Assessing the Social-ecological Resilience of Organic Farmers in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand

Abstract

Since resilience is continuing to make its rise to the top of the sustainable development policies, monitoring resilience has become critical because it provides stakeholders with practical actions that can strengthen the state of adaptability to cope with all kinds of change. In this study, resilience, and social theories, such as grounded theory and technography, were integrated as a conceptual framework to produce a specific set of indicators, which yielded forty-seven indices, called social-ecological resilience indicators (SERIs). This study attempts to manage the temporal and spatial scales of resilience systems and to make such indicators suitable for organic rice production systems in four districts of Chiang Mai Province. A questionnaire was utilized to survey fifty-three organic farmers, and the results of the descriptive data analysis indicated that 0.54 (1.00 = the maximum) had been the respondents’ average score. Meanwhile, the highest and the lowest scores were serially 0.69 and 0.40. In addition, the findings revealed that Kendall’s Tau-b rank correlation’s numeric value came closer to +, which meant that the respondents had demonstrated an average tendency to be resilient. Generally, the highest score of resilience existed for those organic farmers, who had been outstanding in creating opportunities for self-organization, such as considerably relying on food and farm materials from the availability of local resources. Moreover, the majority of them were found to have a secondary on-farm profession that was not only subsidizing additional incomes but was also providing new knowledge and opportunities. This contrasted with the group with lowest score. The farmers, who exhibited unsatisfactory resilience, were centralized in dimensions, ranging from a having a lack of diverse water sources to having sufficient competency to exploit the benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). They are, therefore, more prone to being affected by negative pressures. It is recommended that for building resilience, the ‘holy grail’ is boosting self-reliance. This capacity is key to reducing the risk of losing sustenance and enabling stakeholders to apply the appropriate strategies in times of change