Xuan, Yuan

Disaster arising from climate change are critical factors that affect rural development. Promoting collective action-based natural resource management in rural areas is crucial for enhancing the resilience of rural social-ecological systems. Land fragmentation is a common land use pattern in underdeveloped regions, and research on the relationship between land fragmentation and collective action has suggested that the impact of land fragmentation on collective action is purely negative. However, past research has disregarded the systemic external shocks that disaster represent, as well as the positive role of land fragmentation in risk prevention and ecological sustainability. Based on survey data from 902 households in the border region of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, restricted cubic spline regression is employed to examine the nonlinear relationship between land fragmentation and farmer collective action under the impact of disaster. The results show that: (1) Under the impact of disaster, the relationship between land fragmentation and collective action exhibits an N-shaped pattern. (2) Factors such as education level, relationships with fellow villagers, whether other villagers are supervised to comply with village regulations and agreements, sense of village belonging, and fertility of family land are also important factors influencing collective action. Among these factors, farmers with a stronger sense of belonging, higher education level, better relationships with fellow villagers, and more fertile family land are more likely to participate in collective action under disaster scenarios. This paper integrates relevant research from both the social and natural sciences. It not only provides new insights into the key factors influencing rural collective action, but also demonstrates the prospects of cross-disciplinary integration between social science and natural science research.

Improving the resilience and adaptive capacity of farmers to disasters is a major challenge for rural areas around the world in the context of climate change. The ability of farmers to participate in collective action in response to disasters (CARD) is directly related to the adaptive capacity of individual farmers to climate change. Existing studies have discussed the impacts of disaster risk governance and information and communication technology (ICT) respectively, but few have introduced the factors of ICT application into the analyses related to disaster governance. Based on the collective action theory, this paper builds a link between the application of ICT and farmers' participation in CARD, and proposes a mechanism path through which the application of ICT can enhance CARD by enhancing social learning. Taking 987 farmers in the border areas of China as the study sample, the analysis results show that, on the one hand, ICT has a significant positive effect on CARD, but this positive effect will be weakened with the increase of the users of ICT; on the other hand, ICT will increase the human capital, financial capital and social capital of farmers by promoting the social learning pathway of the farmers, which will enhance the farmers' willingness to participate in CARD. This paper increases awareness of the new public goods represented by digital space, and provides practical pathways for rural villages in developing countries to cope with the impacts of climate change.