Rivalry and recovery: The social consequences of climatic hazards in rural India

Although damaging, the economic and physical consequences of disasters triggered by natural hazards can be mitigated by community recovery effects facilitated by strong social capital. How disasters affect social capital itself, though, is less known; they can serve to both coalesce and cleave communities in their aftermath. Using panel data from 23,000 households and 1,250 villages in rural India, this study aims to answer the following question: how do natural hazards shape social capital? Focusing on four different climatic hazards (droughts, floods, hailstorms, and cyclones) and four measures of social capital (social cohesion, collective efficacy, formal networks, and associational membership), we find divergent effects of hazards, depending on type and recency. Droughts inhibit new access to formal sources of social capital and encourage negative perceptions of social cohesion, but only in the short-term. In contrast, hailstorms encourage short-term building and long-term strengthening of formal networks for all, at the long-term expense of membership in communal organizations. In short, our results suggest that climatic hazards encourage short-term contention within communities while building infrastructure for long-term access to formal sources of authority and resources, although these effects vary by hazard type.