Developing social-ecological resilience indicators of organic rice production through integrating resilience theories with social sciences’ disciplines
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Abstract
The term “resilience” seems to permeate discourses of sustainable development since it has been defined as a practical ability to overcome challenges of all kinds. However, understanding and building resilience must begin with developing a specific set of indicators to monitor a specific system. In this paper, 53 organic farmers in four Districts of Chiang Mai Province were selected as informants by snowball sampling. They were iteratively interviewed and observed with reference to the guidelines of social-ecological resilience in agro-ecosystems and technography, respectively to identify components to deal with the dynamic change of organic rice production. Data obtained from the collection process were coded into concrete indicators by qualitative data analysis, supported by insights from grounded theory (GT). The result shows that all indicators built by that way possess three attributes of precision, reliability, and specificity. These qualities are far from questionable since the informants’ important factors such as perspectives, indigenous knowledge, and infrastructure have been taken into consideration. Therefore, the indicators are not only used for the quantification purposes, but also provided apparent practices and skills which should be implemented against changes.
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