A participatory framework for feasibility assessments of climate change resilience strategies for smallholders: lessons from coffee cooperatives in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Coffee farmers are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, yet recommended resilience strategies are often cost-prohibitive for smallholder producers and/or maladapted to local conditions and contexts. We collaborated with smallholder coffee cooperatives in Latin America to assess the feasibility of climate change resilience strategies they selected: crop diversification; rainwater collection systems; pest monitoring and management; collective coffee seed banks and nurseries; and solar coffee dryers. Data was collected through key actor and cooperative leader semi-structured interviews and focus groups with cooperative members. Our results provide criteria that can be used to determine if these five resilience strategies are appropriate for given environmental, socioeconomic, and political contexts. They also demonstrate the need for tailoring resilience strategies to fit local conditions. The framework we applied serves to select appropriate, effective and equitable resilience strategies, combining a participatory action research approach to incorporate local knowledge, capital assets analysis for a holistic and realistic understanding of feasibility, and access analysis for an assessment of who will benefit and who will not. This framework can be applied to assess the feasibility of climate change resilience strategies with smallholders in a wide variety of geographies, contexts and agroecosystems.

KEYWORDS:

• Coffee
• climate change
• resilience
• smallholders
• participatory action research
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

We offer our sincere thanks for their direct and invaluable partnership: Counter Culture Coffee, particularly Meredith Taylor, Hannah Poppish and Kim Elena Ionescu; CODECH, particularly Francisco Javier Jacinto, Gaspar Rafael García Domingo, Juan Humberto Domingo Ramírez, and cooperative members; and CenfroCafé, particularly Jhoseari Fernández Suyón, Ivan Aranda Aguirre, Alfredo Cruzado Ramírez, Jackson Disney Lizana Arteaga, Rubén Espinoza Bello, Neiser Guevara Vera, Ronny García Holguín, Sergio Fuentes Ramírez, Teodomiro Meledes Ojeda, Elmer Peña Silva, Bartolomé Rojas Pintado, Anner Roman Neira, and cooperative members. We also acknowledge and thank the researchers involved in earlier phases of this study: Claire Fox, Joanna Furgiuele, Saira Haider, Martín Miguel Ramírez Mejía, Michael Younis, Brenda Lara, Jared Ginn, and Gabriel Arrisueño Fajardo. We give particular thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose feedback greatly strengthened our manuscript. Funding for field research was provided by Counter Culture Coffee, the Tinker Field Research Grant, the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and the Kuzmier-Lee-Nikitine Endowment Fund.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Environmental Policy and Management at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She has over 25 years of experience working and conducting research on sustainable rural development policies and programs in Latin America.

Danielle King specializes in the design and implementation of landscape-scale integrated conservation and development initiatives, with a focus on blended finance mechanisms. She received a Master’s in Environmental Management from Duke University in 2016 and currently works as a Strategic Planning Manager for Conservation International.

Ariadne Rivera-Aguirre is a development economist with a focus on health and the quantitative analysis of drug policies and its impact in health and social outcomes. She received her BA in economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and a Master’s in Public Policy from Duke University. She currently works as a Data Analyst at NYU Langone Health. Ariadne’s areas of interest include development economics, health policy and social epidemiology.

Sapphire Wang specializes in international environmental policy. She received a Master’s in Environmental Management from Duke University in 2016.

Jennifer Finley-Lezcano specializes in representative stakeholder engagement, conservation planning and applied ecological research. She received a Master’s in Environmental Management from Duke University in 2016 and currently works as an Environmental Scientist at EnviroSouth, Inc.

ORCID

Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4272-3605