Summary of JOIE Article by Catherine Roween C. Almaden, Asian Institute of Management, Makati City, Philippines. The full article is available on the JOIE website
When rice farmers in Northern Mindanao, Philippines or the Mekong Delta, Viet Nam watch saltwater creep into their fields, they face choices that extend beyond their own plots. Should they build protective barriers that might redirect saline water toward neighbors’ land? Should they switch to salt-tolerant crops while others continue with traditional rice? These are social dilemmas where rational self-interest can undermine collective welfare. As saltwater inundation intensifies, the challenge is fundamentally institutional: How do governance structures shape farmers’ willingness to cooperate?
The Institutional Architecture of Climate Adaptation
Climate adaptation presents classic collective action problems. Markets fail to price externalities of individual adaptation choices, while top-down state interventions stumble due to enforcement limitations and information asymmetries. Polycentric governance offers an alternative, yet success depends on specific institutional conditions that align individual incentives with collective outcomes.
This research examines how meso-level institutions, the intermediate governance structures between individual farmers and national governments, shape farmers’ deliberative preferences for collective adaptation. These meso-institutions include farmer organizations, irrigation associations, and local government units that operate as critical middle layers in climate governance. Unlike macro-level national policies or micro-level household decisions, meso-institutions directly mediate collective action by creating legitimacy, shaping beliefs, and enabling social enforcement.
Three Mechanisms of Institutional Influence
Meso-institutions influence collective adaptation through three interconnected mechanisms:
Legitimacy Creation. Institutions generate perceptions of feasibility and appropriateness. When farmers perceive collective adaptation measures as legitimate, both technically feasible and socially appropriate, they support them. Legitimacy is constructed through participatory planning, transparent decision-making, and demonstrated implementation capacity, transforming abstract proposals into credible, actionable options.
Belief Formation. Meso-institutions serve as critical intermediaries, filtering, interpreting, and disseminating climate information. The quality and credibility of these channels directly affect whether farmers develop accurate beliefs about saltwater inundation risks and adaptation effectiveness. Crucially, information access matters most when institutional trust is high, farmers who distrust their local institutions may discount even accurate information.
Social Enforcement. Collective adaptation requires sustained cooperation, which depends on social mechanisms that discourage free-riding. Meso-institutions provide monitoring, sanctioning, and reward structures that make cooperation rational. Enforcement mechanisms range from informal peer pressure to formal rules governing water allocation. Autonomous, participatory organizations generate stronger peer monitoring than hierarchical, state-directed structures.
Comparative Contexts: Philippines versus Viet Nam
The Philippines and Viet Nam face similar climate threats yet differ fundamentally in institutional architecture.
The Philippines features autonomous, participatory meso-institutions. In Northern Mindanao, farmer and irrigation associations operate with substantial self-governance through member assemblies and elected leaders. A typical irrigation association comprises 50-200 farmer-members who collectively manage water distribution, maintain infrastructure, and negotiate with external agencies. Decision-making is deliberative: members debate adaptation options in regular meetings, vote on collective investments, and hold leaders accountable. When saltwater threatens fields, associations rapidly coordinate responses, pooling resources for shared barriers, negotiating with irrigation users, or collectively shifting planting cycles.
Viet Nam maintains state-centered structures. In the Mekong Delta, agricultural associations formally represent farmers but operate within hierarchical systems where party officials and government departments exercise significant control. Decision-making flows vertically: provincial authorities issue guidance, district departments disseminate recommendations, and commune officials implement directives. While these structures mobilize resources efficiently for large-scale projects, they generate weaker horizontal ties. When saltwater intrudes, responses follow official channels, farmers wait for government programs or implement measures individually rather than through autonomous collective action.
These institutional differences, participatory versus state-centered, autonomous versus hierarchical, horizontal versus vertical, shape how farmers perceive adaptation options, process climate information, and coordinate collective responses.
Key Findings: How Institutions Shape Adaptation Choices
Multinomial logistic regression analysis reveals three core findings:
- Information Access Enhances Collective Preferences, But Only with Trust
Climate information access significantly strengthens support for collective adaptation, but conditionally. Where institutional trust is high, information translates into collective action preferences. Where trust is low, the same information may fail to shift preferences or increase skepticism. This challenges technocratic approaches assuming information provision alone drives behavior change. Institutional quality and trust are prerequisites for effective communication.
- Context-Dependent Capacity to Manage High-Externality Measures
Adaptation measures with high negative externalities, actions that individually impose significant costs on neighbors, present the most difficult coordination challenges. In Viet Nam, farmers show sensitivity to institutional quality when considering these measures, suggesting state-centered structures can facilitate coordination when functioning well. In the Philippines, institutional quality does not significantly predict these preferences, likely reflecting that participatory institutions already operate with sufficiently high baseline quality or have internalized collective management norms.
- Stronger Collective Preferences Under Participatory Structures
Across all measures, the Philippines exhibits stronger deliberative preferences for collective adaptation than Viet Nam. Autonomous, participatory meso-institutions create more favorable conditions for collective adaptation than state-centered hierarchical structures. The mechanism works through multiple channels: participatory institutions build stronger legitimacy through inclusive processes, foster higher trust through transparent governance, enable more effective information dissemination through credible networks, and create more robust social enforcement through peer monitoring.
Implications for Climate Governance
These findings carry one central implication: meso-institutional design fundamentally shapes adaptive capacity. The intermediate governance layer determines whether communities mount coordinated climate responses or fragment into competing strategies.
This challenges common policy approaches. Climate programs often focus on providing information, better forecasts, technical guidance, extension services, assuming rational actors will respond appropriately. Yet information is insufficient without trustworthy, legitimate institutional contexts. Similarly, top-down state interventions may mobilize resources efficiently but fail to generate the legitimacy, trust, and social enforcement necessary for sustained collective action.
The evidence suggests that state support for autonomous farmer organizations, irrigation associations, and community-based resource management groups may be more effective than direct state provision of adaptation services. This does not mean states should withdraw, but rather that institutional architecture matters as much as resource allocation. Building participatory meso-institutions creates foundations for collective adaptation that information provision or state directives alone cannot achieve.
One critical equity concern emerges: institutional embeddedness depends on both exposure and capacity, meaning vulnerable farmers risk marginalization. Climate governance must ensure inclusion through targeted participation support, subsidized membership, or dedicated representation mechanisms.
Conclusion
Farmers facing saltwater inundation in Northern Mindanao and the Mekong Delta navigate institutional landscapes that shape what adaptation strategies are imaginable, feasible, and collectively achievable. This research demonstrates that meso-institutions matter profoundly as they shape collective adaptation capacity through specific mechanisms of legitimacy creation, belief formation, and social enforcement.
Participatory, autonomous meso-institutions create more favorable conditions for collective adaptation than hierarchical, state-centered structures precisely because they build stronger legitimacy through inclusive processes, foster higher trust through transparent governance, and enable more effective coordination through peer-based enforcement.
As climate change accelerates, the challenge is not merely to inform farmers about risks or provide technical options, it is to design institutions that make collective adaptation the rational, legitimate, and achievable choice. The evidence offers clear guidance: invest in participatory meso-institutional architectures that align individual incentives with collective welfare. The institutional middle layer is where climate adaptation succeeds or fails.