Reshaping collective reciprocal space and rules: The impact of digital network technology application on farmers' participation in collective action to respond to natural disasters - evidence from rural coastal border areas of China

Abstract

In the context of global climate change and the increase in extreme weather, the risk of frequent natural disasters has had a great impact on the production and life of farming households, putting their livelihoods under serious threat and destroying their living environment. How to improve the resilience and adaptability of farmers to climate change and enhance their sustainable livelihoods and survival is a major challenge in rural areas around the world. Climate change resistance and adaptation is a public social issue, and the ability of farmers to participate in collective action on disasters is directly related to their individual capacity to adapt to climate change. In the context of the general decline in the capacity for collective action in rural areas as a result of the impact of marketisation and commoditisation, the use of digital network technologies can enhance the capacity of rural households for collective action to resist the impacts of climate change and disasters through the rapid dissemination of information and knowledge, expanding the space for expansion of the social capital of rural households, and reducing the costs of collective action. Former scholars have conducted in-depth studies in the fields of disaster governance and the impact of digital network technology, but few studies have introduced the development of digital network technology, an important scientific and technological variable, into research related to disaster governance. Specifically, firstly, with regard to disaster governance, most of the existing studies have focused on technological instrumental responses, while disaster governance pathways focusing on collective action have been less frequently discussed. Second, most studies focus on enhancing rural disaster governance capacity through exogenous dynamics, but few studies focus on the resilience of rural communities themselves. Third, little attention has been paid to the relationship between digital network technology and collective action in disasters and their interaction mechanisms. Thus, based on collective action theory, this paper combines existing research results on disaster collective action and digital network technology, theoretically builds a link between the use of digital network technology and the participation of farmers in collective action to cope with disasters, proposes a mechanism path through which the use of digital network technology can enhance collective action in disasters by improving social learning, and empirically tests the proposed relationship between the use of digital network technology and disaster collective action based on research data from 987 farmers in Guangxi, a border region of China, based on diversified econometric tools. The proposed relationship between the use of digital network technology and collective action in disasters is empirically examined based on a variety of econometric tools supported by 987 farm household survey data from Guangxi, a border region in China. The results show that, on the one hand, digital network technology has a significant positive impact on disaster collective action. In this, at the initial stage, increased use of digital network technology by farmers can bring about a rapid increase in the level of disaster collective action, but once the use of digital network technology by farmers reaches a certain level, the incremental increase in disaster collective action brought about by the use of digital network technology by farmers decreases. On the other hand, digital network technologies can increase the willingness of farmers to participate in collective action in disasters by increasing their livelihood capital, social capital, and natural capital, specifically through the promotion of social learning. The use of digital network technologies enhances the path of collective action of farmers through social learning, demonstrating that digital cyberspace, as a new type of public good, has characteristics that are different from those of traditional public goods. While traditional public goods are depleted by the increasing number of users, new public goods show positive externalities of "the more you use them, the more you get", which are triggered by the continuous dissemination of knowledge through social learning in cyberspace. Therefore, the institutional design for the governance of new public goods is quite different from that of traditional public goods. Specifically, new public things require boundary rules to encourage openness, while traditional public things require boundary rules to restrict access. In this case, the use of boundary rules to encourage openness in new types of public things will bring strong positive externalities to the users and at the same time expose the users to a higher risk of being affected by negative externalities. Therefore, in the institutional design of new public things, it is necessary to reshape the reciprocal relationships and rules formed in the governance of traditional public things in the governance of new public things, so that the institutional rules for the governance of new public things can adapt to the unique boundary rules of new public things. In addition, the positive impact of the use of digital network technologies on the collective action of farmers in response to disasters, as verified in this paper, actually reveals the idea that people can enhance the resilience and adaptability of rural areas through the use of new public goods. The possible contributions of this paper are as follows: firstly, it empirically examines the positive externalities of new public goods, providing new evidence for further understanding of the characteristic of "the more you use it, the more you get" of new public goods. Secondly, it finds a new type of variable represented by new public things for the study of the influencing factors of collective action, which further expands the related research on collective action. Thirdly, by focusing on rural communities, the study demonstrates that rural communities have endogenous adaptive capacity to cope with climate change in advance of disaster shocks, which further complements the research on rural disaster adaptation.