Supporting Livelihood Resilience to Sudden Environmental Change in the Global South: The Role of Social-Political Capital of Marine Resource Users in a Peruvian Bay

The food security and well-being of people living in rural areas of countries located in the Global South are often highly intertwined with the goods and services local ecosystems provide. In such contexts, a sudden change in environmental conditions, which imparts the productivity of theses ecosystems, can have severe consequences for the livelihoods of local populations. This study integrates ideas from resilience theory with social capital theory to examine the role of resource users’ relationships with different types of political actors from across multiple levels in the political system for the resource users’ ability to deal with the impacts of sudden environmental change events. Resilience in the context of this study refers to the capacity of resource users to cope with the effects of sudden environmental change that impacts the ecosystems their livelihoods depend on, without experiencing strong economic hardship (i.e. specialized resilience). While the applications of the concept of social capital strongly vary and depend on the research field, the notion of social capital very generally refers to the existence of relationships between social entities associated with a number of desirable social phenomena. The core idea is that the existence of social relationships provide access to valuable resources that are embedded in the social structure. These resources are channeled through social relations and can be mobilized by social actors. Hence, the connectedness of an actor through various forms of relationships to others increases an actor’s social capital in that it provides potential access to valuable resources such as information, knowledge, influence etc. that can be mobilized in times of need. Previous research illuminates the role of social capital for the enhanced ability to find alternative employment opportunities, or to receive social support in times of hardship. These results point to the potential role of social capital for natural resource user communities to cope with the impacts of abrupt environmental change. This empirical research draws on empirical data collected through a survey with resource users (n=98) in Peru who were confronted with sudden environmental change triggered by a recent El Nino Southern Oscillations (ENSO) event. Valued ego-network data of the resource users is analyzed. Livelihood resilience is operationalized as the difference in well-being before and after the ENSO event. Integrating insights from resilience and social capital theory, hypotheses are developed and tested to explain this difference focusing on the role of resource user groups’ i) number of relations, and ii) type of relations to political actors. Moreover, analysis examines the impact of the resource user groups’ relations to iii) the different types of governmental (different state agencies) and non-governmental (e.g. NGO) actors nested across the political system (local to national level). The findings offer intriguing insights to better understand the role of social-political relationships to political actors for dealing with sudden environmental change. Moreover, the results entail important implications on how resource users can be best supported for dealing with such events, which are predicted to increase in the near future as the impacts of climate change continue to unfold.