived over long periods of time” (p. 446). Autonomous adaptation has been effective in the maintenance of local livelihoods and farming communities in general (Altieri and Koohafkan 2008). However, local actions and organizations alone are not a panacea (Lam 1997, Ostrom et al. 2007, Ostrom 2007), and it is questionable whether these locally-driven autonomous practices will be enough to adapt to rapidly changing conditions that go beyond historic regularities or “stationary” behaviors (Milly et al. 2008). Also, the fact that these local strategies have survived the passing of time does not mean that actions fostered at higher governmental or organizational levels are useless, especially in a context in which drivers of local impacts are sometimes located at higher scales; and out of the control of communities. 170
Because rural livelihoods dependent on natural resources are expected to share a larger burden of climate change impacts, the diagnosis of the “adaptiveness” of informal and formal institutions for governance of natural resources has a renewed importance. In doing this, considering social vs. governmental actions as competing pathways to effective adaptation could be misleading. Instead, a focus on complementarity or interactivity within and between levels could offer richer perspectives (Paavola 2007). What is common to governmental-motivated and autonomous actions by local communities is that neither of them happens in a vacuum, but in a context in which institutions shape the access, distribution, and use of the natural and socio-economic resources necessary for adaptation. Local or national, formal or informal, governmental, social, or mixed, all strategies for the management of resources have institutions at the core of their existence (Lemos and Agrawal 2006, Paavola 2007), so the tricky questions regarding local adaptation would be how these diverse institutions coexist and interact; what is the nature and scope of these interactions; and how adaptive are the outcomes of these interactions. These questions also require reference to concrete situations or communities, since adaptation is territorial and scale-specific (Agrawal et al. 2012). The present study focuses on how institutions in different regimes (land, water, and rural development), happening at different levels of social organization (local/municipal, regional/state, federal/national, or global/international), and different sectors (social, governmental, and market/private) produce outcomes through their interactions that affect adaptation in rural communities of the San Miguel Watershed (SMW), in arid Northwest Mexico. The following section introduces the conceptual background guiding the analysis. Section three describes the characteristics of the SMW and methodological considerations; while section four presents the main structures, actors, and institutions across levels for 171
governance of land, water, and rural development in this region. The fifth section deals with the identification and description of four types of institutional “mismatches”, “misfits”, or incoherencies derived from institutional interactions. The mismatches negatively affect characteristics of the governance systems that otherwise would add to the adaptive capacity of the SMW. Finally, the last sections present the discussion and conclusions of the study and some policy implications regarding enhancement of adaptive governance.
4.2. Institutions and environmental governance regimes Institutions are understood here in a broader sense as the “complexes of norms and behaviors that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions” (Ostrom 2005, p. 3); they are the “sets of rules, decision-making procedures, and programs that define social practices, assign roles to the participants in these practices, and guide interactions among the occupants of individual roles (Young 2002, p.5). Institutions are distinct from organizations, although the latter are structured and function based on the former. Rather than organizations, they are “mechanisms that shape social and individual expectations, interactions, and behavior”, and there are at least three types: public (state-driven), civil (socially driven), and private (driven by corporations, or market organizations) (Agrawal and Perrin 2008). When institutions are linked to official channels of government policies or bureaucratic structures, they are called “formal” institutions; while “informal” institutions refer to cultural norms of behavior and practices that are shared by a social group (Pahl-Wostl 2009) or a community of practice (Raymond and Robinson 2013). Formal and informal institutions are important in understanding climate change impacts on rural communities because they: 1) influence how households are affected by these impacts; 2) shape the ability of households to respond to impacts and to choose different 172
adaptive strategies; and 3) mediate the flows of external interventions for adaptation (Agrawal et al. 2008). Institutions define how social groups relate to their natural environments and resources, defining in this way the boundaries for adaptation and the actions that are feasible (Barnes 2009). Institutional factors not only function as contextual modulators of these relationships, but they can become major drivers of stressors or crises in social-ecological systems by themselves (Folk et al. 2005, Young 2002), as has been argued through the chapters of this document. A new rule for water access in an irrigation system, an agricultural fee, changes in sanctions or requirements applicable to target populations, lack of critical services and infrastructure, among others, can be stressors for rural communities in a similar way that environmental- or socio-economic events. In turn, governance refers to “the structures and processes by which people in societies make decisions and share power” (Folke et al. 2005, p. 444). Institutions in this context are the mechanisms through which a governance system exists and works. The governance structure or regime could be exemplified as a sports court, and the institutions would be the rules indicating how each player (organizational and individual) is expected to behave, and what would be the consequences of this behavior. An environmental governance system, or environmental resource regime18 is that in which the institutions deal explicitly with environmental or resource issues (Young 2002). An environmental governance regime has a set of rules to allow participants in a SES to negotiate and resolve conflicts regarding natural resources, and these conflicts can range from open confrontations to conflicts of
18
Here the terms “environmental resource regime” and “environmental governance” are treated as exchangeable for practical purposes. However, in their study on biodiversity governance in Europe, Paavola et al. (2009) distinguished between them in terms of its specificity and the object of management.
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interests between different groups that have a stake in the access, allocation, and use of environmental goods and services (Lemos and Agrawal 2006, Paavola 2007). Comprehensive frameworks have emerged from both, natural and social disciplines, to explain the connections between the different components of environmental governance regimes for achieving desirable (i.e. adaptive) outcomes. Well-known examples of these frameworks are the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework mostly applied to analysis of Common Pool Resources (CPRs) (Ostrom 2005); the social-ecological system approach to environmental governance resilience and robustness (Anderies et al. 2004; Berkes et al. 2003; Folke et al. 2005; Ostrom 2007, 2009; McGinnis and Ostrom 2014; Walker and Salt 2006, 2012; Young 2010); and the Panarchy framework and its associated model of adaptive cycles, which is in close connection with the SES approach (Allen at al. 2014, Gunderson and Holling 2002). In policy science, the emerging perspective of Adaptive Governance of SESs has also gained importance during the last years. Adaptive governance “…incorporates formal organizations, informal groups, and individuals at multiples scales and requires collaboration, communication, and adaptation in response to social and ecological monitoring” (Gunderson et al. 2014, p. 149). Perspectives on adaptive governance include social learning (Pahl-Wostl 2009), polycentrism (Pahl-Wostl and Knieper 2014), policyscience dialogues (Scott et al. 2012), participatory approaches and co-production of knowledge (Lemos and Morehouse 2005), and integrated knowledge systems (McCullough and Matson 2016). From this research body, “best” or “most adaptive” practices and guidelines for institutional design have been outlined. In Table 18 a list of the features found in adaptive governance regimes (including CPRs) is presented and features classified in five broader 174
categories: 1) aspects of accountability and clarity in rules of the system or regime; 2) distribution of power and capacities among stakeholders; 3) multi-level management mechanisms (this refers to the actual opportunity for interactive participation of all stakeholders, while the previous category refers to the capacities and power to participate effectively by influencing decisions and rules); 4) general structure and internal dynamics of the SES’s functioning; and 5) use of knowledge, learning, and communication. Although this is not an exhaustive compilation, it indicates the directions that research has followed. While traditional governance of resource regimes had historically looked for increased production, avoiding fluctuations, and reducing uncertainty, new approaches focus on the mechanisms to strengthen the system, understanding the non-linearity of its complex interactions, increasing its flexibility, adaptability, and resilience, and improve equity and social justice outcomes (Folke et al. 2005, Paavola 2007, Young 2002).
Table 18. What makes a resource regime more adaptive? General aspects of governance in SES
Accountability and clarity of rules
Distributed power and capacities
Features of adaptive governance Clear definition of responsibilities, especially for technical tasks Graduated sanctions for non-compliance with rules (referred to CPRs) Improved accountability to local constituencies / Mechanisms for local control Legitimacy / Enough authority to manage and implement decisions / Check and balance mechanisms Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs (referred to CPRs) Collective-choice arrangements (referred to CPRs) Devolution of rights and decision-making powers / Recognition of rights to organize (also referred to CPRs) Increased local autonomy and capacities Polycentrism / Decentralization Socio-economic and power equity
Supporting literature Lam 1997 Cox et al. 2010, Ostrom 2005 Agrawal et al. 2012, Lam 1997 Gunderson et al. 2014, Lam 1997, Paavola 2007 Cox et al. 2010, Ostrom 2005 Cox et al. 2010, Ostrom 2005 Berkes 2010, Cox et al. 2010, Gunderson et al. 2014, Ostrom 2005 Agrawal et al. 2012, Lam 1997 Agrawal et al. 2012, Gunderson et al. 2014, Ostrom 2001, 2005; Pahl-Wostl 2009 Agrawal et al. 2012, Eakin and Lemos 2006
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General aspects of governance in SES
Multi-level management
Features of adaptive governance Co-management across multiple social groups / Multi-level governance Complementarity of interests between individuals Comprehensiveness of policy or management actions High levels of trust and existence of internal and external social networks Nested levels of governance (referred to CPRs) Capacity for self-organization towards socialecological resilience or re-organization after shocks Capacity to live with change and uncertainty
Structure and internal dynamics of the SES
Clearly defined boundaries of the resource to be managed (referred to CPRs) Embeddedness of stakeholders and officials from one level into another Existence of bridging organizations among levels of governance Multiple arenas where stakeholders can interact and play out, channel their demands, and resolve conflicts (also referred to CPRs) Organizational, institutional, and procedural flexibility
Use of knowledge, learning, and communication
Capacity for social learning / institutional learning Capacity to combine different types of knowledge Continued communication across all decisionmaking centers or levels, both informal and formal Learning through policy experimentation Monitoring systems and reliable data on key threshold-type variables of the system (also referred to CPRs) Social memory Use of pertinent information in local-level decision-making
Supporting literature Lemos and Agrawal 2006, Raymond and Robinson 2013 Lam 1997 Gunderson et al. 2014 Eakin and Lemos 2006, Folke et al. 2005, Gunderson et al. 2014, Ostrom 2005, Pahl-Wostl 2009 Cox et al. 2010, Ostrom 2005 Folke et al. 2005 Folke et al. 2005, Gunderson et al. 2014, Cox et al. 2010; Ostrom 1990, 2005 Lam 1997, Pahl-Wostl 2009 Gunderson et al. 2014, Lam 1997 Cox et al. 2010, Eakin and Lemos 2006, Lam 1997, Ostrom 2005 Agrawal et al. 2012, Folke et al. 2005, Gunderson et al. 2014, Lam 1997 Pahl-Wostl 2009, Young 2010 Folke et al. 2005, Lam 1997, Ostrom 2005, Pahl-Wostl 2009 Gunderson et al. 2014, Raymond and Robinson 2013 Gunderson et al. 2014, Ostrom 2005 Cox et al. 2010, Ostrom 2005, Young 2010 Folke et al. 2005 Agrawal et al. 2012, Raymond and Robinson 2013
There is also a growing recognition that globalization has affected the capacity and features of nation-states to promote overarching, comprehensive governance systems, and this impacts their capability to address environmental, and more specifically, climate change challenges (Eakin and Lemos 2006). Logically, a revision of the local level has been brought 176
to stage. Agrawal et al. (2008) argued almost one decade ago that institutional arrangements operating at the local level would impact the types of adaptation strategies pursued by people. However, when these authors explored the UNFCCC’s database on adaptive strategies, they found that there were almost no cases in which external support in communities was directed to capacity building or improvement of local leadership. Also, minimal attention was given to local institutions in climate adaptation. More recent case-based research has demonstrated that local institutions reduce vulnerabilities and increase livelihood security in areas experiencing climate variability (Peach-Brown and Sonwa 2015, Wang et al. 2013, Washington-Ottombre and Pijanowski 2013, Yu 2016). Another important feature of environmental governance is the interaction between actors within a level, and between levels of the environmental governance regimes. This is connected to the realization that environmental and socio-economic problems have a broad scope, and addressing them requires responses spanning through multiple levels (Agrawal et al. 2008, Lemos and Agrawal 2006). Raymond and Robinson (2013), for example, found that potential for adaptation from the point of view of institutional change depends on the interlock between formal institutions and communities of practice (local groups of stakeholders). Local communities of practice are much more responsive to risk when this is framed within the conditions of the farm- or community-level, which can be managed by the rural populations and are significant to them. Folke et al. (2005) called “adaptive comanagement” to the flexible, community-based arrangements that were “tailored to specific places and situations, and supported by and work with various organizations at different levels” (p. 448). Lam (1997) found that the “co-production” of irrigation services was better achieved through the collaboration between public governmental agencies and farmers’
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organizations, in part because they were able to share different types of knowledge and to develop adequate incentives for both sides (p. 16-17). These lessons for environmental resources management can be transferred to adaptive governance of SESs because different levels of governance or scales are important in identifying diverse types of stressors and shocks, as well as the potential responses that are pertinent to each level of governance. Additionally, there is a coupling between the time frame of responses and the level of institutional arrangements in a governance regime. Concrete, lower levels tend to exhibit short-term responses and are more attentive to local information and knowledge; while long-term responses requiring more resources or broader actions can be managed by upper level arrangements, which tend to be more able to coordinate actions across governance levels and spatial scales (Young 2002). Several difficulties, mismatches, or misfits occur in the interactions between elements of the governance regime because the interacting parts are different in scope, goals, dynamics and composition. Also, broader political, socio-economic, technological, or cultural changing features of the system can affect how these interactions evolve (Cumming et al. 2006). Three problematic aspects regarding institutional design of environmental governance regimes have been identified in literature, and these are the departure point for the analysis that follows in this chapter: 1) the problem of fit, 2) the problem of interplay, and 3) the problem of scale (Cumming et al. 2006; Folke et al. 1998, 2005, 2007; Young 2002). The problem of fit refers to the incongruence or incompatibility between the biogeophysical features of ecosystems and the institutional arrangements created to manage human activities affecting them (Young 2002, p. 20). A governance regime “fits” when there is a match between the regime and the bio-geophysical features of the system that it is intended to govern (ibid. p. 50). Other similar names for this are “scale-matching institutions” 178
(Cumming et al. 2006) or “institutional fit” (Folk et al. 1998, 2005, 2007). Maybe this is the most studied type of mismatch in social-ecological systems (Borgström et al. 2006, Borowski et al. 2008, Cumming et al. 2006, Folk et al. 2007, Guerrero et al. 2013, Wilson 2006). The problem of interplay refers to the integration between institutions and actors of a resource regime operating at different levels (vertical interplay), or within the same level of social organization (horizontal interplay). Horizontal and vertical interplay can be driven by functional interdependencies when actors need to interact because they work on the same area or topic, or by politics of the institutional design or management when actors are officially mandated to collaborate (Young 2002, p. 23). Finally, the problem of scale refers to the capacity of institutional arrangements to manage resource regimes at different spatial levels. Young (2002) approaches the problem of scale from the point of view of transferring design lessons from Common Pool Resources (CPRs) (Ostrom 1990, 2005; Cox et al. 2010) to other types of resource regimes. Cumming et al. (2006) talk about scale mismatches when the governance regime does not fit the spatial, temporal, and functional aspects of the resource being governed. In this chapter, the governance regimes for water, land, and rural development in the SMW are analyzed in terms of the interactions between informal and formal institutional arrangements within and across governance levels, regimes, and sectors. From the analysis of empirical and documentary data, the categories described in the academic literature on institutional mismatches in SESs’ governance are reviewed. The original considerations of interplay and scale are kept and expanded, and two new categories are added: one type of mismatch based on the interactive incongruences between different sectorial rules and policies that generate contradictory outcomes when played out in the field (this could be considered also a problem of horizontal interplay, but the type proposed here goes beyond 179
one single resource regime); and the other type that deals with interactive incongruences between the legal frameworks and the actual socio-cultural practices in the towns. This could also be interpreted as a problem of misfit, but in contrast with the traditional misfit between a governance regime and the ecological features of a SES, the proposed type centers on the misfits between the governance regime and the socio-cultural features of a SES. Governance regimes are designed not only to govern environmental dynamics, but mostly to regulate human behavior regarding those dynamics. The present study identifies concrete institutional mismatches affecting adaptive capacity in the arenas where they are pertinent. It focusses on how adaptive capacity emerges or vanishes from day-to-day interactions within and across institutional levels of significance from the point of view of actors in the SMW. The study also tries to incorporate a political ecology approach by arguing that power relationships between social groups and between the government and society are priority in defining the outcomes of any environmental governance system. Together with power relationships, more formal political processes in management of resources also need to be recognized and included (Pahl-Wostl 2009).
The research questions guiding this study are:
1) How are the governance regimes for water, land, and rural development structured across levels of social organization and sectors in the San Miguel Watershed? 2) How do informal institutions (socially shared rules and practices) for the governance of these resources interact with formal institutions (governmental and private frameworks) and what kind of outcomes do these interactions have?
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3) How do these institutional interactions affect the adaptive capacity of rural producers facing global change in the upper, mid-, and lower San Miguel Watershed?
4.3. Case study and setting The SMW is one of the 10 sub-watersheds that integrate the Sonora River Basin in centralnorth Sonora State, in arid Northwest Mexico (CONAGUA and CIAD 2013). The watershed is in a transitional zone between the Sonoran plains and the Sierra Madre Occidental. The polygon of the watershed covers 17,378.25 square kilometers, and has a perimeter of 546.11 kilometers (Heras and Ochoa 2013). It encompasses the territories of four main municipalities. North to south these are: Cucurpe, Opodepe, Rayón, and San Miguel de Horcasitas (SMH) (please refer to map in Figure 12, in the third chapter of this document). These four municipalities accounted for 13,817 people in 2010; less than one per cent of Sonora’s population (although this number would increase above 800,000 if Hermosillo city at the lower extreme of the SMW was included). More than half of the watershed’s population concentrates in the locality of Pesqueira, within the boundaries of the San Miguel de Horcasitas municipality (INEGI, 2010) (see Table 19).
Table 19. Characteristics of the main municipalities within the SMW Municipality
Elevation (m.a.s.l.)
Population in 2010
Percentage of total State population (%) 0.04 0.11 0.06
Number of localities in the municipality 100 74 12
Cucurpe 868 958 Opodepe 654 2,878 Rayón 554 1,599 San Miguel de 397 8,382 0.31 Horcasitas Total /Average 13,817 0.52 Source: elaborated by the author with data from INEGI 2010 and SNIM 2010.
Municipal area (hectares) 156,799 223,709 88,036
59
111,983
254
580,527
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The San Miguel river joins the main stream of the Sonora river before reaching the Abelardo L. Rodríguez dam, to the northeast of Hermosillo city. The precipitation in the SMW follows a decreasing gradient from Cucurpe in the headwaters at 868 meters above sea level (m.a.s.l), to Hermosillo in its lowest extreme, at 216 m.a.s.l (Camou-Healy 1998, CEA Sonora 2008). The region is semi-arid with bi-modal precipitation in summer (JuneSeptember) and winter (December-January) (Romo-Leon et al. 2014). More than 70 per cent of the rainfall is related to the North American Monsoon (Heras and Ochoa 2013). The SMW is an interesting region of study because it combines traditional organizations for water and land management with formal institutional arrangements at higher scales; and modern, market-oriented production systems, in the context of a highly integrated transboundary system in one of the most dynamic border regions of the world (Scott and Buechler 2013). Also, the SMW is at the core of the Northwest Mexico- Southwest United States arid region, which is projected to have higher temperatures and more variable precipitation with a trend to decreasing river flows due to global warming (Overpeck et al. 2013). Other important changes in the communities of the watershed include a progressive de-agrarianization of rural livelihoods because of the expansion of mining, rapid urbanization, and agro-industrial development, as explained in the preceding chapters. This is a good case for studying how diverse, multi-scale, integrated governance regimes for water, land, and rural development interact with globally driven environmental, socioeconomic and institutional challenges, and how these interactions could generate (mal)adaptive governance outcomes. This study utilizes a combination of documentary and direct data sources. A total of 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted during late 2015 and early 2016, with previous approval of instruments and procedures by an Institutional Review Board. The interviewees 182
in all cases were rural producers in three municipalities of the SMW: Cucurpe at the headwaters (n= 10), Rayón at the mid-watershed (n= 9), and San Miguel de Horcasitas downstream (n= 8). The sample included different types of landholders (ejido n= 7, comunidad n= 11, private land n= 7, multiple tenure n= 2) with livelihood systems that were totally agrarian (n= 10), or a combination between agrarian and diversified activities (n= 17). Some producers were also leaders of local organizations (presidents of ejidos, comunidades, local ranchers’ associations, or irrigation units). The sampling procedure for identifying rural producers utilized a combination of purposive and snowball technique, starting with individuals previously identified in household surveys as part of the author’s broader research project. In addition, six additional interviews were conducted with governmental officials from CONAGUA and SAGARPA, as well as municipal officials in the three towns, for a total of 33 semi-structured interviews. The discourse content of these interviews was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for identification of institutional mismatches and case-based examples affecting governance of land, water, and rural development in the communities of the watershed. Documentary data collection regarding legal frameworks, actors, organizations, and programs associated to these topics has been conducted since year 2012 for this region.
4.4.Institutional frameworks for governance of resources and development in the SMW In Table 20, the governmental structure for the governance of land, water, and rural development is schematized.19 Most critical policies and organizations for administering
19
The main institutional elements are illustrated as antecedents of the discussion on institutional mismatches, but a comprehensive analysis of the entire formal Mexican framework for the purposes of governing the territory is beyond the scope of this document. For example, SAGARPA webpage indicates that the federal agency currently has nine general policy programs, and these group a total of 41 “components” or categories
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these resources from an official perspective are highly centralized. Usually there is a set or at least one constitutional-level law ordering the issues connected to each resource or topic, and a punctual organization or federal ministry in charge of enforcing and surveilling the compliance with that law or set of laws. Also, there are state-level organizations and laws that are subsidiaries of the federal ones, or that mimic the federal level structure. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 defines the highest level of formal institutional arrangements. Several articles define provisions for the access, use, and distribution of resources across the territory, but the most important is article 27. In accordance with this, water and land are considered property of the nation subject to exploitation only through an explicit concession by the federal government. On progressively lower levels of formal arrangements, there are sectorial laws, rules and organizations, state-level organisms and subsidiaries of the federal agencies. There is a high level of redundancy at the state level, in which organizations depending on the Sonora’s state structure coexist with decentralized delegations of the federal ministries that have similar sectorial responsibilities (for example, there is a state level water agency and a state level water law, but also national-level instances of these, and this same situation happens in several sectors). Although redundancy is generally seen as a positive feature for increasing resilience of SESs (Low et al. 2003), the empirical results of this redundancy in Sonora and the SMW are mixed. In many cases the state-level agencies work in coordination with the federal ones, but many people interviewed in the local communities of the SMW did not differentiate between them, or they did not even know that a state-level agency existed for purposes of land or water management.
that are eligible for public investment. A similar situation exists in the case of SEDESOL and SEMARNAT. In Table 20 only the programs mentioned by interviewees in the SMW, or critical programs are listed.
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Municipal level organizations are less frequent for official management of these resources (see Figure 26), except by the operation of social development policies (SEDESOL programs are operated at the municipal level). The main local governance rules and bodies for water, land, and rural development are socially driven, and the interactions between governmental and social actors usually follow a top-down asymmetric relationship in which higher levels dictate the general policies, the laws and the directions for public investment, with restricted channels for bottom-up participation in higher-level decision-making (Eakin and Lemos 2006). These informal local governance elements are not included in Table 20, but they are identified in Figure 26, and described in the sections below for each regime.
Table 20. Governmental institutions and actors for resources’ governance in the SMW LEVEL 1: Mexican Constitution of 1917 (with modifications and additions) • Article 4: Human right to water for personal and domestic consumption • Article 27: Property of land and water lies in nation’s hands • Article 115: Provision of water for domestic consumption by municipalities • Sonora State Constitution (also from 1917, with modification and additions) LEVEL 2: Sectorial laws and rules at the federal and state levels • Agrarian Law (+ Two sets of rules for rural property and gender rural equity) • Law of the Nation’s Waters (+ Rules) • General Law of Ecologic Equilibrium and Environmental Protection (LGEEPA) (+ five sets of rules for several environmental aspects) • General Law of Social Development (+ Rules) • General Law of Sustainable Development (+ Rules) • Law of Rural Sustainable Development (+ Rules) • Federal Law of Rights (includes rules and fees for water rights) • General Law of Climate Change (+Rules regarding control of emissions) • Federal Law of Environmental Responsibility • General Law of Sustainable Forestry Development (+ Rules) • General Law of Wildlife (+ Rules) • Law of Energy for the Countryside (+ Rules) • State-level rules in Sonora for regulation of land, water, environment and development Social Development Act Cadastral and Registry Act Water Act Rural Sustainable Development Act Law for Enhancement of Sustainable Forestry Development Livestock Act Land Use Planning and Urban Development Act Ecological Equilibrium and Environmental Protection Act
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Environmental Prosecutor’s Office for Sonora State LEVEL 3: Federal agencies created by law decree • Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources- SEMARNAT o National Water Commission – CONAGUA Public Registry of Water Rights- REPDA o National Forestry Commission- CONAFOR o National Commission for Protected Natural Areas- CONANP o National Commission for Arid Zones- CONAZA o Federal Prosecutor’s Office for Environmental Protection- PROFEPA • Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries, and Food – SAGARPA • Ministry of Agricultural, Territorial and Urban Development- SEDATU (formerly the Ministry of the Agrarian Reform or SRA) o National Agrarian Registry- RAN o Agrarian Procuratorate- Procuraduría Agraria • Ministry of Social Development- SEDESOL o CONASUPO’s system of distribution- DICONSA (CONASUPO was a stateowned company in charge of popular subsistence and food security, which operated from 1961 to 1999) LEVEL 4: State level agencies, and state subsidiaries of federal agencies • State Water Commission- CEA Sonora (dependent on the state’s government, independent from CONAGUA) • Northwest Basin Organization- OCNO (administrative regionalized subsidiary of federal CONAGUA) o Basin Council High Northwest (Alto Noroeste) Technical Committee of Ground waters of the San Miguel Aquifer- COTAS- San Miguel (these are civil associations or “A.C.s” recognized by law to advice the governmental bodies managing groundwater) o Basin Council Yaqui-Mátape rivers o Basin Council Mayo river • Sonora State Ministry of Social Development- SEDESSON • SEDESOL Sonora (state delegation of the federal SEDESOL) • Sonora State Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Hydraulic Resources, Fisheries, and Aquaculture- SAGARHPA • SAGARPA Sonora (state delegation of the federal SAGARPA) o Regional Rural Development Districts- DDR • Commission of Ecology and Sustainable Development of Sonora StateCEDES • SEMARNAT Sonora (state delegation of the federal SEMARNAT) • SEDATU Sonora o State delegation of the National Agrarian Registry- RAN in Sonora o State delegation of the Agrarian Procuratorate- Procuraduría Agraria en Sonora LEVEL 5: Policy programs of federal and state-level agencies • Programs for enhancing rural development o PROCAMPO Productivo (Program of direct support to the countryside) (SAGARPA)
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PROGAN Productivo (Program for enhancing livestock productivity) (SAGARPA) o Machinery and infrastructure (SAGARPA) Programs for water management and conservation o Groundwater Closing Decrees (CONAGUA) o Irrigation technology (SAGARPA-CONAGUA) o Solar wells for livestock ponds (SAGARPA-CONAGUA) o Several programs for improving surface irrigation infrastructure (SAGARPA-CONAGUA) Programs for social development o PROSPERA (SEDESOL) o Support for the elderly “65 y más” (SEDESOL) o Rural supply- DICONSA (food security enhancement) (SEDESOL) Programs for territorial development o Mining Fund (fund for social development programs in localities that have presence of mining companies) (SEDATU) o Risk prevention and land use planning (SEDATU) o
•
•
•
4.4.1. Water governance At the top of the formal institutional framework for managing water in Mexico is the Law of the Nation’s Waters (LAN), enacted in 1992 and substantially modified in 2004 (Lutz-Ley and Scott 2016). The LAN delimits the types of uses to which water can be concessioned and assigns responsibilities to the different participants in water governance in the country. Most importantly, the LAN established the approach based on watershed or water basins as the main units for water management (Pineda-Pablos et al. 2014). Under the auspices of article 115, it also did put in the realm of municipal responsibility the provision of water and sanitation services, although without “teeth,” or enough financial and decision-making power for local water and sanitation administration (Pineda-Pablos 2002). The main organization in charge of water management is the National Water Commission (CONAGUA or CNA), created in 1989 as a decentralized organization under the former Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources (SARH), but now it depends on
187
SEMARNAT (see Table 20 and Figure 26). Aboites (2009) argues that the creation of CONAGUA inaugurated in Mexico a new phase of management characterized by a vision of water as a commodity subject to market rules and efficiency considerations, with all the policy implications that this had, such as more attention to metering and scientific-based diagnosis, the establishment of tariffs and fees for different uses, and the creation of REPDA. REPDA is a policy instrument through which water access is dependent on the formal concession by the government as stated in a water title that is subject to periodic renewal. This defines volume, type of use, type of source (surface or groundwater), geographic points of extractions, and names of the water bodies where extraction occurs. Water titles and REPDA made possible the start of an incipient water market that supposedly would allocate the resource to the most beneficial and efficient use (Aboites 2009, Pineda-Pablos et al. 2014). But no surveillance or enforcement has been pursued systematically with regards to these rules, especially in the case of rural or countryside waters, which in practical terms have never been under the “real” control of the central government, but under the practical control of users (Aboites 2009). In the rural communities of the SMW, water metering is virtually nonexistent, CONAGUA does not have enough human resources to supervise extractions consistently, and social traditions determine local practices (Lutz-Ley 2014). However, in accordance with rural producers interviewed in the SMW, this has been changing in the last decade, especially in terms of more stringent policies for controlling groundwater exploitation in the San Miguel aquifer, as explained below. After these first steps towards policy liberalization in the early 1990s, CONAGUA regionalized the management of water by dividing the Mexican territory in 13 Hydrologic Administrative Regions (Lutz-Ley and Scott 2016, Scott and Banister 2008). The region where Sonora state is included, together with a portion of the neighboring state of Chihuahua, 188
corresponds to the RHA II- Northwest (Noroeste). These RHAs are administered through basin organizations; and the RHA II is managed by the Northwest Basin Organization (OCNO) that is the formal regional office of CONAGUA. The federal water agency continued its decentralization and regionalization process through the devolution of management faculties to the users, particularly in large irrigation districts (Wilder and Romero-Lankao 2006), and returned powers to lower levels of management, such as the basins organizations (Scott and Banister 2008). This was accompanied by the creation of several types of councils and governance bodies matched to hydro-ecological areas, such as watersheds, rivers, and aquifers. These new governance groups were intended to represent all civil, private, and governmental actors with a stake in water resources in those areas. In the RHA II there are three basin councils: The Basin Council of the High Northwest (Consejo de Cuenca del Alto Noroeste) where the SMW and the SRB are located; the Basin Council of the Yaqui-Mátape rivers (Consejo de Cuenca de los ríos Yaqui y Mátape); and the Basin Council of the Mayo river (Consejo de Cuenca del río Mayo). Basin councils were created with the objective of intermediate between the three levels of government in Mexico (federal, state, and municipal) and society, and for promoting civil participation in addressing water issues that arise in these hydro-ecological regions.20 However, the actual outcomes of decentralization and regionalization have been limited, and mixed in the best of cases, because CONAGUA retained its formal capacities to allocate water rights and to design and implement major policies (Scott and Banister 2008). Since the nation is the legal owner of resources, state level agencies or local organizations do not have real constitutional powers to modify the dispositions regarding
20
CONAGUA. 2016. Consejos de Cuenca. Available at: https://www.gob.mx/conagua/documentos/consejos-de-cuenca (Access: November 30, 2016).
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these resources. Nonetheless, they have bargaining powers and the state has jurisdiction for intervening in regional conflicts regarding water allocations and data collection and surveillance, as it was demonstrated during the development of the Sonora SI, an infrastructural plan led by the state government that generated many political conflicts among different social groups during the 2009- 2015 administration (Scott and Lutz 2016, Lutz Ley et al. 2011). Also, lower levels of governance in Sonora have been gaining voice and space, and more participatory approaches have developed for water governance as indicated before, although these are still evolving (Scott and Pineda 2011). Together with the governmentally-designed basin organizations, governmental-civil committees have also been created across the country for groundwater management at the level of individual aquifer systems embedded in the basins organizations of each RHA. Mexico is the largest groundwater user in Latin America with more than 100,000 highcapacity pumps for agricultural purposes (Scott and Banister 2008, p. 68), so it is no surprising that these additional policy instruments have been pursued. These are called Technical Committees of Underground Waters, or COTAS. In the RHA-II only four of the 60 aquifers in the region have a COTAS; one of them corresponds to the San Miguel aquifer (COTAS San Miguel), established in 2001.21 Although these committees are intended to advise decision-making regarding the aquifer management, and to represent all involved stakeholders and users, during the interviews with rural producers in the communities of the SMW no one of the 27 ranchers and farmers mentioned the COTAS San Miguel as a functional institution for channeling their demands and concerns, and access to groundwater was associated to a direct relationship between
21
Information on aquifers in Sonora is available at: http://www.gob.mx/conagua/acciones-yprogramas/disponibilidad-por-acuiferos-66095 (Access: November 30, 2016).
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CONAGUA and the individual right-holder rather than a mediated relationship involving the COTAS. The Basin Organization of the High Northwest was not mentioned by any of the rural producers either. At the state level, there also exists the State Water Commission (CEA-Sonora) that is administratively independent from the federal CONAGUA. CEA Sonora does not have constitutional power over allocations of water. But it works in parallel with the federal agency in collecting water and sanitation information, financing infrastructural projects, and mediating relationships between users and formal governance structures with the state-level. All the rural producers interviewed in the three communities of the SMW could identify CONAGUA, but only two recognized CEA-Sonora, and several more thought that CONAGUA and CEA- Sonora were the same agency. At the local level, water for productive purposes in the SMW is managed per a variety of arrangements that depend on the water source, the size of the systems, and physical variables affecting them. The communities at the headwaters (Cucurpe) and the lower watershed (San Miguel de Horcasitas and la Fábrica de los Ángeles) depend on surface water for irrigation of agricultural fields. Surface water is collectively managed through irrigation units for rural development (Unidades de Riego para el Desarrollo Rural, or URDERALES). These are a CPR type of governance structures smaller than the large, usually commerciallyoriented irrigation districts.22 If legally constituted, irrigation units assume the legal figure of civil associations (asociaciones civiles), and have a president, a treasurer, a secretary, and a
22
See Pedroza-González, E. and G.A. Hinojosa Cuellar. 2014. Manejo y distribución del agua en distritos de riego. Breve introducción didáctica. Jiutepec, Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua (IMTA).
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general assembly.23 The assembly designates a water judge (juez de agua), who oversees the equitable allocation, distribution, and use of water.
Figure 24. Acequia of “El Sahuarito” in the Saracachi river in front of Cucurpe town (photo credit: America Lutz, date: 03-10-2016).
The irrigation units in the municipalities of Cucurpe and San Miguel de Horcasitas are informal governance regimes coupled with bio-geophysical systems consisting of a network of earthen or covered dams and channels or “acequias” that connect the river with the agricultural parceled areas. The water from the rivers is derived to small dams that are connected to a main acequia. From this main acequia, water is distributed to each parcel
23
In the RHA-II Northwest, there are 1,070 irrigation units for rural development (URDERALES) covering an extension of 135,710 hectares, or the 21.3% of the total region’s area; 925 of them are in Sonora, and 145 in Chihuahua. Also 826 are legally constituted, but 244 are not, although they are identified. CONAGUA 2106. Infraestructura Hidro-agrícola. Organismo de Cuenca Noroeste (OCNO).
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utilizing secondary channels (see acequias in Cucurpe and San Miguel de Horcasitas in Figure 24 and Figure 14, respectively). To the north of Cucurpe town, the Saracachi and the Dolores rivers have their headwaters. They join to the south of Cucurpe, giving birth to the San Miguel river. In Cucurpe most of the interviewees were part of the irrigation units of either “Los Hornitos” or “El Sahuarito”. Both units are in the Saracachi river. In turn, “Cañada Ancha” and “El Pintor” use the water of the Dolores river. The two irrigation units in the Saracachi river include all the users on the right and left margins. The president of these units reported that there are 15 users in “El Sahuarito” in front of the town, and 30 in “Los Hornitos”. The water judge in the head locality of Cucurpe relies on an assistant to perform the supervision activities and the distribution of water. The water is physically channeled to fields per a time schedule (rol de riegos) agreed upon by the assembly, and the assistant would check that the opening of the channel for conducting water towards a specific field happens according to the schedule, and that nobody takes more water-hours than assigned. These water-hours depend on the size of each parcel, which at the local level is calculated per the number of “jornales” each producer has. This is a traditional concept that combines the physical extension of the land and the amount of work required to cultivate it. In summer of 2016, in Cucurpe the jornales were also used to determine the fee that each user in the assembly agreed to contribute for paying the assistant. The fee was a financial burden for some of the users, but they reported that water supervision had improved. This fee was established in 2013, during one of the worst drought years remembered by the interviewees. Downstream, in the head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas, the interviewees were users of the irrigation unit “El Bacajúzari,” and in La Fábrica de los Ángeles the irrigation unit was named after the locality, “Unidad de Riego los Ángeles,” with two main acequias 193
corresponding to each margin: “Los Locos” and “Los Licenciados.” The story of these irrigation units shows the effects of creeping environmental impacts together with inadequate policies for management of water. The habitants of the head locality of San Miguel de Horcasitas coincided that they have gone through one of the worst droughts they remember in the last decades. What made the drought so severe is its length (15 to 18 years), and the degree of its impacts (all the producers interviewed considered the number of dead cows and the lack of running water in selected places of the river as the main indicators of these impacts). The unit of El Bacajúzari was unable to keep the participation of all its members as the water become scarcer. The president of the unit mentioned that the lack of surface water during approximately 15 years caused that the users stopped organizing for maintaining the acequia, which is one of the main responsibilities of the members. The fact that water scarcity discourages participation of users has been found in other traditional irrigation systems (Lam 1997). When the drought ended in fall of 2014 and the precipitation was exceptionally good, the river flow recovered, but the users of El Bacajúzari were unable to use this water because their acequia system was in bad state, or destroyed in some sections. Only those with deep wells could continue production of forages for feeding the cattle. The rest had to look for additional sources of income to buy bales, or to rely on the low amounts of rainfall in the open grazing lands and their agricultural land plots. In turn, the irrigation unit serving la Fábrica de los Ángeles kept providing water to the users because it relies on a mixed surface-groundwater system. One of the oldest ejido producers in the town, who is also a field judge (juez de campo),24 indicated that around the 1960s decade the former SARH came to the town of San Miguel de Horcasitas with an
24
A juez de campo is an informal local authority in charge of supervising livestock movements and exchange. They work in coordination with SAGARPA and the UGRS, as explained below.
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infrastructural project to perforate deep wells in the irrigation unit and cover the channels (during these years the Mexican government invested large amounts of money in improving rural and agricultural infrastructure to foster productivity in the countryside). The members of the irrigation unit had to contribute with 25% of the total investment, but in El Bacajúzari the users did not come up with an agreement on this, so the opportunity was lost. In la Fábrica they decided to collaborate with SARH and perforate the two wells, one for each margin of the river, and to cover at least the main channels. Now, when the levels of surface water descend in the river, they operate the wells to extract water that is deposited in the main acequias to irrigate the fields per the schedule. The water judge in La Fábrica oversees both, the surface structure and the wells. This is a hybrid system in which groundwater and surface water seem to be exchangeable. The irrigation unit of Los Ángeles has a collective water title for 1,740,000 cubic meters of water per year for agricultural purposes. Interestingly, the water title mentions that there is one point of extraction and the type of source is surface water for this entire volume. However, the title also authorizes two points of groundwater extractions, but “0” cubic meters of groundwater volumes. No matter that the users utilize a combination of surface and groundwater depending on the season, this volume is considered all surface water for legal purposes. REPDA has accommodated the variety of local institutional arrangements for water management through making more flexible the categories of subjects eligible for concessions. For example, in one case, the collective title for water is given to the ejido or comunidad (land-management structures), and in other cases, it is given to the irrigation units or the civil associations managing the irrigation units (water management structures). Finally, in stark contrast with the high dependency on surface water for irrigation, in the mid-watershed municipality of Rayón the most frequent source among the interviewees 195
was groundwater extractions. The producers in the head locality indicated that nobody there irrigated with acequias, but mostly with water from deep wells, or practiced rain-fed agriculture. However, out of the head town, there also exist irrigation units and these have concessions for both types of sources, ground- and surface water. The number of water titles of collective bodies in Rayón is higher than in Cucurpe and San Miguel de Horcasitas. In Cucurpe, the president of the irrigation units said that they were still in the process of regularizing their situation with CONAGUA. No water title was found in REPDA for El Bacajúzari in San Miguel de Horcasitas either. An aspect mentioned in the three communities was the fact that CONAGUA stopped approving groundwater concessions for agriculture, and nowadays it is possible to obtain a concession only for livestock ponds or water holes. Also, the producers indicated that the agency had been approaching the watershed’s towns during the last decade and requiring producers to regularize their rights situation, to register or renew their titles, and to install water meters in the wells; especially in those that are electric-powered and for agricultural purposes. CONAGUA and SAGARPA also stopped subsidizing costs for the diesel- powered pumps. The feelings of the producers were mixed regarding all these actions. The majority believed that CONAGUA was right, but also that the agency had to recognize the livelihood value that water has for them, and they must be provided with alternatives and financial support to transit to other water use strategies instead of only being pushed by the agency. Many believed this new way of doing things was connected to drought and water scarcity. Another aspect that raised from interviews is a conceptual separation between surface and groundwater, and this separation was supported by the differential legal treatment that users have depending on the source of water. All the producers thought that having a well was advantageous to buffer lack of water in the river because each individual producer can 196
operate the well whenever she or he wants, without need for addressing the schedules and procedures mandated for members of surface irrigation units. Except by two of them, they believed that operation of wells did not affect the capacity of the surface system to provide water to the well-less users. Per the informants’ reports, CONAGUA also has stricter regulations regarding use of groundwater, while surface water regulation is left to the local users and nature’s vagaries. The hydrological connection between both sources seems to be overseen by both, users and the water agency. With respect to the connections between land and water, although they have separate legislations in Mexico, water concessions seem to be dependent, at least partially, on the evolution of the land tenure and the specific topographic features of each area. For example, the Comunidad de Rayón, constituted by the traditional colonizers in the head town, has several collective water titles for livestock purposes and no one for agriculture. The cattle are kept in communally managed grasslands, where no water from the river is available and deep perforations are required. In turn, during the interviews there was indication that many producers of the Comunidad have individualized water titles for agricultural production instead of collective concessions of agricultural water. The Comunidad has the best arable lands in the riparian area, where water tables are higher, although water does not flow on the surface regularly over the entire river valley (see Figure 25). The openness of the valley at the mid-watershed, and the volumes that flow underground contribute to increased dependence on wells because it was relatively easy for farmers to access this source before CONAGUA declared the Groundwater Closing Decree for the San Miguel Aquifer, and stopped agricultural concessions. These conditions were not met in Cucurpe that lies on a mountainous zone, or in San Miguel de Horcasitas in a narrower valley with intense water extractions for table grapes’ production and urban uses. Also, the 197
better economic endowments of the town’s households are evident in its appearance and human development indexes in comparison with the other municipalities (CONAPO 2000). The ejidos of Rayón in turn, newer and poorly endowed, have concessions for both types of sources, indicating that collective entitlements could be a strategy to face their disadvantageous endowments of land, water and financial resources.
Figure 25. The Rayon Valley. To the left, the San Miguel river crosses the valley stretching in and out through the terrain. To the right, a section of the town and some agricultural parcels can be seen (photo credit: America Lutz, date: 06-11-2015).
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Figure 26. Governmental, private, and social actors across governance levels in the SMW
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4.4.2. Land governance Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution states that land and water are originally owned by the nation (public property), but through concessions and purchases, they can assume private and social types of property. While private property means the full control of the land by the owner comparable to private property in other parts of the world, social property of land refers particularly to ejidos and comunidades (INEGI 2016). The ejido is a form of collective tenure created by governmental decree in the Constitution of 1917 with the objective of disintegrate large landholdings (latifundios) and re-distribute the land among the population. This distribution had a social justice objective by providing a livelihood resource to much of the landless population at that time; second, it served the pacification of the social revolts that led to the Mexican Revolution; and third, it was intended to enhance the socioeconomic development of the post-civil war Mexican country (Warman 2001). In turn, the comunidad is a traditional land tenure form that has roots on self-organization by early colonizers. Many of the Sonoran current comunidades have a background in the mission system built by Jesuits and Franciscans in the wild northern colonial Mexico, such as Cucurpe and Rayón (Sheridan 1988); in mineral extracting towns called “reales de minas”; or in military prisons, as San Miguel de Horcasitas (Padilla 2012). The main federal organization in charge of land management and planning is the Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development (SEDATU). In federal administrations before year 2015, there was a division between the management of agrarian lands by the Ministry of the Agrarian Reform (SRA) and land planning in urban locations. Now SRA has been restructured to manage all territorial planning in Mexico, which means that the government has legally unified the management of all lands into one single agency. SEDATU has regional delegations in the states that work in coordination with cadastral 200
offices in municipalities as well as a network of Agrarian Procuratorate offices to deal with land issues in ejidos and comunidades. For practical governmental purposes, SEDATU categorizes all ejidos and comunidades as agrarian units that share similar (but not identical) legal frameworks. As mentioned before, there are almost 32,000 agrarian units in Mexico; 997 of them are in Sonora State. In the three municipalities of the SMW included in this research there are 12 of these agrarian units (INEGI 2006) (see Table 21). The internal structure of the agrarian units is like that of the irrigation units: there is a president, a secretary, a treasurer, substitutes for these positions, and a general assembly. There is also a surveillance committee that works as a prosecutor of the decisions taken by the general assembly.
Comunidad Comunidad Ejido Comunidad
Cucurpe San Javier Seis de Enero Rayón El Ranchito de Aguilar Rayón Cerro de Oro Tres Álamos San Miguel de Horcasitas Pesqueira El Torreón Codórachi
Ejido Rayón
Ejido Ejido Ejido Ejido
San Miguel de Horcasitas
Ejido Ejido Ejido
Total members
Name
Avecindados
Cucurpe
Type of unit
Posesionarios
Municipality
% of municipal area occupied by the unit
Ejidatarios or Comuneros
Table 21. Ejidos and Comunidades in the three municipalities of the SMW
21,484.54 10,568.27 8,396.11 16,292.58
13.70% 6.74% 5.35% 18.51%
242 85 41 357
0 0 1 0
1 0 0 0
243 85 42 357
5,931.65
6.74%
72
5
8
85
5,827.24 4,112.91 339.52
6.62% 4.67% 0.39%
131 48 33
3 0 0
202 0 8
336 48 41
47,006.59
41.98%
323
34
13
370
2,772.38 2,010.29 1,068.26
2.48% 1.80% 0.95%
84 58 53
7 0 58
373 8 7
464 66 118
Total area in hectares
201
The authoritative positions in the ejidos and comunidades are elected democratically by the members that attend the assembly meetings for that specific purpose. There should be a simple majority for these elections to be in order. However, all the interviewed producers that were also members of agrarian units (and particularly of ejidos) mentioned that attendance is ever lower (30% or less of the members are regular in these meetings). They also identified two main reasons for this: many members are old (or dead) and their mobility and capacity to attend is limited, and the children or younger successors do not live in town, but only visit the communities during vacations or special dates. The agrarian distribution that started in 1917 was formally ended by the federal government in 1992. In this same year, several modifications were made to article 27, followed by a new Agrarian Law (see Table 20). This gave executive powers to the general assemblies of the ejidos and comunidades, individualized the access and use of agricultural land, and provided an institutional way to transform previously collective land toward full private property (and then, selling or leasing it). The federal government instituted the PROCEDE for the measurement, certification and issuing of individual parcel titles to ejidatarios and comuneros all over the country. Up to 2006, around 93 per cent of the land within the agrarian units had been certified and certificates issued to individual landholders (INEGI 2006). However, these certificates only established the official recognition of well-bounded land concessions to individuals, instead of collective bodies, and full privatization still requires additional steps involving 1) the approval of the Assembly, 2) the application to the Agrarian Procuratorate (Procuraduría Agraria) for transition of tenure form, and finally 3) registering the land in the Public Registry of the Property (Registro Público de la Propiedad), where it would be subject to taxing procedures as any other private property in the country (ejido and community land are 202
exempt of these taxes). Full privatization did not automatically follow the 1992 reforms as expected (Barnes 2009). However, in the fields, the interests of peasants have been in a constant interaction with those of the government and the private landholders through land history in Mexico (Sanderson 1984, Sheridan 1988). Nowadays ejidatarios coexist in the communally managed lands with avecindados (neighbors or residents) or posesionarios (possesors), two legal figures to nominate landholders of former ejido land that are not ejidatarios (see Table 21). The rural producers interviewed were members of the Comunidad de Cucurpe, Comunidad de San Javier, Comunidad de Rayón, Ejido de Rayón, and Ejido San Miguel de Horcasitas. When asked if there were differences in the way of using or managing land before and after the PROCEDE, the 100% of them mentioned that nothing had changed at the field level. They kept producing the same things with the same procedures they knew. Instead, changes were motivated because of lack of water, or market factors (agricultural prices). However, almost all of them also mentioned that there was a change in the sense of certitude over land ownership. Others added that they could make improvements to the land, and to protect it from invaders, poachers, or illegal mesquite wood harvesters now that they have official recognition of their right to that land. The local arrangements for management of land in ejidos and comunidades throughout the SMW appeared to be less variable than the arrangements for the management of water resources. Probably because land is a more stable, slower-changing resource than water. Also, the size of the communally managed areas and the number of members originally registered with PROCEDE in each ejido and comunidad must be kept over time, so it gives these institutions certain stability. Nonetheless, human dynamics can have enormous impacts on the landscape in a very short time, and this is a source of vulnerability 203
for collective land tenure and ecosystem sustainability in the SMW if demographic and environmental changes continue.
4.4.3. Agrarian productivity and rural development governance The third governance regime influencing adaptive livelihoods in the San Miguel Watershed is that of agrarian productivity and rural development. From the interviews with local actors, the main federal-level agency identified is SAGARPA. At the domestic level SEDESOL is important, but its programs are not focused on agrarian productivity. The structure of SAGARPA follows a hierarchical configuration with head offices in Mexico City, and state-level offices in Hermosillo city. SAGARPA operates at the local level through the Rural Development Districts (DDRs). These are regional-level organizations encompassing administration and delivery of the agency’s programs and support, advising for agrarian and rural productivity, and surveillance of compliance with program’s rules. The DDRs serve as the main intermediary between rural producers and the federal government in topics of rural productivity and development. The Law of Rural Development Districts enacted during the administration of President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1982-1988) gave origin to the 192 DDRs that currently exist in Mexico.25 For operational activities and outreach, the officials from the DDRs coordinate with the Municipal Government in each of these municipalities (“ayuntamientos”); and notably, with the Local Ranchers’ Associations (Asociaciones Ganaderas Locales), which are civil society organizations composed by the active ranchers in each municipality that are officially registered with the association, and pay an annual membership fee. This direct interaction
25
SAGARPA 2016, available at: http://www.sagarpa.gob.mx/Delegaciones/Paginas/default.aspx (Access: November 30, 2016).
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allows SAGARPA’s representatives to use the physical offices and the time of the rancher’s meetings to divulgate information about the programs and requirements of the agency. The local ranchers’ associations have an internal structure composed of a president, a secretary, a treasurer, and the general assembly of ranchers. They are all subsidiaries of a larger Regional Rancher Association (UGRS, or Unión Ganadera Regional de Sonora) that works at the state level concentrating more than 25 thousand members distributed in 86 local associations, and has existed since year 1936. This is a powerful producers’ organization with bargaining and economic capacities that defines best livestock management practices, and specially livestock commercialization and marketing policies.26 Within the governance structure for livestock development, the UGRS together with SAGARPA have associated field judges (jueces de campo), who oversee the movement of cattle out and in each zone within a municipality (the zones are defined by a set of neighboring localities). The authorizing documents (guías de campo) issued by the judges are required to purchase and sell the cattle locally, and in the auctions organized periodically by the UGRS. They also serve as inputs for databases kept by the field judges to elaborate livestock censuses each year. These censuses are submitted to the DDR corresponding to each municipality. Each ejido and comunidad interacted with other actors in their communities with different results in terms of achieving rural development goals. For example, in the upper SMW the comuneros of Cucurpe reported some benefits from the three gold mining companies present in the municipality through the access to machinery and economic resources for funding local businesses and improving public spaces. The president of the local ranchers’ association in Cucurpe indicated that the largest gold mine in the area provide
26
UGRS 2016, available at: http://www.unionganadera.com/index.php (Access: November 30, 2016).
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them with these services in exchange for using communal land for building the mine’s electric supply network. These interactions are locally driven and there are no formal contracts involved. They depend on the bargaining capacities of the habitants rather than on some form of high level regulation by the government. While this is something positive for most of the rural landholders interviewed in Cucurpe, a former municipal president and former president of the comunidad, emphasized that those short-term supports won’t be enough to compensate the people for the impacts of mining in the long term. He indicated that high-load trucks moving all day between Cucurpe and Magdalena have deteriorated this transportation way for Cucurpeños. Furthermore, gold leaching uses a cyanide-based solution and, while the discharge should be strictly regulated by SEMARNAT and PROFEPA, per the informant’s report, nobody in the town is assured that what happened in the copper mine in Cananea, in the neighboring SRB (the spill of a tailing pond in 2014 and pollution of the Sonora river), can’t happen in Cucurpe.
4.5.Institutional mismatches and adaptive governance
Some institutional arrangements can be more adequate than others for achieving adaptive governance of resources in the SMW. In Table 22, four institutional mismatches are identified and summarized. Each section below describes them by utilizing examples from the communities at the upper, mid-, and lower SMW. These originate from the interactions between multiple resource regimes (land, water, and rural development) within a level or across levels of social organization (international/global, national/federal, state/regional, local/municipal), and between sectors participating in that governance system (social, governmental, and/or private/market).
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Difficulties in the interactions between federal level actors that are highly bureaucratic and technical, and local, flexible and relatively informal social groups managing resources. Control of resources is monopolized by those able to navigate multiple levels.
It emerges from the interactions between institutional levels that have different nature and scope. This mismatch happens in situations with high centralization, or incomplete decentralization of decision-making and rights, and absence of bridging institutions than balance the power and resources differences between levels.
It occurs when different resource regimes operating in the same geographic area are spatially incoherent between them. This category deals with the interactions between multi-regime institutional interplay and the features of the bounded common space in which the interplay operates.
Level-based
Scale-based
There are multiple resource regimes operating in the same SMW region: water, land, ecological conservation, and rural development. Each resource regime has its own definitions of the regional boundaries defining its focus areas. These different areas generate dissimilar access to adaptive opportunities and resources by the social groups that coexist in the same geographic space. Inequality is created almost automatically.
This can occur in non-governmental settings too. SMW Communities lack an accountable intermediate institution to connect with regional markets. Resourceful individuals profit from market bridging.
Example(s)
Description
Institutional Mismatch
• Clear definition of responsibility within the regime, and blurred in regards to the global SES • Policy actions are not comprehensive • Incapacity to interlock levels and regimes of governance and to manage embeddedness of actors from different resource regimes • Deficient check and balance mechanisms across regimes • Inequity in access to knowledge and resources of each regime
Factors of adaptive governance affected (see Table 18) • Imperfect polycentrism or decentralization • Incapacity for cross-level interaction and communication • Decreased local autonomy and capacities • Incomplete devolution of rights and decision-making powers • Low legitimacy / lack of local authority • Deficient check and balance mechanisms across levels • Low accountability to local constituencies
Table 22. Institutional mismatches in the governance of resources in the SMW
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Define feedbacks of the cross-level and cross-regime interactions that conduct the SES toward adaptive and non-adaptive outcomes.
Common arenas where all participants in a geographic area identify the dynamics in which they interact.
Shared systematic, updated, and credible knowledge on key SES attributes that affect all the regimes.
Vertical integration through actors, institutions, or knowledge from one level that participate in or influence other levels (PahlWostl 2009).
Bridging organizations can build channels over institutional gaps (Gunderson et al. 2014).
How can we reduce the mismatch?
Description
It occurs when there is an internal incongruence or contradiction between formal regulations and policies pertaining to different governance regimes. It is equivalent to classical institutional disarticulation in the regulatory components of governance regimes.
It happens when there is a mismatch between the official or formal institutions for governance of resources, and the on-the-ground practices of actors in that setting. In other words, this broadly refers to the mismatches between formal institutions and expected and real people’s behavior.
Institutional Mismatch
Regulation-based
Practice-based
Differences in worldviews affect resource access, use, and conservation. Federal agencies for land, water, and rural development have a focus on efficiency-oriented actions. Local practices still have a strong traditional component. For people in the SMW, land and water formal requirements contradict, or do not integrate with their customary uses and practices. This makes difficult for all the actors to agree on the management of these livelihood resources.
Federal level regulations interact with local level regulations. Allocation of additional ejido land restricted by wildlife policies of SEMARNAT in the lower SMW. No more land is available for agricultural livelihoods.
Regulations for multiple resources in the SMW generate contradictory results since they are designed for single topics or resources, instead of considering the entire SES in which they are embedded. SAGARPA has support programs to foster rural productivity, but its rules of operation interact with CONAGUA’s and SEMARNAT’s conservation policies and generate worse-off results in terms of SES long-term resilience.
Example(s)
• Organizational, institutional, and procedural inflexibility • Capacity for social or institutional learning is limited • Capacity to combine different types of knowledge is limited or inexistent • Lack of monitoring systems and reliable data on key thresholdtype variables of the SES • Little or no use of pertinent information in decision-making across levels and regimes • Low legitimacy of government
• Mechanisms for regulation and surveillance are undermined • Complementarity of interests between individuals is affected • Deficient co-management of environmental resources across multiple social groups, levels or regimes • Deficient crosscheck of institutions from different resource regimes • Overall negative impacts on the general capacity of the SES to reorganize after shocks
Factors of adaptive governance affected (see Table 18)
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Co-production of knowledge on the shared stressors and best adaptive strategies to deal with local issues regarding livelihood resources, and supported by changes in upper-level institutions.
Policy-science dialogues and effective social learning processes that involve actors from all the levels and all the sectors involved in multiresource regimes.
Delimiting the regulatory authority of each part.
Look for common interests by looking at organizational or institution objectives in reference to other organization’s objectives.
Setting common arenas for interaction between participants and identifying issues or problematic areas in which rules from each regime play a role.
How can we reduce the mismatch? Deliberate co-management of the horizontal interplay (Oberthür et al. 2011):
4.5.1. Organizational level-based institutional mismatch Highly centralized governance regimes imply a potential lack of attention to local features that otherwise could make adaptation better targeted and effective (Cumming et al. 2006). While human adaptation to global change has been demonstrated to be a local event (Adger et al. 2005, Agrawal et al. 2012), the institutional frameworks for management of critical rural resources in Mexico are federally determined and based on generic understandings of the national territory and its issues. These policies are downscaled to the lower levels, in which they interact with institutions that have a different nature and scope. The inadequate interactions between levels produce outcomes that can affect adaptive governance mechanisms. Young (2002) identified this type of mismatch and indicated that higher levels of government have high management costs in terms of their inability to understand local variations of critical biophysical variables, and lack of sensitivity to local institutional elements. This is an example of the first type of mismatch identified in the SMW, an organizational level-based mismatch. However, in this case the analysis of the mismatch expands to other sectors of the governance system, such as the markets, beyond the governmental or public domain. In Mexico, as in many parts of Latin America, a process of decentralization and regionalization of natural resources’ management has been pursued at least since the late twentieth century (Eakin and Lemos 2006), but de facto centralization still exists because those resources are under the constitutional control of the federal government. Each governance level has its own set of rules and organizations regarding land, water, and rural development. This is particularly the case of the government in Sonora, whose institutional
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framework coexists with the decentralized/regionalized framework of the federal government almost on a one-to-one basis for each resource governance regime. While this is part of the formal institutional design, the story has two sides: in one there is a high institutional density and overlapping of functions in the interlock between federal and state levels that vanishes as it goes down in the vertical hierarchy (i.e. no specialized departments exists in the municipal governments of the rural communities, in contrast with specialized management units in urban settings). On the other hand, there are significant gaps in the federal and state levels regarding socially or privately driven institutions and actors for governance of land, water, and rural development (maybe the only exception is the UGRS that deals with regional-scale livestock management, and the basin councils that are, at the end, a creation of the government) (see Figure 26). The fact that diverse and redundant institutions coexist and overlap across organizational levels is generally seen as a feature of adaptive governance increasing resilience of a SES because they help in absorbing disturbances and spreading the risks across levels (Folk et al. 2005, Low et al. 2003). However, this overlapping is not an advantage without precaution in all governance situations. In Mexico, one of the outcomes of imperfect decentralization/regionalization of governance levels is that formal government actors are dense in the state and federal levels of the governance regimes, while relatively informal and scattered social organizations dominate the local level. This is not a problem by itself. The existence of relatively informal rural organizations of users managing water, land, and rural productivity can be design-wise for addressing the local variability in physical, ecological, and socio-economic variables that formal institutions and organizations at higher levels do not incorporate. The higher levels of a governance system can be incapable of “micromanaging” (Lam 1997, p. 36). 210
The organizational level- based institutional mismatch emerges when very different institutions operating at higher and lower levels of governance and social organization need to interact, and this leads to asymmetric relationships and clientelistic outcomes if the rest of the design elements are not adequate; for example, when the local levels depend on higher levels for financial capital and approval of decisions without enough legitimacy and accountability from the higher to the lower level, or across levels. This is a prevalent situation in Mexican rural communities with low revenue-raising capacity and no more options in terms of financing their development or acquiring power for bargaining with higher levels. Agrawal et al. (2012) argue that “decentralization reforms constrain local autonomy and capacity particularly when they are accompanied only by upward forms of accountability” (p. 574).27 Furthermore, Berkes (2010) argues that effective management of resources by local levels of governance requires devolution of rights and property to the usergroups and organizations. However, devolving powers to lower levels of governance in developing countries without an adequate and solid civil society acting as “safety net” could cause a worse overall situation for adaptive capacity than that in which more robust governmental institutions retain the control at higher levels (Schuurman 2000, cited by Eakin and Lemos 2006, p. 13). In other words, higher level corruption and mismanagement can be downscaled, not eliminated, if decentralization is pursued on weak institutional grounds. Throughout the interviews with rural producers in the three communities of the SMW multiple examples were provided indicating how the interactions between actors in different levels in the context of the current rules promoted that only those able to understand discourses and practices on both sides (i.e. understanding operational rules of federal
27
Cursives added.
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agencies and local practices) kept informational and resources advantages, and in this way perpetuate their leadership positions in the local settings. While producers complained about this in the three towns, they found themselves disempowered to face or challenge this situation while standing on unfair or unequal terrains. Level mismatches also emerged in the private sector, particularly in the commercialization of products from the local communities to the regional markets. In all the towns, the interviewed producers reported that most small-scale ranchers utilized the services of middle-men for commercialization of cattle. They would buy a fair amount of calves from the localities in the surroundings and transport them to the capital city and other points of commercialization. These middle-men were usually very well endowed local ranchers able to provide credits in advance and collect the payments by taking calves equal to the amount of the credit. The ranchers see this as an adaptive strategy during years with low precipitation or poor socio-economic conditions, especially because they do not have formal financial services. The middle-men do not charge interests and these transactions are based on trust relationships instead of using the rancher’s property as collateral for credit. However, at the same time, by using these informal credits they loss other commercialization options because of previous commitments to the lender. There are just a couple of local ranchers in each locality who take by themselves their animals to the auctions organized by the UGRS in Hermosillo city. The reasons are geographical (the distance that they need to travel with the cattle safely transported); socioeconomic (the money that should be invested in going to Hermosillo, stay there, and show the cattle makes that only a decent amount of calves are worth to transport), and mostly institutional (the producer needs to comply with a series of restrictions to be allowed to commercialize the cattle with the UGRS, such as being a registered tax payer with the 212
Treasury Office -Hacienda-, being able to issue invoices for purchases, and to comply with sanitary specifications that are costly to accomplish for the average rancher). Since the social sector producers are exempt from many tax obligations, virtually all the ranchers said they were afraid of entering in troubles with Hacienda because they were ignorant of the implications, and the size of their operations did not make this a worthy strategy. In this case, the high level of formality in regional, national, and international commercialization levels represents a challenge to the lower, informal and flexible levels that lack knowledge and capacity to enter in those higher orders. It is unnecessary to say that power relationships emerge from these situations in detriment of the small-scale producers. It is not rare that the middle-men are also social or political leaders in the towns, or have dense networks with local authorities. Some older ranchers said that the middle-men all over the region were consciously agreeing on average prices that would benefit them the most, no matter that the small producers suffer. Others see the middle-men as persons of good will that help them during difficult times, and even some more thought that the United States was the most powerful agent determining prices. At least five of the 27 producers mentioned during the interviews that the prices for calves were determined by a table - “la tabla”defining the weight of a calf to be exported to the United States. The optimum weight was around 150 kilograms (approximately 330 pounds). Calves fatter than that were less priced. The reason, in accordance with the interviewed producers, is that the feedlots in the USA fatten the cattle with special foods, so they can comply with market certifications (“classified meat” was a concept repeatedly mentioned by the producers). From one perspective or another, an outcome of this organizational level-based mismatch is that livestock businessmen profit from the gap by knowing how to play across levels, and this happens with no regulation by public institutions. Although the reader could 213
fairly question the sustainability of livestock rearing in a semi-arid watershed, this mismatch regarding cross-level interactions poses difficulties for pursuing other types of more adaptive livelihood activities too. For example, a farmer in Rayón indicated that he would plant organic crops or other less-water intensive crops instead of leasing his land or producing forage if he was sure that commercialization would be successful. Planting fodder crops and pursuing a livelihood based on livestock seems to be the less risky agricultural endeavor in these conditions, although the long-term viability of this activity is not guaranteed. Another producer in Cucurpe said: “if you plant… let’s say lettuce, then you would have to find a buyer, and even if you find one, you won’t be totally sure of being able to deliver the product because you have no control on rainfall and plagues. In turn, if you have a cow, you put it in your pick-up anytime, and I bet you that you would have sold it before arriving to Magdalena”. Selling cattle does not necessarily require accessing higher levels in the “governance” of markets. Although it is clear from literature and empirical examples that “one-size” solutions are not viable in a highly complex and dynamic institutional setting, the interactions between levels would be more effective in promoting adaptive governance if ad-hoc middle- or intermediate spaces designated for co-management (Young 2002, p. 107, Lam 1997) existed to balance the differences of power of the interacting levels; in other words, “…neither centralization nor decentralization, but cross-level interactions” (Folke et al. 2005, p. 463), and it should be added: with very clear rules to define the scope of those interactions, and agreed by both, the local users and the federal and regional actors, not by some administrative unit in central Mexico that retains full control over rights and executive decision-making.
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4.5.2. Spatial scale-based institutional mismatch A second type of mismatch occurs when there are regimes that are spatially incoherent between them for managing the territory. While the first mismatch category deals with misfits in the interplay between levels of governance, this category deals with the outcomes of the interactions between the multi-regime institutional interplay and the features of the specific geographic area in which the interplay operates. For example, the land regime operates in a bounded scale different from the one defined by the water regime, or the rural development regime. This is a spatial scale-based mismatch in which the geographic boundaries of regime areas are non-coincident, and whatever happens in one regime area or “layer” does not reach other coexisting layers, or reach them in different ways, making the story far more complicated. While cross-level heterogeneity (i.e. redundancy, diversity) in governance systems could be desirable for adaptation, inequality is generated through the creation of adaptive opportunities for some groups and not for others that are spatially close, but not within the boundaries of one regime-defined area. The municipal boundaries in the SMW are non-coincident with the watershed boundaries, the ecological boundaries, or the boundaries of the DDRs. There are, at least, three types of agencies managing several resources regimes in a single area (SEMARNAT, CONAGUA and SAGARPA) with multiple definitions of where the boundaries are, although the social-ecological system is the same. Young (2002) referred to a similar situation as a problem of “fit”. However, in this case, more than a problem of “fit” between the governance regime features and the biogeophysical features of the SES, this is a problem of fit between multiple administrative areas of different governance regimes (land, water, rural development, ecological sustainability, and others) operating in the same space. At the same time, it is different from a simple
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problem of interplay. While interplay refers to the capacity for integration between levels of the human-created structure of governance, the scale mismatch identified here emerges from the overlay of this “mismatched interplay” overlying a geographical area. In this way, the original mismatch of fit identified by Young (2002) is expanded to address the growing complexity in interactive overlying of different regimes’ spatial scales. This has important consequences for adaptive governance outcomes because environmental regimes always deal with spatially localized natural capital. About water management, for example, Borowski et al. (2008) explains that “problems of vertical and horizontal interplay between (…) institutions at basin scale and those organized at traditional administrative boundaries (…) prove to be a barrier for implementing integrated management approaches and may lead to overly complex structures. They are also an impediment for the adaptation to climate change which requires effective vertical coordination” (p. 358). An example of the spatial scale-based institutional mismatch occurs in the SMW in the development of rural livelihood strategies contextualized by multiple interacting regimes for access to resources. The main agency for procuring financial support for rural productivity projects is SAGARPA, which in turn operates at the local level through the DDRs. Article 7th of the Law of DDRs indicates that these should include zones with homogeneous ecologic and socio-economic characteristics for agrarian activities, forestry, agroindustry, and aquaculture, with similar conditions of irrigation, drainage and rain-fed lands, to foster integrated rural development. However, each DDR addresses rural issues in a bounded area corresponding with the geopolitical limits of the municipalities under their jurisdiction instead of the ecological and productive criteria indicated in the law. In this way, the delimitation of the DDRs in the San Miguel Watershed does not seem to follow ecologic or even socioeconomic criteria for grouping the municipalities: Cucurpe, in the headwaters, 216
corresponds to the DDR 140 with offices in Magdalena; Rayón to the DDR 142, with head offices in Ures; and San Miguel de Horcasitas to the DDR 144 with offices in Hermosillo. If we consider that SAGARPA approaches the communities through its DDR agents, then it is not surprising that the three municipalities, although being part of one region for water governance purposes as defined by CONAGUA, end up with differential access to knowledge and resources from the point of view of rural development governance. Furthermore, the rural producers need to access SAGARPA offices located in different municipalities, which are not even within the SMW boundaries defined by CONAGUA. The fact that dissimilar municipalities are included within a single DDR could play a role in unequal distribution of resources transferable to the other regimes’ areas. For example, an interviewee in San Miguel de Horcasitas confided that they did not receive much support from SAGARPA programs because most of the money was “taken” by the agricultural valley of la Costa de Hermosillo, which is included in the same DDR, but is much larger and producers are better equipped and educated than in San Miguel de Horcasitas, and then they have better opportunities to be founded through more competitive project applications. While this is difficult to prove, it would be fair to say that the lower Sonora River Basin enters in unequal interactions with the lower SMW through the distributional policies of SAGARPA. According to Young (2002), “mismatches between regimes and ecosystems are frequently difficult to eliminate (…) Partly, this is a matter of difficulties associated with efforts to document unsustainable activities and to demonstrate conclusively the role of prevailing institutions as causes of these activities” (p. 22). Some potential solutions may include common, continuous, detailed, and credible knowledge on the key attributes of the social-ecological system, and this common set needs to be shared, feed, and utilized by the multiple governance regimes coexisting at the same 217
SES across the federal, regional/state, and local/municipal levels. Another possibility is the creation of common arenas where all governance participants in a geographic area identify the critical dynamics in which they interact with one another, and then explore the feedbacks of those interactions that would produce adaptive and non-adaptive outcomes. Finally, the above issues are related to a scale-based mismatch in spatial terms, but other SESs’ authors have nominated problems with scale in temporal and functional terms (Cumming et al. 2006, Young 2002). These are also critical in the SMW, especially in regards to time cycles in formal government shifts and the disconnection between policy timeframes and ecological dynamics; however, these will be explored in future research. Other possible factors affecting these interactions include bureaucratic inertia, competition among agencies, and organizational cultures.
4.5.3. Formal regulation-based institutional mismatch A third type of mismatch occurs when there is an internal incongruence or contradiction between formal regulations and policies pertaining to different governance regimes. This is called formal regulation-based mismatch and refers to the classical institutional disarticulation in the formal regulatory components between multiple governance regimes. This type of institutional mismatch can be compared to the problems emerging from horizontal interplay identified by Young (2002), but in this case the mismatch emerges from the multiplicity of regimes operating together. Horizontal interplay can happen when: 1) there is a necessity to choose arenas for framing an issue, 2) there is bargaining over the content of issues and policies, 3) there are operational linkages between institutions, 4) two organizations supply similar or common services, or 5) there are conflicts between rules of separate regimes (Young 2002), as in the regulation-based mismatch identified here. The 218
conflicts between formal rules of separate regimes are more probable when institutions promote single purpose regulatory programs, or single objective policies, and these are used by groups on convenience. Sectorial laws and programs “fragment the social-ecological system into pigeonholes (water quality, species habitat, flood control, etc.) and frustrate interagency coordination” (Gunderson et al. 2014, p. 137). An example of these institutional mismatches are the productive programs existing in the portfolio of SAGARPA for supporting rural communities. PROCAMPO is a program of direct money transfers to farmers depending on the type of crop planted per season and the area cultivated. Per its rules of operation, the payment of the support is dependent on the actual cultivation of a farmer’s parcel, no matter that the crop fails or that there is no rainfall or enough groundwater that year. This promotes that farmers registered in PROCAMPO always plant their lands, so they can have this money. Several of the interviewed producers mentioned that some bad years they did know that rainfall was not coming, and that very few could be harvested, but still cultivated to receive the money. While this can be good for buffering pressures posed on agricultural livelihoods during dry years -and actually the people said that money from PROCAMPO is a critical financial resource to survive during these times-, it also promotes exploitation of scarce water and already stressed landscape, which enters in conflict with other in-situ legislation that tries to do the opposite, such as the banning of well’s perforations by CONAGUA (Groundwater Closing Decrees), the policies for protection of biodiversity by SEMARNAT, or the mesquite reforestation policies of CONAFOR. Scott (2011), for example, has demonstrated that energy subsidies by SAGARPA have contributed to aquifers’ overdraft in Mexico. How these regimes resolve competing goals in the context of rural livelihoods, economic dynamics, and climate change is at the core of this mismatch. 219
The horizontal interplay between formal regulations and procedures is stronger between SAGARPA and CONAGUA than between other organizations in the SMW, and SAGARPA is probably the organization with better developed linkages to the local producers. Agents from the water agency usually approach the rural communities through the DDRs or the ejido or irrigation unit organizations. During fieldwork, the author witnessed how CONAGUA representatives attended the assemblies’ meetings to communicate aspects of water policies and programs to the local rural producers. Furthermore, several programs require formal crosscheck between SAGARPA’s and CONAGUA’s approvals of a producer status to be eligible; at least as stated in operational rules. The application for water concessions by social sector producers requires the certificate of the ejido or communal land. Similarly, to apply for the energy subsidy of SAGARPA for agricultural water pumping, the producer needs to show proof of the legal concession of water by CONAGUA, as well as the compliance with the water metering rule and the periodic reporting of volumes extracted. While all these requirements are clearly stated “on the papers”, none of the two agencies have enough human and financial resources to empirically corroborate the compliance with regulations, and then to enforce the rules of operation of these programs. An employee from SAGARPA interviewed in 2015 reported that they only required the documents of the title and trimestral reports on water volume extractions to file an application for the energy subsidy program. When asked if they verified the veracity of this information, the interviewee said that it was possible for a person to use documentation for misrepresenting his/her land or water situation and relatively low probability of being caught soon. So, although there is a careful treatment of crosschecks per formal institutions in theory, in the reality there are not well developed means of enforcing such crosschecks. The
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mismatching emerging from these interactions decrease the capacity of the SES to prevent free-rider and rent-seeking behavior. Regarding the outcomes of defective governance regimes interactions in terms of power and resources distribution, Young (2002) argued that “institutional interplay becomes a matter of politics when actors engaged in specific interactions seek consciously to make use of overlaps to achieve identifiable goals” (p. 137). However, there may be situations in which actors use the gaps instead of the overlaps to achieve their goals. There was a case in which a producer knew how to use the mid-level institutional gaps in the horizontal interplay between SAGARPA, CONAGUA, and SEDATU to generate personal benefits. At the time of the interview, this informant was planning to build water infrastructure for a large livestock operation at lower costs, by utilizing a combination of governmental funds thanks to access to neighboring lands under multiple tenures. The interviewee mentioned that it was possible to use the advantageous financing scheme for ejido producers (SAGARPA contributes 70 or 80% of the investments, while the producer contributes 30 or 20%) to provide infrastructure serving a total area that also included private lands (private owners require to contribute more of the co-investment). The Agrarian Law does not provide means for restricting multiple types of ownership, and there are no institutionalized or enforced crosschecks between SAGARPA and land tenure organizations. The result of this is that resources targeted to small scale producers are utilized by mid-size and large producers that can achieve multiple funding arrangements thanks to multiple types of ownership. These rules would also partially explain why the ejido lands have been transformed to private lands very slowly through time. The above example also demonstrates that institutional mismatches can interact between them to make the issues more pervasive: the lack of crosschecks in the horizontal interplay between different sectorial policy requirements (a regulation-based mismatch) can 221
interact with local arrangements for land ownership (level-based mismatch) and generate undesirable results very difficult to correct for the watershed SES. Although one officer of the DDR in Ures explained that many state agents were aware of these issues, they did not have real powers or institutional capacity to modify the situation, and in practical terms “it was impossible to regulate everything”. In the long term, these events emerging from the incapacity for integrated governance across levels, across scales, and across different resource regimes could undermine the communities’ social fabric, the trust across levels, and the legitimacy of both local and higher level institutions.
Figure 27. Sign forbidding collection and/or hunting of wildlife in the ejido of San Miguel de Horcasitas (photo credit: America Lutz, date: 04-02-2016)
There were cases in which federal regulations were precedent over local level regulations, creating a regulation-based mismatch first between resource regimes, and second between governance levels. For example, some informants in the mid- and lower watershed 222
indicated that they were members of ejidos, but had not been assigned individual agricultural plots, as had all members. They were landless ejidatarios waiting for their assignments to be done. In the ejido at the lower SMW, no more agricultural land was available because of governmental restrictions from SEMARNAT, PROFEPA and CONAFOR for conservation enhancement, which made impossible to clear new areas (see Figure 27). Ecological regulations -when federally determined- have greater priority over livelihood uses of landscape in certain sections of the SMW.
4.5.4. Practice-based institutional mismatch Practice-based mismatches happen when there is a mismatch between the official or formal regulations for governance of resources, and the “in-use” rules and practices of actors in that setting. In other words, this refers to the mismatches between formal institutions and people’s behavior. This is maybe the most common type of mismatch in the SMW and other rural communities around the world. This type of mismatch can happen when formal institutions -usually implemented by the government- fail in recognizing the complexity of the real-world settings, or when formal institutions deliberately search for making the reality “manageable” through simplification of the real features of the systems to be governed (Scott 1998). This also happens when the government imports “one-size-solutions” from other latitudes (Ostrom 2005), or as recommended by international financing organizations; something that has been very common for developing countries in general. In third place, the lack of reliable, systematic, and updated information on critical features of the SES can make policy feasibility very difficult to determine beforehand, and then some rules and policies that are carefully designed fail when they enter in contact with dynamic and flexible realities, because the design was 223
conducted under wrong assumptions on how the system works. Furthermore, in many situations, political power rather than conscious and systematic planning can play a big role in the failure of institutional design, because “many, if not all, institutional arrangements depend on political bargain, not necessarily on systematic implementations and design” (Young 2002, p. 108). Finally, the lack of enforcement and surveillance mechanisms of formal institutions obviously will contribute to increasing the gap between the expected behaviors and the real practices in all levels of governance. The recognition and naming of these mismatch is an addition to the previous three mismatches that have correlates identified by other authors (Young 2002). Many examples are available from empirical data and observation notes collected in the three municipalities of the SMW that support this type of mismatch. However, the mismatches that maybe have the most overreaching consequences for the SES are those occurring in the formal administration of land and water rights systems, and the local practices regarding access and distribution of these resources. Tradition rather than efficiency define many, if not all, the mechanisms for local access to land and water from the point of view of right holders in the SMW. The differences in worldviews between the Mexican government and the local users of these resources in northern Mexico have been widely documented by social scientists for water and/or land since, at least, the last half of the twentieth century (Aboites 2009, Banister 2010, Perramond 2010, Sheridan 1988, Wilder 2002). This does not mean that globalization has not transformed the local worldviews, but instead that those are now hybrids in which traditional values still retain a lot of power in defining how people think about their resources. In the interviews with leaders of comunidades and ejidos in the three municipalities of the watershed, none had precise answers to questions regarding the status of ownership of 224
lands within the organizations. These informants mentioned that people tend to be very informal in land successions, and there were individuals that never updated the land certificates received through PROCEDE. The president of a comunidad in the upper watershed mentioned that he had inherited communal land when his father died. He received several certificates because the allotment consisted of several plots, but he also received the certificate of a plot that he remembered his father had sold to somebody else. He discovered that the buyer paid for the land and took the copy of the original land certificate; however, the change was never reported to the Agrarian Procuratorate in Hermosillo, so the land certificate was still titled to the informant’s father. If the informant would desire to keep property of this land, he could have legally done so, no matter that the land was sold to somebody else, because the titles were never updated. In the words of the informant, cases like this are abundant in the SMW because, for people, the “palabra de un hombre” (“a man’s word”) is valuable in land transactions based on trust, with the outcome that nobody knows precisely what is going on in terms of regional land ownership and tenure at the level of ejidos and comunidades. Also, the long distance that should be traveled to the bureaucratic centers of the state (Hermosillo in the case of SEDATU and the agrarian offices) makes this process more challenging for rural populations. The roots of the mismatch between formal institutions and local practices regarding land can also be found in the history of the agrarian distribution. One elder rancher in La Fábrica de los Ángeles mentioned that the government “was very generous” to people when the agrarian distribution was done, but that the procedures to conduct the assignments of land were far away from adequate. The agrarian officials arrived to this town and collected as many names as there were people asking for land, with no previsions of the actual destination of this land. The result, from the point of view of this informant, is that many “nylon farmers” 225
(referring to their “false” or “synthetic” quality) got land without knowing how to cultivate it. The end of the agrarian distribution only promoted that these nylon farmers sold more easily their rights, fostering in this way rent-seeking behavior more than enhancing the Mexican countryside productivity. In terms of water, throughout the watershed there was a sense of high valuation of customary practices regarding water in comparison with the more modern, market-oriented management perspective that CONAGUA is trying to advance (Aboites 2009, Wilder and Romero-Lankao 2006). For several of the users, the fact that they have used this water for many decades was more important for practical purposes than the legal requirement of CONAGUA to have a legal title to prove their rights (Lutz-Ley 2014). This sums to the lack of local control that the federal agency has in these communities; something that Aboites (2009) refers to as the management of the “countryside waters” or “las aguas pueblerinas”. One of the representatives of CONAGUA’s OCNO indicated during an interview that the agency knew that the reports of volumes extracted by rural producers were not reliable because they do not have meters in many places, so people used indirect calculation methods. He added that OCNO officials in the past flied over rural communities using helicopters to detect illegal perforations and dams. However, due to a public scandal involving the use of federal vehicles for personal purposes by a top official from federal CONAGUA, the agency decided to safeguard the helicopters in the central offices, with the consequential loss of capacity for regional offices. This shows how factors external to the SES, such as mass media coverage, can have enormous consequences in the performance of governance regimes within the system. In a more general perspective, the lack of reliable and precise information on water availability, distribution, and use at the local level constitutes another challenge in the pursuing of adaptive management of water resources in the face of global climate change. 226
4.6.Discussion: is a “mismatched” governance possible? No governance regime is perfect simply because human beings cannot control all the variables that affect its performance. However, there are factors that can undermine the general capacity of a social-ecological system to keep its functions and identity in face of stressors and shocks driven by environmental, socio-economic, and institutional challenges. This study analyzed how the institutional interactions between factors of resource regimes for the governance of water, land, and rural development impact adaptive outcomes in the San Miguel Watershed, in arid Northwest Mexico. This study was based on empirical data from three communities representing the upper, middle, and lower watershed, and is focused on the interactive processes explaining governance outcomes. Institutional mismatches had been previously identified in academic literature on SESs governance. This chapter takes those mismatches and expand them conceptually to capture the complexity of multi-regime, multi-level, and multi-sector governance of livelihood resources that characterizes current social-ecological systems. Four types of institutional mismatches were identified: an organizational level-based mismatch occurring when institutions at the federal, regional, and local levels do not fit because their nature and scope is non-coincident, there are asymmetries in power and resources, and they lack the intermediate or bridging organizations that would reduce these asymmetries and allow productive interactions. A spatial scale-based mismatch happens not only when the characteristics of the governance regime do not fit the features of the socialecological system that it is supposed to govern, but when multiple resource regimes coexist in the same geographical space but they do not have matching focus areas, or the boundaries of action are defined in different ways depending on the regime. This affects the equity in
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the access to knowledge and resources to foster adaptation, no matter that the actors share the same ecoregion, and are subject to similar stressors and sources of vulnerability. The third mismatch is based on formal regulations, particularly on incongruences between formal regulatory institutions that are part of different resource governance regimes. The general outcome of this mismatch is that policies focusing just on one resource or component without considering its interactions with the broader SES are ineffective in achieving its goals, or even worse, they generate overall decreases in the resilience of the system in the long term. Finally, a practice-based mismatch happens when the formal institutions are non-coincident or do not organically integrate with the concrete practices and behaviors of people. This poses challenges not only to the achievement of resource management goals, but also impacts the generation of systematic information on key indicators of the SES; the adequate functioning of incentives, sanctions, and feedbacks; the legitimacy of formal institutions, and the capacity to utilize multiple types of pertinent knowledge to foster adaptation. Considering that adaptation to global change is local, and that strong institutions are necessary across levels to sustain adaptation efforts, two critical features of governance regime required in the SMW to initiate corrective actions regarding these mismatches are: first, on the side of formal governmental institutions in state and federal levels, the capacity of flexibilizing processes and approaches in order to adjust to changing local institutions, and enough legitimacy and openness in executive decision-making. Many institutional arrangements experience rigidification along the passage of time, and the piling up of stressors and shocks can easily overwhelm the regimes’ capacity to respond effectively (Gunderson et al. 2014). According to Young (2010), “what emerges in such cases (of rigidification) is a mismatch between relatively fast and often accelerating disturbances and a fixed or even declining capacity on the part of the relevant institutions to respond swiftly 228
and decisively” (p. 382). On the side of local or informal institutions, what is required is a strong safety network that sustain local authority and capacity to implement adaptive actions, and to enhance bottom-up collaborations with higher governance levels or multi-regime governance systems. This represents a real challenge for arid rural communities in Mexico and the developing world in general, characterized by weak civil societies. The quality of a governance system of being adaptive or not, depends on external evaluation criteria, such as social equity and justice, long-term survival, and sustainability of eco- and social components of the SES. Very resilient systems are possible without matching these criteria. These are “perversely resilient systems” (Gunderson et al. 2014) in which inadequate distribution of resources, social practices, and lock-in situations (Pahl-Wostl 2009) have not lead the SES to total disintegration or change of identity yet. So, a mismatched governance is possible indeed, but most probably those systems would not resist stressors that go beyond the average ones experienced in the past, especially if extreme events combine with creeping changes and require an uncertain mix of slow and quick responses across levels of governance and regimes. This chapter dealt with mismatches regarding progressive or creeping changes, and an elaboration on how mismatches structure when a SES responds to rapid shocks requires further analyses. Another aspect that is important in terms of mal-adaptive and perversely resilient systems is that, even if the SES do not change identity, there are some components that will suffer transformations without altering SESs’ general functioning in appearance. Those components are usually the ones already trapped in challenging situations, such as poorlyendowed ranchers and farmers in ejidos, people living in the peripheries of towns where public services are not present and physical vulnerabilities are increased, degraded grasslands and marginal ecosystems unable to provide services, and livelihoods that depend on natural 229
resources on the edge of essential transformations due to global changes. Even though these elements can be eliminated or shifted without an apparent change in the SES, the effects of these shifts could show in the long term. Therefore, spatial, temporal, and functional scales are also important for measuring the adaptiveness of strategies, and the effects of punctual changes in the entire SES. Through the exploration of potential solutions to minimize institutional mismatches, what appears consistently is the generation of arenas for improving the one-to-one interactions and communication of all the actors that participate in multiple sectors (government, society, and markets), levels (federal, state/regional, and local/municipal), and regimes (water, land, environment, rural development) of a SES. Also important is the generation of common knowledge that is systematically obtained, updated, shared, and utilized by all these actors; and finally, the identification of common key threshold variables, key cross-level/sector/regime interactions, and the feedbacks of these key interactions that could lead the SES toward adaptive and non-adaptive outcomes. According to Gunderson et al. (2014), the ultimate abilities of an adaptive governance regime are those that allow the system to identify thresholds, to manage regime shifts, and to facilitate transformation of the components of the system towards more resilient identities. Of course, in pursuing all these features, a careful inclusion of the general political context where the SES is embedded is necessary, since power relationships define many of the dynamics regarding who, when, and how access and use the SES resources happen.
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4.7.Conclusions and policy implications
•
The complexity in the governance of livelihood resources in the SMW is dependent on the elements of and interactions between three aspects: 1) different sectors with a variety of actors (government, civil society, and the market or private sector); 2) different levels of governance and social organization (the international/global, the national/federal, the state/regional, and the local/municipal); and 3) different governance regimes (land regime, water regime, rural production regime, social development regime, ecologic conservation regime, and so on). The crossed interactions between these elements generate many potential combinations of action arenas that can affect governance outcomes, although many of them are overseen or underrecognized by policy makers.
•
The four institutional mismatches are not a comprehensive list of all the possible issues that can arise from institutional interactions given the high number of potential combinations between the three aspects indicated above. This study focused only on one rural watershed in arid Northwest Mexico. This means that further research is necessary to validate these mismatches by finding more examples in other locations; and to identify other type of mismatches that may be unique to specific situations.
•
Each institutional mismatch has negative effects on specific features recognized by literature as enhancers of adaptive governance, as indicated in the Table 18 of this chapter. However, all the mismatches also affected general features of adaptive governance, such as: the legitimacy of institutions, the capacity for cross-collaborations, the co-production and common use of systematic and pertinent information and knowledge, and the general flexibility and efficacy of the regimes to achieve long-term adaptation goals. 231
•
The above implies that it is possible to identify a set of practices that can foster these generic features of adaptive governance and address -at least partially- all the institutional mismatches identified. In this chapter this set of practices refers to the creation of common spaces of interaction that involve the sectors, levels of governance, and resource regimes that have a stake in the governance of a bounded social-ecological system. This is not a panacea either, and it can be truly challenging to delimitate the adequate boundaries of a SES, considering its interactive and nested nature. However, thinking from the perspective of a SES instead of atomized resources, ecosystems, or social groups would allow more comprehensive governance and policy approaches per se.
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CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS, POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS, AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS This chapter represents the conclusion of almost five years of reflection and search condensed in one document. In the introductory chapter, the contributions of the research project were summarized in three aspects: 1) the emphasis on the complexity of multiple types of rural livelihoods in understanding local adaptation to global change; 2) the inclusion of formal and informal institutional factors, and their interactions, acting as both stressors and regulators in these local adaptation processes; and 3) the collection and analysis of empirical evidences and the development of guidelines for better design of adaptation policies in rural arid Northwest Mexico, and other rural arid communities of the world. In this fifth chapter, another approach is pursued. The main findings and guidelines derived from the research are organized in three groups of “take-home messages” that I consider important for future readers looking for useful and usable knowledge: a) the advances in empirical understanding of rural adaptation to global change; b) the contributions to the scientific body of theory and methods in adaptation studies; and 3) the advising of science-based policy designs for fostering adaptation in rural arid communities.
5.1. For the broader public: advances in the understanding of rural adaptation
One of the main arguments made since the beginning of this dissertation is that rural people are not only exposed to environmental change (i.e. climate change), but to the combination of stressors coming from three simultaneous processes: environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change. All together these dynamics create novel challenges for people living in arid rural areas, characterized by poor resource endowments and high climate variability. Global changes push these communities to adapt beyond known limits. 233
Furthermore, the globally-driven stressors are not equally significant for all the socioeconomic groups that coexist in these settings. Rural households have different vulnerabilities associated to global change depending primarily on their participation in markets or their orientation to subsistence production. The experience of stressors and shocks associated to environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change also varied according to the livelihood profile of households, because stressors have differential impacts on the capitals on which these households rely. The livelihood profiles refer to the combination of activities and resources that households utilize to make a living. In the third chapter of this dissertation, four livelihood profiles were identified through survey data analysis, and their perceptions of stressors and shocks associated to environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change were compared. The stressors of drought and lack of water for production were more salient for households with agrarian components in their livelihood profiles, in comparison with those not directly dependent on agriculture or livestock raising. Stressors associated with low public expenditure and lack of public services (i.e. energy and domestic supply of water) represented important burdens for all the livelihood profiles in the three localities that participated in the study, while socioeconomic stressors (i.e. lack of employment) were more salient for the livelihood profile with non-stable jobs. These differences among the livelihood profiles were statistically significant. In terms of adaptation to these combined stressors, the literature review of empirical studies on rural adaptation to global change indicated that there is a great variety of adaptive responses in the rural communities studied in Mexico and the Southwest United States, but those are concentrated in the levels and dimensions in which people can exert more control, or in which they have more decision-making capacity: the physical or economic aspects of the farm or the household. This finding reported in the second chapter for these case studies 234
was validated in the third chapter regarding the strategies commonly reported by households in the four livelihood profiles identified in the San Miguel Watershed. The most frequently mentioned adaptive strategies were connected to livestock management and to low-cost endeavors. As the social complexity of the strategy increases, or the transaction cost of the activity is higher, the number and scope of adaptive strategies decrease. This is also indicative of the limited capacity for social organization and for participation in higher-level socialenvironmental decision making by these rural populations. Most of the barriers for adaptation identified in the literature review in the second chapter, and the empirical part of the research in chapters three and four, were socioeconomically and institutionally-driven. The lack of households’ assets and resources, the variable international prices for agricultural products, the high prices of productive inputs, the insufficient information and knowledge on climate dynamics, and the lack of usable forecasts and access to extension services and technology, were listed among the top barriers for rural adaptation to global change in this region. Informants in the SMW did not have any official or reliable source of information on climate change, nor on the multiple changes occurring in their communities, and how these can influence their livelihoods’ development. In turn, the most important enablers identified were access to private or social capital, credit, or insurance; secure access to additional land; diversified and dense social networks; access to governmental support; access to income that is relatively independent of environmental vagaries (off-farm income diversification); and access to additional sources of water. Particularly important in the SMW is the access to additional (and spatially coupled) land and water resources. This allowed the agrarian livelihoods to diversify to both, agrarian and more commercially-oriented activities, as well as leasing the land for higher value
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exporting crops, although these decisions have unrecognized consequences on the broader social-ecological system of the watershed. In this sense, most of the outcomes of the interactions between stressors and responses identified in the literature review, and in the empirical case study of the San Miguel Watershed, refer to four categories: 1) less flexibility to execute new responses once a course of action has been selected (for example, installing a technified irrigation system reduces the options regarding other water-management or crop-management strategies); 2) a general trend to biodiversity loss, degradation, and decreased ecosystem services (for example, mono-cropping systems associated to commercial agriculture in leased lands reduce the agrodiversity that characterizes traditional farming; or changing land uses alter the ecosystem functioning in the case of mining developments and urbanization); 3) decreasing social capital and disintegration of traditional governance structures (i.e. undermining of acequia and ejido systems due to changes in land tenure structures, as well as environmental, market, and demographic-related pressures over these areas traditionally managed by communal bodies); and 4) increasing conflicts and social inequity in access and distribution of natural resources (i.e. monopolization of financial and natural resources by those better equipped to compete for productive grants, and to bear the effects of combined environmental, social, and institutional stressors).
5.2. For other researchers: contributions to the adaptation theory and methods
In studying human adaptation to global change, we need to overcome a big conceptual and methodological challenge that arose in this research too: the coupling between globallydriven processes that generate stressors and shocks, and locally-driven adaptive responses to those stressors and shocks. In this study, I tried to address this gap by explicitly combining 236
the Double Exposures with the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework. In this way, it was possible to identify how households with different livelihood profiles experience globally driven stressors and shocks, and how they perform a diversity of adaptive responses based on both these experiences and the actual access to natural, social, human, and economic capitals on which the livelihoods rely. There are, however, some gaps or missing elements in the application of these frameworks. The first one is the understatement of power relationships and power differentials affecting how stressors are produced and impact rural communities. The assumption I did in this research by merging the DEF and the SLF is that globally-driven stressors will have different affectations on rural socio-economic groups via impacting the capitals on which they rely to make a living (i.e. to develop a livelihood profile). However, the power relationships connecting internally the members within a community, and externally the community to other actors in the government, market, and society sectors, have a profound influence on how resources are distributed, as described through several passages in the text of the second and third chapters. But deeper analysis of locally situated powerrelated implications is difficult under the assumptions of the DEF, which focuses on larger social-ecological scales. The superficial treatment of these power relationships also affects the capacity of the framework to address specific issues of vulnerable groups, such as the access to adaptation resources by women, native populations, or the elderly. The second gap is related to the internal/external generation of drivers of change and stressors. Although the DEF assumes that stressors are globally-driven and have local affectations that depend on the characteristics of communities, local dynamics can produce stressors too and these, in fact, could be more significant for rural populations’ decisionmaking regarding adaptation. While this does not contradict the framework’s main 237
assumptions, we need to address in more adequate ways the interactions between the global and the local level dynamics that contribute to the production of these problematic events, and beyond that, that contribute to environmental, socio-economic, and institutional change. Another important observation for young practitioners and researchers is that the importance of the temporal and spatial scales in the analysis of adaptation is never too overstated. For example, responses, barriers, and enablers identified through the literature review reported in the second chapter were more frequently referred to the household and farm level. Outcomes and feedbacks of interactions between responses and stressors were most commonly reported at the community or regional levels. The principle of embeddedness of social-ecological systems seems to be operating in this case: the effects of activities initiated at the individual and local levels are piling-up at the community and regional levels. Temporal and spatial scales are also critical in defining the effectiveness of adaptation. Some responses that prove adaptive in the short term and local scales (such as groundwater extractions motivated by economic expectations, agricultural subsidies, and lack of surveillance), can have negative outcomes when they accumulate over longer or broader temporal and spatial spans that are subject to other rules or drivers. Innovative guidelines and principles that incorporate multiple temporal and spatial scales are needed to evaluate the effectiveness of adaptive responses in rural communities and broader geographies. Also, long-term studies on vulnerability and adaptation trajectories are required to systematically evaluate the feedbacks on the social-ecological systems. Current research designs are inadequate for these purposes. We need costlier, but necessary, long-term research. On the other hand, a positive trend identified in the scientific production on rural adaptation is the level of interdisciplinarity observed in empirical studies analyzed in the
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chapter two. Around 70 per cent of the studies combined two or more theoreticalmethodological approaches. Regarding the generalizability of the results and methods developed in the three research chapters that integrate this dissertation, although the empirical component was developed in a well-bounded case in Northwest Mexico, the union of the DEF and SLF concepts, and particularly the idea of multiple rural livelihood profiles, can be applied in other rural settings subject to rapid transformations fostered by environmental, socioeconomic, and institutional change. Many of the studies on rural adaptation reviewed in this dissertation failed to recognize that the rural is much more than just the agricultural, and that the rural settings nowadays are exposed to a diversity of experiences and events that modify how they approach their resources and how they develop a livelihood with those. Although these experiences and events vary from one place to another, the logic of increasing complexity of livelihoods and the globally fostered impacts on those can be observed in many places around the world. The model of mismatches presented in the chapter four is in a similar situation than the livelihood profiles model applied in the chapter three of this dissertation. Although the SMW provided the empirical examples for the four institutional mismatches identified, the idea of multiple sectors, levels, and regimes operating in a governance setting and producing different types of adaptation outcomes can also be applied in other settings as long as there exists an institutional structure operating for governing of rural resources and development. The specific political systems of countries may play a big role in the structuring of these governance interactions (for example in Mexico, municipal-level elections for rural communities have a big influence on the actual dynamics for accessing resources); hence we
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need a better understanding on how political power, global change, and local adaptation are interlinked. This understanding should be a formal objective of future studies.
5.3. For policy-makers: evidence-based policy guidelines
The finding of different livelihood profiles in the communities of the water-scarce San Miguel Watershed as reported in chapter three indicates that “one-size” policy solutions are not viable in complex rural settings where social groups are differentiated beyond traditional ranching and farming. It is necessary to recognize the heterogeneity of rural communities for designing more effective targeted adaptation policies or, in other words, better local implementations of policies designed with common goals toward adaptation. Because the households with different livelihood profiles experience and react to environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors in different ways, adaptation policies should be framed considering the stressors and impacts that are meaningful for people in each of these profiles. Also, independently of the livelihood profile, public education on climate change impacts and alternatives for adaptation is needed in rural communities, because their main source of information on climate change so far has been television. The lack of extension services and the absence of communication and coproduction of climate knowledge are important barriers for adaptation in the SMW. In terms of the capacity to adapt based on the access to capitals, around one third of the households surveyed have non-steady incomes through their work as daily wage laborers. This is an important source of vulnerability because poor socio-economic conditions increase exposure and sensitivity to other environmental, socio-economic, and institutional stressors. In rural communities that have historic conditions of marginalization and poverty, adaptation policies cannot be conducted in isolation of social development ones. 240
In association with this, around 45 per cent of the households surveyed in the SMW received some form of monetary support from the government. However, these support programs were focused on poverty alleviation rather than on capacity building for long-term resilience and adaptation. The shift in priorities could need a long negotiation between political actors because these programs have important repercussions in terms of power distribution and maintenance of the status quo within the communities. Programs that have a social development component are administered by the municipal governments, and then subject to local political power bargaining. In terms of governance regimes for water, land, and rural development in the SMW, official agencies and actors could benefit from the comprehensive consideration of different sectors (governmental, civil society, and private sector), levels (international/global, federal/national, state/regional, and local/municipal), and regimes (water, land, rural development) in their policy designs. These multiple aspects affect bounded SESs, but if the pertinent interactions among these elements are identified, this can be used to inform policies for promoting adaptive governance of resources. Critical aspects to achieve successful crosssectorial, cross-level, and cross-regime collaborations are: the co-production of systematic, updated and pertinent sources of information on key threshold variables for the commonly managed SES; the identification of the actors and interactions that are critical for achieving adaptive governance outcomes; and finally, the creation of common arenas where the involved actors can play out and balance their power and knowledge asymmetries and move toward achievement of common goals. In the case of the San Miguel Watershed, these critical aspects can be advanced by providing the actors involved in the governance system multiple and iterative opportunities to share common projects requiring agreements on broader goals and rules with specific derivations for each regime, sector, and level of organization. 241
Encuesta Rápida para Hogares Rurales en la Cuenca del Río San Miguel
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
No.
Nombre M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F M/F
Genero
Relación con el entrevistado
Ocupación
242
Ultimo grado educativo, o actual si es estudiante
1) Nombre: __________________________________________________________________________________ 2) Edad: _________ 3) Género: MASC / FEM 4) Ultimo grado de estudios: _______________________ 5) Lugar de nacimiento: ____________________/_____________________/_____________________ a) Localidad b) Municipio c) Estado 6) ¿Vive usted en esta comunidad? SI / NO 7) ¿Durante cuánto tiempo ha vivido en esta comunidad? _____________ 8) ¿La casa donde vive es suya? SI / NO 9) Domicilio donde se encuentra el hogar: ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 10) ¿Podría mencionar a todas las personas que viven con usted en esta casa?
A. Datos personales del entrevistado(a) y su hogar
* Entrevistador(a): _______________________________________ * Lugar: ___________________________ * Fecha de entrevista: ______________________
APPENDIX A- Household Survey
Edad
M/F M/F M/F M/F
___ Ejidal ___ Comunal ___ Propiedad privada
b) Tipo de propiedad
c) Extensión en hectáreas
d) ¿Qué siembra?
Relación con el entrevistado Ocupación
¿De dónde obtiene agua para sus cultivos? ____ Temporal ____ De riego (Siga a pregunta 13)
Lugar donde vive
a) ¿Posee usted tierras de AGOSTADERO en esta localidad u otras? SI / NO
14) Tierras de Agostadero
___ Ejidal ___ Comunal ___ Propiedad privada
b) Tipo de propiedad
c) Extensión en hectáreas
d) ¿Qué animales tiene y cuántos?
243
¿De dónde obtiene agua para sus animales?
13) Fuentes de agua para sus tierras AGRÍCOLAS (Señale todas las que apliquen y el volumen en cada caso) a. De pozo _____ Volumen: _________________ ¿Comparte este pozo con otros usuarios? SI / NO ¿Cuántos? ______ b. De acequia _____ Volumen: _________________ ¿De cuál toma de agua?: ____________________ Nombre del común de agua: __________________ c. Compra _____ Volumen: _________________ ¿De dónde viene el agua que compra? POZO / ACEQUIA / AMBOS d. Otra fuente _____ Volumen: _________________ Especifique la fuente: ________________________________________________________________
a) ¿Posee usted tierras AGRICOLAS en esta localidad u otras? SI / NO
12) Tierras Agrícolas
B. Datos de las actividades agropecuarias del hogar
M/F
2 3 4 5
Nombre
1
No.
11b) Si su respuesta es SI, ¿podría indicar quiénes? Genero
11a) ¿Alguno de sus familiares cercanos vive fuera de esta casa? SI / NO Edad
b. Agua entubada d. Piso de cemento f. Baño conectado a drenaje h. Paredes de ladrillo o block j. Aire acondicionado
_____ _____ _____ _____ (Otro material: ________________________________) _____ (Otro sistema de enfriamiento: ___________________)
244
26) ¿Cuáles considera que son los tres problemas más importantes que afectan la vida de su hogar y sus actividades en esta localidad? a. ________________________________________ / b. _________________________________________ / c. ________________________________________
25a) ¿Pertenece usted a alguna asociación local de productores u otra agrupación? SI / NO 25b) Especifique: ________________________________________
24) ¿Su hogar cuenta con…? (Señale todas las que apliquen) a. Electricidad _____ c. Estufa de gas _____ e. Refrigerador _____ g. Número de cuartos _____ i. Carro _____
23) En promedio, ¿cuánto calcula que haya sido el ingreso total de su hogar el año pasado? _________________________
17a) ¿Es miembro de algún ejido o comunidad? SI / NO 17b) ¿Cuál? _________________________________ 18a) ¿Ocupa algún cargo actualmente en éste(a)? SI / NO 18b) ¿Cuál? ________________________________ 19) ¿Con qué frecuencia participa en las asambleas de su ejido? NUNCA / A VECES / FRECUENTEMENTE / CASI SIEMPRE / SIEMPRE 20) ¿Desde cuándo es miembro del ejido o propietario(a) de su tierra? __________________________________ 21) ¿Cómo definiría su actividad principal? Agricultor / Ranchero / Ambos / Otra actividad principal ________________________________________________ 22) ¿Cuál(es) son las principales fuentes de ingreso de su hogar? a. ___________________________________ / b. ____________________________________/ c. ______________________________________ / d. ______________________________________/ e. ____________________________________________
16) En cualquiera de sus tierras (propia o rentada, temporal o de riego) ¿emplea alguno de los siguientes? (señale todos los que apliquen) a. Empleados o jornaleros _____ Cuantos: _______ b. Fertilizantes o abonos _____ Especifique tipo: ________________________________________________________________________________________ c. Insecticidas _____ Especifique tipo: ________________________________________________________________________________________ d. Maquinaria agrícola _____ Especifique tipo: ______________________________________________ ¿Es suya o la renta? ________________________ e. Sistema de riego _____ Especifique tipo: ______________________________________________ ¿Cuánto tiempo tiene? ______________________ f. Herbicidas _____ Especifique tipo: ______________________________________________________________________________________ g. Otro _____ Especifique: ____________________________________________________________________________________________
15a) ¿Renta alguna tierra? SI / NO 15b) ¿Qué tipo de tierra es esta? 1. De riego / De temporal ---- 2. Ejidal / Propiedad privada 15c) Extensión: ___________ 15d) ¿Cuál es la actividad principal desarrollada en las tierras que renta? _______________________________________________________________________
245
30a) ¿Desea seguir participando en el estudio? SI / NO 30b) ¿Tiene algún teléfono a donde podamos llamarlo? _______________________________________
29) ¿Qué estrategias ha utilizado o utilizaría para adaptarse a estos cambios?
28a) ¿El cambio climático afecta su comunidad? SI / NO 28b) ¿De qué modo?
27b) ¿A qué cree que se refiera?
27a) ¿Ha escuchado el término “cambio climático”? SI / NO
C. Conocimiento sobre el cambio climático e impactos locales
APPENDIX B- Producers’ Interview Entrevista para Productores de Localidades Rurales de la Cuenca del Río San Miguel * Entrevistador(a): ___________________ * Lugar: _____________ * Fecha de entrevista: ______________
A. Datos personales del entrevistado (esta sección será completada con datos de la encuesta rápida para hogares y sólo se confirmará la información con el entrevistado-a) 1) Nombre: _______________________________________________________________ 2) Edad: _______ 3) Género: MASC / FEM
4) Lugar de origen: ________________/_________________/________________ a) Localidad b) Municipio c) Estado
5) Último año de estudios: (1) (1) (1) (1) (1)
(2) (2) (2) (2) (2)
(3) (4) (5) (6) (3) (3) (3) (4) (5) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Primaria Secundaria Preparatoria Universidad o Carrera Técnica Posgrado (Maestría- Doctorado)
6) ¿Cómo definiría su actividad principal? Agricultor / Ranchero / Ambos / Otra actividad principal 7) ¿Cuál(es) son sus otras actividades económicas, en caso de tenerlas? a. _______________________________________________________________________________ b. _______________________________________________________________________________ c. _______________________________________________________________________________ d. _______________________________________________________________________________ 8) Situación civil: ___________________ 9) ¿A qué se dedica su esposa(o)? ___________________ 10) ¿Cuántos hijos tiene? _______ 11) ¿Cuántos de ellos viven en esta casa? _____ ¿En Rayón? ________ ¿En Sonora? _______ ¿En México? _______ ¿En otro país? ______
246
B. Acceso a tierra y agua (SOLAMENTE para entrevistados-as que no hayan respondido la encuesta rápida) 12) Tierras de Riego b) Tipo de propiedad a) ¿Posee usted tierras de RIEGO en esta localidad u otras? SI / NO
c) Extensión en hectáreas
d) ¿Qué hace en esta tierra?
___ Ejidal ___ Comunal ___ Propiedad privada
13) Fuentes de agua para sus tierras AGRÍCOLAS (Señale todas las que apliquen y el volumen en cada caso) a. De pozo_____ Volumen: _________ ¿Comparte este pozo con otros usuarios? SI / NO ¿Cuántos? ______ b. De acequia_____Volumen: _________ ¿De cuál toma de agua?: _________ Común de agua: __________ c. Compra_____ Volumen: _________ ¿De dónde viene el agua que compra? POZO / ACEQUIA / AMBOS d. Otra fuente_____Volumen: _________ Especifique la fuente: ___________________________________ 14) Tierras de Temporal b) Tipo de propiedad a) ¿Posee usted tierras de TEMPORAL en esta localidad u otras? SI / NO
c) Extensión en hectáreas
d) ¿Qué hace en esta tierra?
___ Ejidal ___ Comunal ___ Propiedad privada
15a) ¿Renta alguna tierra? SI / NO 15b) Tipo: 1. De riego / De temporal -2. Ejidal-comunal / Privada 15c) Extensión: __________ 15d) ¿Qué hace en estas tierras? ______________________________________ 16a) ¿Tiene acceso a las praderas ejidales o comunales? SI / NO 16b) Extensión en hectáreas: _______ 16c) Animales en la pradera común (tipo y cantidad): _____________ 17) En cualquiera de sus tierras ¿emplea alguno de los siguientes? (señale todos los que apliquen) a. Empleados o jornaleros b. Fertilizantes o abonos c. Insecticidas d. Herbicidas e. Maquinaria agrícola f. Sistema de riego g. Otro
_____ Cuantos: _______ _____ Especifique tipo: _____________________________________________ _____ Especifique tipo: _____________________________________________ _____ Especifique tipo: _____________________________________________ _____ Especifique tipo: _________________ ¿Es suya o la renta? ___________ _____ Especifique tipo: _________________ ¿Cuánto tiempo tiene? _________ _____ Especifique: __________________________________________________
18a) ¿Es miembro de algún ejido o comunidad? SI / NO 18b) ¿Cuál? _______________________________ 19a) ¿Ocupa algún cargo actualmente en éste(a)? SI / NO 19b) ¿Cuál? ______________________________ 19c) ¿Con qué frecuencia participa en las asambleas de su ejido? 1. Nunca
2. A veces
3. Frecuentemente
4. Casi siempre
5. Siempre
20) ¿Desde qué fecha es miembro del ejido o propietario de su tierra? _______________________________ 21) ¿Cómo adquirió la tierra que actualmente posee? ____________________________________________
247
POLÍTICAS DE TIERRA Y AGUAS (preguntas 23 a 28) 22) ¿Usted ya era miembro del ejido/comunidad cuando éste se registró en el PROCEDE? SI / NO
23) ¿Hubo algún cambio en la forma en que se maneja y se usa la tierra antes y después del PROCEDE? Describa esos cambios por favor.
24) ¿Usted considera que su situación como ejidatario/comunero mejoró con el PROCEDE? ¿Por qué?
25) ¿Ha habido cambios en su comunidad en cómo se obtiene y se utiliza el agua durante los últimos años?
26) ¿El gobierno ha impulsado alguna ley o política que cambie la forma en que usted obtiene y usa el agua? Describa estos cambios por favor.
27) Considerando los cambios en las leyes para el agua y la tierra en los últimos años, ¿usted considera que éstos han afectado su capacidad para enfrentar problemas económicos o ambientales? ¿De qué manera?
C. Cambios en el sistema social-ecológico de la cuenca e impactos a nivel de hogar
28) En los últimos años, ¿ha observado cambios en el ambiente natural de su localidad? ¿Cuáles?
29) ¿A qué cree que se deban estos cambios?
30) ¿Cuáles son los impactos más importantes de estos cambios sobre sus actividades y su vida en general?
248
31) ¿Qué cambios ha observado en las condiciones socio-económicas de su localidad en los últimos años?
32) ¿A qué cree que se deban estos cambios?
33) ¿Cuáles son los impactos más importantes de estos cambios sobre sus actividades y su vida en general?
34) A continuación, le presentaré un calendario circular donde usted y yo señalaremos: a) los periodos de lluvias; b) todas sus actividades económicas y en qué momento del año ocurren, y c) otros eventos, tanto NATURALES como SOCIALES que ocurran a lo largo de un año y que usted considere que afectan su vida y sus actividades. Habrá eventos que se realicen todo el año (por ejemplo vender algún producto), y habrá algunos que ocurran en ciertos meses del año (por ejemplo, sembrar ciertas verduras o pastura, que llueva, o que ocurra alguna celebración que afecta o beneficia sus actividades económicas). Usaremos colores para indicar cada actividad o evento. Note que el primer círculo se refiere a TODO LO QUE PASA CUANDO LAS CONDICIONES DEL CLIMA SON NORMALES (LA LLUVIA ES NORMAL, EL CALOR ES NORMAL). El segundo círculo se refiere a todo lo que pasa cuando hay SEQUÍA. Nuestro objetivo es ver cómo cambian sus actividades y su vida cuando cambian las condiciones climáticas en su localidad.
249
CUANDO HAY LLUVIA BUENA O NORMAL
Clave de los colores Lluvia Menores niveles de agua en los pozos
250
CUANDO HAY SEQUÍA
Clave de los colores Lluvia Menores niveles de agua en los pozos
251
35) En los últimos 20 años ¿podría decir cuáles son los años de malas y buenas lluvias que recuerde? Años con malas lluvias o sequía
Años con buenas lluvias
D. Estrategias adaptativas
36) En los años en los que hubo muy poca agua, indique si hizo alguna(s) de las siguientes cosas: Sí a) b) c) d) e) f) g) h) i) j) k) l) m) n) o) p) q) r)
Compré/renté más tierra para cultivar Compré más ganado Cambié mis cultivos a otros más resistentes Instalé un sistema de riego más eficiente Dejé algunos pedazos o todo mi campo sin sembrar Realicé mejoras en mis tierras o establos para usar mejor el agua (por ejemplo, cubrir con cemento canales de riego) Vendí algunos o todos mis animales Vendí algún producto casero Vendí alguna parte o toda mi tierra Vendí algún bien material que tenía Hice un acuerdo con otro ranchero/agricultor para compartir las tierras o el ganado Conseguí otro empleo en mi localidad Conseguí otro empleo fuera de mi localidad Pedí un crédito a un banco Pedí dinero prestado a un familiar o amigo(a) Compré agua a otro agricultor/ranchero Compré alimentos complementarios para mi ganado Pedí apoyo a la SAGARPA u otra agencia de gobierno Otras actividades: Indique cuáles
37) Cuando hay una sequía en su localidad, ¿qué cosas o qué factores son los que permiten a un agricultor o ranchero salir adelante? Mencione todos los que se le ocurran.
38) ¿Cómo contribuyen las organizaciones y asociaciones locales para resolver estas dificultades relacionadas con el clima?
252
39) ¿Cómo contribuyen la familia, amigos, y vecinos de un productor para resolver estas dificultades asociadas con el clima?
40) En la última sequía o “año malo” que usted recuerde, marque todas las fuentes de las que haya recibido información y/o recursos que le permitieron salir adelante:
Información
Recursos materiales, financieros o crédito
Notas
CONAGUA CEA SONORA SAGARPA FEDERAL O DISTRITO DE DESARROLLO RURAL SEDESOL GOBIERNO MUNICIPAL ASOCIACION DE PRODUCTORES LOCAL COMPRADOR O CLIENTE VENDEDOR DE INSUMOS AGRICOLAS O GANADEROS INSTITUCION FINANCIERA PUBLICA INSTITUCION FINANCIERA PRIVADA GRUPO CIVIL O RELIGIOSO AMIGOS O VECINOS FAMILIA NUCLEAR FAMILIARES EN LA LOCALIDAD FAMILIARES FUERA DE LA LOCALIDAD, PERO EN MEXICO FAMILIARES FUERA DE MEXICO OTRO:
E. Conocimiento sobre el cambio climático 41) ¿Ha escuchado el término “Cambio climático”? SI / NO
42) ¿Podría explicar brevemente a qué cree usted que se refiere este término?
43) ¿Usted considera que el cambio climático está ocurriendo en su localidad?
253
44) ¿Cuáles considera que van a ser los impactos del cambio climático sobre su vida?
45) ¿Qué podría hacer usted para adaptarse a esos efectos del cambio climático?
46) ¿Usted considera que la sociedad y los gobiernos están tomando acciones suficientes para minimizar los efectos del cambio climático o adaptarse a éste?
47) ¿Qué se está haciendo en su comunidad para adaptarse a estos cambios?
254
APPENDIX C- Livelihoods’ Factor Analysis (SPSS Outputs)
Total Variance Explained Initial Eigenvalues Component
Total
% of Variance
Extraction Sums of Squared Loadings Cumulative %
Total
% of Variance
Cumulative %
1
3.378
30.711
30.711
3.378
30.711
30.711
2
2.175
19.777
50.487
2.175
19.777
50.487
3
1.477
13.425
63.912
1.477
13.425
63.912
4
1.223
11.118
75.030
1.223
11.118
75.030
5
.966
8.778
83.808
6
.640
5.816
89.624
7
.528
4.804
94.428
8
.323
2.933
97.362
9
.290
2.638
100.000
10
-2.086E-17
-1.897E-16
100.000
11
-6.575E-16
-5.978E-15
100.000
Total Variance Explained Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings Component
Total
% of Variance
Cumulative %
1
3.265
29.684
29.684
2
2.073
18.849
48.533
3
1.649
14.990
63.524
4
1.266
11.506
75.030
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.
255
Rotated Component Matrixa Component 1 Main activity of the head of
2
3
4
.916
.043
.024
-.120
.896
-.190
-.075
-.123
.668
.351
.301
.072
.612
.328
.302
-.001
-.413
.775
-.311
.104
-.453
-.697
.436
.007
.118
.670
.133
.207
household is agrarian Household income is mainly agrarian The household has ownership/access to agricultural land The household has ownership/access to grazing land Household income is mainly mixed/diversified Household income is mainly non-agrarian Number of income sources reported by the informant
256
Main activity of the head of
-.094
-.491
-.050
.372
-.256
.084
-.887
-.160
-.558
.011
.589
-.553
-.161
.147
.145
.841
household is retired or has no activity Main activity of the head of household is mixed/diversified Main activity of the head of household is non-agrarian Main activity of the head of household is housewife Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis. Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.a a. Rotation converged in 10 iterations.
257
REFERENCES 1. Primary Data Sources •
• • •
•
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