What psychological factors lead to the abandonment of cultivated land by coastal farmers? An interpretation based on the psychological distance

Xin Nie, Xingyi Wu, Han Wang, Qing Kang, Fengqin Li, Lihua Li and Hua Qiao

Journal of Risk Research, 2023, vol. 26, issue 9, 947-968

Abstract: For a long time, the research on the cultivated land abandonment behavior of farmers, caused by natural constraints such as coastal ecological environment vulnerability and frequent extreme climates, has received extensive attention. However, few scholars pay attention to the impact of psychological construction of farmers’ environmental risk perception on abandoned farming behavior, especially the use of psychological distance (PD) to quantify this abstract psychological process. Taking Shankou Town, Guangxi, China as an example, this study combines the PD in the field of sociology with the construal level theory to build a PD framework for coastal farmers. A structural equation model was used to explore the influence mechanism of the social, temporal, hypothetical, and spatial distances on farmers’ cultivated land abandonment behavior. We found that coastal land abandonment is affected by social trust and the probability of extreme weather, although the risk preference under the ‘discount rate’ is not significantly affected. At the same time, the closer the spatial distance between the residence and the coastline, the higher the abandonment of cultivated land, although with a different impact. In addition, population mobility and human-sea connection were found to play a mediating role in the effect of psychological distance on cultivated land abandonment. We confirmed that the direction of the effects of the four types of psychological distance on land abandonment behavior is not consistent. This study is helpful to understand the cultivated land abandonment behavior of farmers in coastal zone, and tries to provide reference for coastal zone planting planning.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13669877.2023.2220334 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jriskr:v:26:y:2023:i:9:p:947-968

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJRR20

DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2023.2220334

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Risk Research is currently edited by Bryan MacGregor

More articles in Journal of Risk Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().