Farmers' Perceptions of Climate Change in Context

Toward a Political Economy of Relevance

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4446459
AutoresMatthew Houser (0000-0001-5236-8278, Assistant Research Scientist and Faculty Fellow, Environmental Resilience Institute, Department of Sociology, School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University Bloomington IN USA, autor de correspondencia), R Gunderson (0000-0002-3837-0723, Department of Sociology and Gerontology Miami University 375 Upham Hall Oxford OH 45056 USA), Diana Stuart (0000-0003-1479-2208, School of Earth Sciences and Sustainability, Program in Sustainable Communities Northern Arizona University Room 280 Building 70, SBS West Flagstaff AZ 86011‐6039 USA)
Año2019
Volumen59
Número4
Páginas789-809
Fecha de publicación2019-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSociologia Ruralis (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0038-0199 • E-ISSN: 1467-9523
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/soru.12268
OpenAlexW2968042549
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas68

Sociologists commonly hypothesise that experiencing the impacts of climate change will lead actors, including farmers, to desire to address climate change. It is increasingly clear that farmers can detect the regional biophysical expressions and impacts of climate change. However, this has not led farmers to desire to take action on climate change. This begs the question: how then are farmers interpreting these experiences? We argue that political-economic context, the structural conditions of capitalist production, contributes to how farmers perceive and understand the impacts of climate change. We draw from our novel political economy of relevance theoretical framework and apply this framework to a sample of over 100 qualitative interviews with Iowa and Indiana row-crop farmers. We focus on their experiences with heavy rain events, a key impact of climate change in the Midwest. Our findings suggest that farmers become aware of, interpret and respond to heavy rain events within the context of capitalist production. This leads most farmers to see heavy rain events as barriers to achieving capitalist goals, rather than as signals of the reconsider climate scepticism or the need to mitigate contributions to climate change

Climate change · Context (archaeology) · Economics · Environmental resource management · Geography · Natural resource economics · Political economy · Political economy of climate change · Political science · Politics · Production (economics) · Relevance (law) · Skepticism · Climate change impacts on agriculture · Ecology · Organic Food and Agriculture · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability