Journal
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
Volume 182, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106933
Keywords
Sustainable development; Cultural capital; Social capital; Tangible wealth; Intangible wealth; Tribal agriculture; Socioeconomic relationship
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This study investigates the impact of cultural values and social relations on tribal agricultural production in New Caledonia, finding a two-way relationship between agricultural performance and social relations, as well as the indirect influence of cultural values on economic performance. The results suggest that the complementary nature of different forms of capital is crucial for the sustainability of tribal agriculture, challenging the neoclassical hypothesis of perfect substitutability between components of wealth.
This paper proposes an empirical investigation of the impact of social relations, referred to as structural social capital, and cultural values, referred to as intangible cultural capital, on tribal agricultural production in New Caledonia. By using microdata from an original survey on tribal communities, we construct a simultaneous equations model to explore the mechanisms by which cultural values and social relations interact with agricultural performance. Several original findings emerge from this study. First, agricultural performance (production and yield) is a result and, simultaneously, an explanatory factor of social relations, highlighting the limited substitutability between these two sources of wealth (agriculture and social capital). Second, cultural values appear to be an explanatory factor of tribal social relations and thus indirectly affect economic performance. Moreover, our results suggest that the complementarity between the forms of capital is essential for the extensification-maintenance/scaling up-of tribal agriculture (crop production) and even more essential for the intensification (performance, i.e. crop yield) of this activity and the persistence of social ties. Our results thus show that the neoclassical hypothesis of perfect substitutability between the components of wealth is not valid for socioeconomic sustainability.
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