Suchergebnisse

Iran faces a water crisis so severe that much of its land has ceased to be productive. Since Iran has coped with water shortages for thousands of years, it would seem that something has been lost in the abandonment, over the past half-century or so, of traditional practices in favour of modern ones. A comparison of the socio-technical systems inherent in the traditional practices with those that accompany the modern ones reveals a striking loss of institutional plurality. It also suggests the remedy: a switch away from 'government' (in which state actors prescribe and firms, farms and households comply) to 'governance' (in which state actors are in two-way and constructive engagement with actors from both the market and civil society).

AbstractThis study has been done with the aim of developing and validating a perceptual scale for small‐scale farmers in arid regions and also redirecting interventions towards sustainability; it was conducted in the two qualitative and quantitative phases. In the scale validation process, principal component analysis was employed to identify the latent dimensions of farmers' perceptions of climate change. The results showed that the scale of farmers' perceptions of climate change has five latent dimensions including "awareness and knowledge," "ascription of responsibility," "forgetfulness and optimism about the future," "perceived risk," and "human agency." The results of model validation revealed that all fitness indices are at a suitable level, and this scale might be used by climate change social interventions for sustaining agricultural activities, in water‐scarce areas. Given that forgetfulness and optimism are due to the weakness of farmers' episodic memory, it was recommended that climate change social interventions be focused on improving episodic memory using episodic future thinking.