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Adoption and shift of water-saving strategies to policy shock: based on social-ecological system analysis

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Abstract

Water scarcity is a global issue due to climate change and increasing water demand. Water pricing policy is a critical instrument to stimulate farmers’ water-saving actions. Different types of water-saving behaviors are closely related and interactional. It is thus necessary to study multiple water-saving behaviors together and their dynamic transformation with intensification of policy shock. Besides, whether the policy could work well depends much on the social-ecological system where farmers are embedded. This paper studies how social-ecological system impacts farmers’ choice from multiple water-saving strategies and their shift of response strategies with further increase in water price. A field survey was conducted in semi-arid area of northwestern China that has suffered from severe water shortage and human-land conflicts for a long time. The results show that adoption of active-negative strategy rather than passive water-saving strategy is affected by productivity and predictability of resource system, number of users, norms, social capital, and collective choice rules. Adoption of active-positive strategy depends much on relative size and productivity of resource system, predictability of system dynamics, mobility of resource units, number of users, norms, social capital, and monitoring and sanctioning process. However, their effects have disparities, or are even opposite under different intensities of policy shock. When policy shock intensifies, mobility of resource units, number of users, resource importance, and monitoring and sanctioning process are identified as key factors to degrade farmers’ water-saving strategy rather than maintain their original strategy. Both the size of resource system and the quality of social network promote farmers to upgrade response strategy. The results indicate that there is a complicated relationship between policy shock and water-saving responses in the framework of social-ecological system, explained by a series of mechanisms. The findings provide valuable implications for optimizing water pricing mechanism, designing targeted measures, and developing effective governance environment.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This study is supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (20BRK044), Social Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2020R034), National Natural Science Foundation of China (72203169, 72073029, 72273062), Soft Science Research Project of Department of Science and Technology of Shaanxi Province (2023-CX-RKX-124), and Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (Xi’an Jiaotong University, SK2022137).

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  1. Linjing Ren and Xiaojun Yang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Policy and Administration, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, P.R. China

    Linjing Ren

  2. School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, No.28 Xianning West Road, Xi’an,, Shaanxi 710049, P.R. China

    Xiaojun Yang

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  1. Linjing Ren
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Linjing Ren: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Writing - Original Draft, Funding acquisition. Xiaojun Yang: Conceptualization, Investigation, Resources, Data Curation, Writing - Review & Editing, Project administration.

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Correspondence to Xiaojun Yang.

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Ren, L., Yang, X. Adoption and shift of water-saving strategies to policy shock: based on social-ecological system analysis. Water Resour Manage 37, 4015–4037 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-023-03537-6

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