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
The objective of this research was to compare insights of organic farmers and extension agents regarding social-ecological resilience. To achieve that, forty-seven social-ecological components were used as the base. These components are features that can be applied to build resilience in organic rice production. In 2017, the components were systematically constructed by fifty-three organic farmers in four districts of Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, who grouped the four critical properties. The informants were twenty-eight extension agents working in the same districts. They were asked to assign a score to each vital property, and to gauge its significance contributed to building resilience. The scoring values were computed using the normalized method to produce the intensity of the importance of the properties. Next, an analysis of one sample t-test at the level of significance of 0.05 was carried out to compare the two parties’ intensities. The results pointed out three out of the four properties had been homogenous. The difference was only found in the property of ‘Learning to live with change and uncertainty’ due to the organic farmers’ unaltered hindrances, such as living in an aging society. This drawback can be solved by allowing organic farmers to gain access to programs facilitated by extension agents. This collective action motivates organic farmers to engage in those programs since it is designed to meet their needs.
The purpose of this study was to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic affects the organic rice production system in four districts of Chiang Mai Province. Eight organic farmers were purposefully chosen as informants because they have possessed forty-seven resilience components (SERCs) needed to cope with all kinds of social-ecological change. They were asked using a structured questionnaire to assign each SERC’s contribution value before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, in which each time scoring must be coupled with entailed explanations. Then, the paired samples t-test was run to compare such means of SERCs’ contribution values to examine whether their organic rice production’s resilience was affected by the pandemic and how. Results showed the means of SERCs before and after the pandemic have no significant difference as the p-value is 1.00 at the 95% confidence interval. This meant the pandemic does not influence the organic rice production’s social-ecological resilience. But several practices and qualifications were found varying from the original to make production more suitable. The dependence on household labor and that on mutual labor exchange were respectively increased and decreased in their roles in resilience building. Labor availability was interrupted by the social distancing protocol that had restricted people from gathering. Besides, the household accounts recording was adopted more than usual for being seen as a solution to improving the household economy during the time of financial vulnerability. Importantly, relying on local goods was remarkably recognized for increased importance. This was an attempt to get access to materials possibly free from the COVID-19 contamination because of the absent transportation. These findings provide two key interests. They can be applied as a framework not only to strengthen agricultural resilience but also to propose a blueprint of coping mechanisms against the pandemic at a mass scale.
This paper illustrates the application of the Delphi method, which assists in the production of social-ecological resilience indicators, and which are suitable for building the resilience of organic rice production in the central portion of Northeastern Thailand. Forty-seven adept farmers were purposively selected as participants, and the Delphi method was utilized as a tool by which the participants could reveal their different opinions and ideas. They were surveyed in order to visualize an organic rice system called the ‘desirable system.’ Nevertheless, such a system must be built simultaneously with certain components, the attributes of which can enable the system to withstand all kinds of change that can take place across spatial and temporal scales. The resilience literature, which is related to agro-ecological systems, had been published online during the seven previous years, and was applied to formulate questions, which were specifically aimed at establishing components that were focused upon coping and adaptive strategies. It was discovered that the inclusion of a group discussion, which had taken place with two rounds of the Delphi method, had provided a valuable means for exchanging information and responding with feedback. Given that the processes had been entirely conducted through group discussions, the voices of a few participants were, however, lost. They were dominated by the innate power expressed by other members within the group, especially the leaders. Despite this, the Delphi method was able to achieve an adequate degree of consensus among participants and was able to lead in the direction of building resilience with a significant level of confidence, which was capable of overcoming the social-ecological complexities of organic rice production. This was evidenced by the discovery of 21 social-ecological resilience indicators, which had been constructed by the engagement. Moreover, the indicators had indeed been reliable. With the support of the consensus of the participants’ judgements, which were based on their actual contexts of organic rice production in the central portion of Northeastern Thailand, the indicators were able to be validated by statistical analyses, consisting of arithmetic means (x), standard deviations (sd), and interquartile ranges (R).
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