Region: Global

Dates: 2014-present

PI: Arun Agrawal

Other personnel: Wen Liang, Lauren Persha, Heather Huntington

Funder: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Project Description:

This project identifies the key coping mechanisms that poor and marginal households use to cope with agricultural risks; the role of institutions and collective action in coping with risks; and the effectiveness of individual vs. collective coping mechanisms. The project does so by surveying the secondary literature on community and household level risk coping strategies and systematically coding information from more than 150 the published studies.  IN the course of the work on this project, we identified nearly 1000 coping strategies used by rural producers in fifty different countries.  The project has created the largest searchable, geo-referenced, publicly available global database on coping strategies of rural households and communities. The project also assesses the distribution of different coping mechanisms by institutions and livelihoods, and the effectiveness of individual vs collective coping strategies.

Project documents and data.

Contact name & email: Arun Agrawal (arunagra@umich.edu)