How do Farmers Align with the Agri-Environmental Changes in Irrigated Agriculture? A Case Study from the Harran Plain, Turkey

Irrigated agriculture has a significant potential for food security and poverty reduction, while it is also associated with broader agri-environmental changes. These changes include agrarian change in terms of the intensification, globalization and neoliberalization of agriculture, and environmental change due to the pollution, degradation and exploitation of water and soil resources. Farmers are key actors in irrigated agriculture, since they are both the users of water and soil resources and the target groups of policies. This paper aims to improve the understanding of the relationship between farmers' decisions on irrigated agriculture and the agri-environmental changes that result from irrigated agriculture, and to explain how farmers differ in terms of their alignment with these changes. We develop a conceptual model by building on natural resources governance and farmer decision-making, and apply the model through a case study in Harran Plain, an agricultural area in Turkey. Our findings indicate that farmers are differentiated in terms of their degree of alignment. This differentiation results mainly from the attributes that relate to what the farmers have, such as land, financial capacity, power attribution and network range, and it affects the farmers' decisions about resource use and crop production