Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) in Turkey's agriculture: farmers' social capital and agricultural institutions

Agrarian populations bear the brunt of the multifaceted impacts of the climate crisis, including slow-onset events such as drought, rising sea levels, land salinization, and water scarcity, as well as rapid-onset events such as storms, heatwaves, floods, and hail. They increasingly experience losses in yields, income, and livelihoods because they are highly dependent on environmental and climatic conditions. They adjust their on-farm and off-farm activities to such climatic challenges. Likewise, their capacity to adapt to climate change tend to differ based on existing socio-economic, political conditions, underlying vulnerabilities, and inequalities in as much as on the severity and frequency of climate change impacts. However, existing studies on climate change adaptation (CCA) in agriculture tend to have a skewed emphasis on the economic or proximate social dimensions of adaptation, while more profound social, and sociological aspects remain to be less examined. In light of these tendencies, this dissertation, from an interdisciplinary perspective, has three primary purposes. First, it probes farmers' climate change perceptions, main adaptation strategies and the adaptive and maladaptive consequences of such adaptation measures. Second, building upon the former, it focuses on the role of farmers' social capital (bonding social capital vs. bridging-linking social capital) in increasing their adaptive capacity. Third, it seeks an answer to the adaptive capacity of intermediate agricultural institutions with which farmers are in direct contact. In doing so, it expands the widely used demographic-socio-economic determinants of adaptation strategies by adding farmers scale (small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale farmers), vulnerability index (less vulnerable-vulnerable and highly vulnerable ones) alongside agricultural sources and methods. Apart from certain adaptation strategies and institutional endeavours that increase farmers' adaptive capacity, this study overall reveals that the majority of the farmers analysed tends to be closer to the maladaptive end of the continuum between successful adaptation and maladaptation. Among the main reasons are exacerbating climate change effects, insufficient adaptive capacities, path dependencies, partially effective social capital and formal institutions, and a lack of innovative, inclusive, and sustainable climate policies. Thisstudy relies on an extensive fieldwork from 2021 to 2023 in three research areas from Turkey (Afyonkarahisar-Şuhut, Mersin-Erdemli and Şanlıurfa-Eyyübiye), each being reliant on agriculture and under various impacts of climate change. Primary data collected by the author consist of survey interviews with 111 farmers, semi-structured in-depth interviews with 53 farmers and 48 survey questionnaires and 29 semi-structured in-depth interviews with experts/officials from intermediate agricultural institutions. The latter comprise chambers of agriculture, district and provincial directorates of agriculture, agricultural cooperatives, irrigation associations, and seed-fertilizer-pesticide companies. Feeding on mixed method approach, it primarily utilizes descriptive statistics, column proportion tests, logistic regression, critical-comparative approach, and qualitative analysis. Likewise, apart from filling significant gaps in existing research on (mal)adaptive, relational, and institutional dynamics of research on climate change adaptation in agriculture at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, this study also represents the first endeavour in this direction within the context of Turkey. Keywords: Climate change, (mal)adaptation, agriculture, adaptation strategies, bonding social capital, bridging-linking social capital, vulnerability, climate change governance, formal institutions, institutional adaptive capacity, sustainability.