Social Capital, Livelihood Diversification and Household Resilience to Annual Flood Events in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta

Floods are a familiar and frequent feature of life in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta (MRD). Although floods bring hardship to people, they also bring benefits, such as livelihood development. People in the MRD have experienced the impacts of floods for years, however some adapt well to the floods, while others are more vulnerable. Studying resilience to floods is useful as a way of assessing the capacity of rural households to cope with, and benefit from, annual floods. Social capital plays an important role in a household’s ability to access technical information, resources and local knowledge during annual flooding. Livelihood diversity is known to be a vital strategy for coping with the risks of flood damage. However little is known about the effects of social capital and livelihood diversity on household resilience to floods in terms of securing their homes, securing food, and protecting income, as well as learning new flood-based livelihoods. This study explores the relationship between a household’s resilience to floods in the MRD and levels of social capital (neighbourhood attachment, social supportive network, and participation in groups and associations) and livelihood diversification. These different forms of social capital were measured using the Inverse Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (IHHD). Resilience in this context is defined as the ability of households to learn from, cope with, and benefit from, flood events. Household resilience was measured using expected levels of well-being, obtained from a household survey in 2010, using a five-point Likert scale to construct indexes of household resilience. The results from multiple regressions demonstrate that different forms of social capital have different effects on different forms of household resilience. Neighbourhood attachment has statistically significant effects on a household’s ability to secure food, income, and a level of interest in learning new flood-based livelihoods, but it does not have a significant effect on the capacity of households to secure their home. Similarly, the social supportive network index has significant effects on a household’s ability to learn new livelihoods during the flood season, but it does not have a significant effect on household capacity to secure the home, food and income. Besides social capital, the socio-economic condition of households (household income) is shown to have a significant effect on the three resilience factors – capacity to secure homes, secure food and income, and level of interest in learning and engaging in new livelihoods. Rich households are less likely to be interested in learning new livelihoods (negative effect). Rich households often own large areas of land so they are more likely to specialize in rice farming, which takes a break during the flood season. Poor and medium-income households often own less land or are landless, so they have to work harder to secure an income and food in order to survive during the flood season. Other socio-economic variables, such as the gender and age of respondents, have significant effect on the level of interest shown in learning new livelihoods (negative effect). Housing type also has a significant effect on household capacity to secure the home (concrete houses are less vulnerable). Regional flood factors also have a significant effect on the three resilience factors; people in the highest flood-prone region are less likely to be resilient in terms of securing their houses, food and income, but are more likely to learn new ways of living with floods. Surprisingly, the livelihood diversity index has no effect on household resilience to floods in this context.