Conference Agenda

This manuscript aims to quantify farm resilience capacity and its relationships with food security outcomes in Tajikistan. Using a panel dataset from the Khatlon Province of Tajikistan from 2015 and 2023, the study (a) measured resilience pillars and farm resilience capacity, (b) clustered farm households through resilience pillars, and (c) estimated the effects of farm resilience capacity on food security outcomes. The findings confirmed positive effects of enhanced resilience capacity on food security outcomes. Further development interventions in Tajikistan should mainstream resilience to enhance household food security.

The climate change literature broadly characterizes resilience as a household’s capacity to withstand the negative consequences of climate change. However, most studies on climate change resilience rely on general or inconclusive relationships between resilience and household coping strategies. To extend the existing literature, we apply FAO’s Resilience Index Measurement Analysis (RIMA) approach to construct a Resilience Capacity Index (RCI) for households. Using Latent Class Analysis (LCA), we cluster homogeneous classes describing household coping strategy behavior. With an Instrumental Approach (IA), we aim to explore the extent to which climate change resilience alters perceptions of coping strategies. Our findings generally indicate a negative relationship between long-term RCI and short-term household coping strategies. This relationship is particularly significant for changing planting dates, planting short-cycle crop varieties, crop diversification, and tree planting. Regarding policy interventions, we can conclude that climate change resilience may diminish the motivation to activate short-term coping strategies.

Climate adaptation among smallholder farmers depends not only on access to technologies but also on access to credible information. However, rural advisory systems increasingly involve private input suppliers and digital platforms, where misinformation and asymmetric information may distort farmers’ decisions. This study investigates how misinformation and information asymmetry influence farmers’ adoption of climate adaptation practices using Protection Motivation Theory as a behavioral framework. Data were collected from 218 smallholder farmers in Upper Dir District, Pakistan, complemented by 22 qualitative interviews. A multivariate probit model was applied to examine adoption decisions across six adaptation strategies while accounting for interdependence among choices. Results show that exposure to asymmetric information significantly increases adoption of agroforestry and gabion walls but reduces traditional soil conservation practices, suggesting selective adoption driven by biased information. Borrowing inputs from market vendors reduces improved seed adoption, reflecting market lock-in effects. Access to credible online platforms significantly increases adaptation uptake. Qualitative findings confirm that weak public extension services force farmers to rely on commercially motivated advice. The study highlights the importance of strengthening public advisory systems and regulating private information channels. These findings demonstrate how information distortions shape adaptation behavior and provide methodological and policy insights for improving climate resilience.

Rural outmigration is reshaping agricultural landscapes in developing countries, with farm succession increasingly promoted as a mitigation strategy. Existing research generally assumes that succession planning indicates continued agricultural engagement; however, land transfer and farming continuation may represent distinct household decisions. Using a sequential mixed methods approach, we analyze survey data from 199 rice farming households in Cambodia with random forest classification, followed by semi-structured interviews with 13 farmers. This approach provides the first systematic examination of this relationship in a smallholder context. We find that while farmers almost universally intend to transfer land, most express substantial uncertainty about whether their children will continue farming, and many actively prefer that their children exit agriculture. We identify dual motivations explaining this disconnect, where subsistence-driven succession occurs among struggling farmers who retain land for food security and insurance, and profit-driven succession occurs among commercially viable operations, with the lowest succession commitment observed among intermediate farms. This evidence suggests that high succession rates may reflect constrained alternatives rather than agricultural vitality. Given an identified critical farm size threshold that is signaling land consolidation in the area, we propose that agricultural modernization and rural development be pursued as dovetailed policy objectives rather than competing priorities.

This study examines how parental internal migration shapes offspring’s transition to adulthood, emphasizing the varying impacts of specific childhood residential arrangements. Using the 2003–2022 Fixed Observation Rural Survey (FORS), we compare three early-life experiences—being left behind, migrating with parents, and remaining with non-migrant parents—and assess their associations with initial labor market outcomes. While parental migration broadly facilitates a shift toward nonagricultural work, family spatial configurations generate substantial heterogeneity. Compared to non-migrant peers, both migration-exposed groups exhibit lower agricultural participation; however, migrant children are significantly more likely to secure nonagricultural employment. Among nonagricultural entrants, left-behind experience is predominantly associated with general wage employment, whereas migrant experience is linked to higher public-sector employment probabilities and higher starting wages. These diverging occupational trajectories reflect a comprehensive advantage in pre-entry human-capital accumulation—encompassing better health, greater educational investment, occupational qualifications, and vocational training—for migrant children relative to their left-behind counterparts. This developmental gap is especially pronounced among daughters and in less-developed regions, highlighting the gendered and spatial nature of household resource allocation. Ultimately, internal migration drives early socioeconomic stratification not merely through parental mobility per se, but through the distinct family residential arrangements it produces.