Climate adaptation, perceived resilience, and household wellbeing: Comparative evidence from Kenya and Zambia

The growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events has spawned a rapid increase in policies and programs designed to enhance the resilience of small-scale producers through the promotion of climate-adaptive agricultural practices. However, gaps exist in the conceptualization and measurement of farm-households' resilience in face of climatic stress. Furthermore, comparative evidence to understand the relationships between climate-adaptive practices, resilience capacities, and household wellbeing across diverse rural contexts remains scant. Using a novel approach to measure households' perceived resilience against climatic events, we empirically examine the relationship between perceived climate resilience, the adoption of climate-adaptive practices, and household wellbeing in a pastoralist setting in Kenya and a rain-fed cropping system in Zambia. To enable comparisons across these diverse settings, we use a typology of climate-adaptive practices based on their relative factor intensities or diversification decisions. Using the 'doubly-robust' inverse-probability-weighted-regression-adjustment (IPWRA) approach to account for potential selection issues, we find that capital-intensive strategies are consistently and positively associated with resilience, food security, and income in both contexts. Laborintensive and diversification strategies have generally positive but heterogeneous impacts across the two production systems, likely governed by contextual differences. Results also highlight the complementarity between different climate-adaptive practices in improving household welfare in both contexts. The findings suggest that enhancing resilience and improving overall wellbeing in small-scale producer settings requires multidimensional approaches. These include interventions that reduce the capital constraints that inhibit the adoption of capital-intensive adaptation practices, bundled with approaches that promote the simultaneous adoption of context specific labor-intensive and diversification practices.