The study’s first headline finding is deceptively simple: 55 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with the expropriation process, while 45 percent reported dissatisfaction. In other words, the affected population is split almost down the middle, a near-even divide that immediately signals the process is not uniformly failing or succeeding. That split matters because farmland expropriation is one of the most consequential and least reversible events in a rural household’s economic life. Once land is transferred for urban development, the primary productive asset of the family disappears, and everything that follows — income, food security, social standing, and even the daily rhythm of work — must be rebuilt from the compensation payment and whatever skills the household can redeploy. A satisfaction rate hovering at barely more than half suggests that the machinery of compensation in East Gojjam is delivering acceptable outcomes for many, but leaving a very large minority behind.

The structural transformation the researchers documented after expropriation is dramatic. Before losing their land, 81.46 percent of surveyed households relied on subsistence farming as their main livelihood. After expropriation, that figure collapsed to just 17.92 percent. The displaced farmers did not simply become urban professionals or successful small traders; instead, the largest single post-expropriation category was daily wage labor, absorbing 26.25 percent of households, while 11.25 percent fell into chronic unemployment. These numbers describe a classic livelihood transition in the development economics literature: households pushed off the land and into the informal urban labor market, where income is volatile, bargaining power is weak, and there is no harvest cycle to structure the year. Daily wage work in fast-growing Ethiopian towns typically means construction labor, loading, and other physically demanding jobs with no security, no benefits, and no protection against the shocks that a plot of fertile land once buffered.

Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak, and this is where the study becomes genuinely nuanced. Urban expansion significantly improved household access to three fundamental services: electricity, safe piped water, and road networks. Families who once lived in the service shadows of town boundaries found themselves connected to the grid, to clean water infrastructure, and to transport links that open access to markets, schools, and clinics. This dual character — improved public services alongside deteriorating livelihood security — is precisely the tension that makes peri-urban expropriation so difficult to govern. The physical infrastructure of development arrives, but the economic foundation of the displaced households does not automatically follow. A household can gain a lightbulb and a tap while losing the means to pay for anything beyond subsistence.

To move beyond description, the researchers employed an ordered logistic regression model, a statistical technique well suited to satisfaction data that falls on an ordered scale rather than a simple yes-no split. The model identified a set of socioeconomic determinants that push satisfaction up or down, and the strongest positive drivers were exactly what one would hope a well-designed compensation system would provide. The amount of compensation had a positive and highly significant effect on satisfaction, as did diversified modes of compensation — meaning payments or benefits delivered in more than one form — and the prompt timing of payments. Each of these findings is actionable. Farmers who received more money were more satisfied; farmers who received compensation in varied forms were more satisfied; and farmers who were paid quickly, rather than left waiting through bureaucratic delays, were more satisfied. Timing, in particular, is a policy lever that costs nothing in monetary terms and yet shows up as highly significant in the model.

On the negative side of the ledger, the regression revealed that residential displacement, larger family sizes, greater areas of expropriated land, and higher fertility of the lost plots all significantly reduced satisfaction levels. Each of these variables tells a coherent economic story. Families who lost not just their fields but their homes faced a double displacement, forced to rebuild both livelihood and shelter simultaneously. Larger families spread any fixed compensation payment across more mouths, diluting its purchasing power. Larger landholdings represented a bigger income stream that a one-time payment struggled to replace, especially if the household lacked the skills to invest the money productively. And the fertility of the lost plot is perhaps the most telling variable of all: the better the land, the higher the baseline income it generated, and the harder it is for any standardized compensation formula to make the household whole. Fertile land produces returns year after year, while a cash payment is spent once.

One of the most counterintuitive findings in the study concerns agricultural risk. Exposure to agricultural risks — drought, crop failure, price swings, and the other hazards of rain-fed highland farming — was positively associated with satisfaction with compensation. The explanation the authors offer is rooted in how people evaluate losses: farmers who had been struggling with unreliable harvests had lower baseline income expectations from their land, so the compensation they received compared favorably against an income stream that had become uncertain and disappointing. For these households, a guaranteed cash payment, even a modest one, represented an improvement in expected welfare. This finding is a reminder that satisfaction is a relative judgment, not an absolute one, and that compensation policy must account for what farmers think they are losing, not only what the land produces in a good year.

The methodological design of the study strengthens the credibility of these conclusions. The researchers used a multi-stage sampling design and a cross-sectional field survey, randomly selecting 480 households across the peri-urban areas of the four towns, which reduces the risk that the sample reflects only the most accessible or most aggrieved farmers. The combination of descriptive statistics, livelihood transition analysis, and ordered logistic regression allows the study to do three distinct jobs at once: quantify the satisfaction split, map the structural shift in how people earn a living, and isolate the causal correlates of satisfaction with statistical controls in place. The research received no external funding, and the authors, Haymanot Bassie Mognhod and Belete Animaw Beyene of the Department of Economics at Debre Markos University, declare no competing interests — a clean provenance for work that touches on one of the most politically charged processes in rural development.

The policy implications the authors draw are direct: fair property valuations, standardized rehabilitation guidance, and sustainable livelihood restoration frameworks. Each addresses a specific failure mode identified in the data. Fair valuation responds to the finding that compensation amount drives satisfaction and that fertile, productive land is systematically hard to replace with a flat payment. Standardized rehabilitation guidance responds to the vulnerability of households that received cash but had no roadmap for converting it into a durable urban livelihood, ending up in daily wage labor or unemployment. Livelihood restoration frameworks respond to the deepest structural finding of all — the collapse of subsistence farming from over 81 percent of households to under 18 percent — by treating compensation not as an endpoint but as the starting capital for a deliberate transition into stable urban employment or enterprise. As African cities continue to expand at some of the fastest rates in the world, the East Gojjam evidence makes a compelling case that the question is no longer whether farmland will be expropriated, but whether the people who worked it will be equipped to survive the transition. The 55 percent who are satisfied show it can be done; the 45 percent who are not show how easily it is not.

Subject of Research: Socioeconomic impacts of farmland expropriation and compensation satisfaction among peri-urban farming households in Northwest Ethiopia

Article Title: Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia

Article References: Mognhod, H. B., & Beyene, B. A. (2026). Farmers’ satisfaction and livelihood transitions following farmland expropriation in East Gojjam Zone, Northwest Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04937-5

Keywords: farmland expropriation, peri-urban expansion, livelihood transition, compensation satisfaction, ordered logistic regression, Ethiopia, East Gojjam, subsistence farming, daily wage labor, urban development, land governance, rural livelihoods

The research, led by Anindita Sarkar of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn together with colleagues in Germany, Nepal and India, combined four decades of satellite-based climate analysis with extensive fieldwork across nine villages in the Seti River basin. Precipitation records from the CHIRPS dataset and temperature data from TerraClimate covered 1984 to 2023, while land-cover change was tracked using European Space Agency satellite data from 1992 and 2022. Between April and May 2025, the team conducted twenty focus group discussions with 284 participants, split evenly between men and women, alongside semi-structured interviews with farmers, irrigation users, local officials and returnee migrants.

The quantitative findings are subtle but consequential. Annual rainfall in Bajhang, averaging roughly 1,262 millimetres, shows no statistically significant long-term trend. Yet the seasonal distribution is shifting in ways that matter enormously for rainfed agriculture. April rainfall has increased significantly, driven by intense pre-monsoon convective storms known as Nor’westers that can flatten standing crops and erode topsoil. December rainfall has declined significantly, leaving early winters drier. Meanwhile, July and August, the wettest months at more than 300 millimetres each, show declining trends, hinting at a shortening monsoon. Post-monsoon rainfall in October and November is extraordinarily variable, making the timing of the entire agricultural year less predictable.

Temperature tells a clearer story. Annual mean temperatures have sat consistently above the long-term average of about 14.3 degrees Celsius since the early 2000s, with the fastest warming in February, March and October at up to 0.07 degrees per year. Mann-Kendall trend tests confirm statistically significant warming during the monsoon and post-monsoon months, particularly September and October. In high-elevation villages such as Daarya, farmers report that winter snowfall has all but vanished. Where snow once lingered until February or March, rivers now run dry by early spring, cutting the pre-monsoon streamflow that feeds canals and springs and undermining wheat and barley cultivation.

The researchers call the resulting condition agroecological misalignment: a widening gap between inherited agrarian calendars and the climate that actually materialises. Crop-by-crop analysis shows the mismatch clearly. Lowland rice, transplanted in June and July, depends on sustained monsoon rainfall to keep paddies flooded, making it acutely vulnerable to late or excessive rain. Wheat and barley, sown after the monsoon, now grow through increasingly dry winters and ripen earlier under spring temperatures above 20 degrees, shortening the grain-filling period and depressing yields. Perhaps most strikingly, the traditional labour sequencing, in which barley in the high hills ripened after wheat in the valleys, has collapsed. In some years both crops now ripen simultaneously, and wheat harvest overlaps with rice field preparation, creating simultaneous labour peaks that households cannot cover.

The social consequences are visible from orbit. ESA land-cover data show that fallow or abandoned cultivable land expanded by roughly 24.3 square kilometres between 1992 and 2022, while total cropland remained nearly stable, indicating gradual de-intensification rather than permanent conversion. Terraces once planted with barley and wheat are left uncultivated for entire seasons. The drivers are intertwined: rainfall has become unreliable, male labour has migrated to India and the Gulf, cultural norms restrict women from ploughing, and mechanisation is either unaffordable at around 1,000 Nepalese rupees per hour or physically impossible on narrow, stony highland terraces. Land is culturally retained rather than sold, so households simply wait, sometimes for the seasonal return of migrant men, before ploughing can begin.

Traditional crops are disappearing with the old climate. Barley, buckwheat and even apple orchards planted over the past two decades under development programmes are failing as winters warm and snowfall declines. Farmers describe apple blossoms dropping and fruit shrivelling before ripening. These losses carry cultural weight beyond agronomy: buckwheat and barley were embedded in rituals, diets and collective memory, and their decline is experienced as a loss of identity as much as income. Some households have switched to potatoes, millet or wheat, and warmer conditions have even encouraged experiments with broadcast rice in areas where it was once unthinkable.

The burden of this reordering falls unevenly. With men gone, women now manage most farming tasks while continuing to shoulder livestock care, domestic work and caregiving, without corresponding access to credit, equipment or extension services. The study’s authors resist the term feminisation of agriculture, which implies expanded authority; what they document instead is responsibility without power. One creative response is a renewed form of parma, the traditional non-monetised labour exchange, now organised among upper-caste women as care-based reciprocity. Meanwhile, land abandoned by upper-caste households has opened selective, precarious tenancy opportunities for Dalit families, who lease land informally with no written contracts, gaining access to cultivation without security of tenure. Dalit women in particular face compounded burdens, returning to villages to manage leased farms while raising children under conditions of informal tenancy.

Underlying all of this is what the researchers term institutional thinness. Irrigation governance is informal and shaped by local power relations and elite capture, with communities left to dig their own channels. Climate information exists but is not trusted or usable: farmers hear weather updates on the radio but never adjust their farming accordingly, and there is no early warning system for rainfall. Government soil scientists visit but never follow up. Remittances are consumed rather than reinvested in farms, and cheap imported rice has depressed farm-gate prices, further weakening incentives for local production. Formal adaptation frameworks such as Nepal’s National Adaptation Plan exist on paper, but their implementation is mediated by fragmented governance and local hierarchies, leaving women and marginalised castes to carry increasing agricultural responsibility without institutional support.

The study’s central argument is that adaptation in places like Bajhang should not be measured against the arrival of climate-smart infrastructure or early warning systems. It is already happening, continuously, through seasonal fallowing, crop switching, informal labour exchange, residue burning and migration, practices that are not transitional failures but a stabilised, everyday adaptation regime. Migration and climate change reinforce each other in a loop: climatic uncertainty pushes men out, labour shortages then weaken irrigation maintenance and collective farming, deepening vulnerability to the next shock. The policy implication is sobering. The challenge is not simply to deliver better technologies, but to address the governance inequalities that determine whose knowledge counts, whose priorities shape institutional responses and who ultimately pays for climatic uncertainty. Until then, mountain farmers will keep adapting the only way they can, one uncertain season at a time.

Subject of Research: Climate change adaptation as everyday practice in mountain farming communities of Bajhang District, Nepal

Article Title: Reimagining adaptation as everyday practices: agroecological misalignment, institutional thinness, and shifting socio-cultural norms in climate-vulnerable mountain agrarian peripheries of Nepal

Article References: Sarkar, A., Kumar, A., Osemwegie, I., Akhtar, F., Kumar, N., Shrestha, S., & Borgemeister, C. (2026). Reimagining adaptation as everyday practices: agroecological misalignment, institutional thinness, and shifting socio-cultural norms in climate-vulnerable mountain agrarian peripheries of Nepal. Regional Environmental Change, 26(3), Article 185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02669-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02669-w

Keywords: climate change adaptation, Nepal, Himalaya, monsoon variability, agroecology, subsistence farming, migration, gender, caste, irrigation, land abandonment, institutional governance