Measuring and Understand Resilience to Climate Change among Smallholder Farmers in East Africa

Abstract

A substantial share of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers, reliant on rain-fed systems increasingly destabilised by climate change. Their food security is shaped by dynamic interactions between environmental conditions, choice of livelihood strategies, and structural constraints, making resilience a critical but challenging focus of rural development analysis. This PhD attempts to advance resilience research through four interlinked contributions. First, a literature review shows that while resilience is framed as a multidimensional process, quantitative assessments privilege re-purposed social and economic indicators, marginalising ecological and systemic dimensions. Second, a comparative application of three leading and two representative resilience assessments demonstrates inconsistencies. However, when applied to more homogenous systems their is some convergence although results vary by empirical methodology, highlighting trade-offs between regression and latent factor–based approaches. Third, a Bayesian regression framework integrates household food security outcomes, environmental indicators, and livelihood attributes to show how conditional correlations differ by outcome and agroecological zone. Finally, high-frequency panel data---80 households surveyed fortnightly for 18 months---reveals that household rationing of food correlates most strongly with time-invariant between-household differences--such as infrastructure and soil type---than with time-variant between-time factors. Overall, food security emerges as environmentally constrained, allowing households only modest agency to shape outcomes. Methodologically, the thesis underscores the need for greater integration of biophysical factors as well as scale-sensitive modelling to better capture the complexity of smallholder resilience under climate stress.

Date of Award	20 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Andrew Dowsey (Supervisor) & Levi J Wolf (Supervisor)