Understanding the role of social capital for climate resilience.

This project aims to improve our understanding of the role of social capital (SC) for climate resilience of smallholder
farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa. SC describes the connections that individuals possess at different
levels with other individuals, groups, and institutions, which may provide increased resilience to climate shocks and
other external factors. SC may become increasingly important with climate change as resilience needs to be
strengthened to adapt to changing hydroclimate extremes and facilitate development.
The project builds on previous work that has identified the importance of different types of SC (bonding, bridging,
and linking) and highlighted the potential significance of changes in SC over space and time. The project will
explore how SC changes across spatial scales, between and within countries, drawing from proxy data from
existing household survey data, to understand how SC is related to socioeconomic factors. The temporal dynamics
of SC will be explored by examining how different types of SC change over time and how they transition from one
type to another, using proxies derived from available multi-year survey data. There will be a focus on access to
education as a key factor hypothesized to enhance SC, such as through diversifying and broadening networks
that may be important to resilience. The data analysis will be validated by fieldwork and to understand local
contexts, likely focusing on communities in Malawi, Kenya and/or Ghana, and linking to collaborators in these
countries, who will provide invaluable local knowledge and contextualise the potential impact of the research
findings.