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This article examines how farmers' assignment of responsibility for the disaster in late 2015 – early 2016 connects with reflexivity, habitus and local vulnerability.

This article uses semi-structured interviews with 28 disaster-affected households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta to answer the question.

This article finds out that Vietnamese farmers actively accepted their responsibility for the disaster. In their explanation, they link their action with the root causes of vulnerability embedded in their socio-cultural traditions and collective identity.

This article makes a case for the importance of local culture and epistemologies in understanding disaster vulnerability and responsibility attribution.

This article is original in researching Vietnamese farmers' responsibility attribution, their aesthetic reflexivity, collective habitus and the socio-cultural root causes of disaster.

This article argues the value of integrating pragmatism in applying behavioural science to complex challenges. We describe a behaviour change-led knowledge co-production process in the specific context of climate change in Australia. This process was led by an interdisciplinary research team who struggled with the limitations of the prevailing deterministic behaviour change paradigms, such as the “test, learn, adapt” model, which often focuses narrowly on individual behaviours and fails to integrate multiple interpretations from diverse stakeholders into their knowledge co-production process.

This article uses collaborative reflection as a method of inquiry. We document the team’s experience of a recent challenge-led, programatic research initiative that applied behaviour change strategies to reduce climate vulnerabilities. We demonstrate the necessity of critical reflection and abductive reasoning in the face of the complexities inherent in knowledge co-production addressing complex problems. It underscores the importance of accommodating diverse perspectives and contextual nuances over a one-size-fits-all method.

The article shares lessons learnt about integrating collaborative and critical reflection throughout a project cycle and demonstrates the capacity of abductive reasoning to ease the challenges arising from the tension between behaviour change paradigms and knowledge co-production principles. This approach allows for a more adaptable and context-sensitive application, acknowledging the multiplicity of understandings and the dynamic nature of behavioural change in relation to climate adaptation.

This reflection contributes original insights into the fusion of pragmatism with behaviour change strategies, proposing a novel framework that prioritises flexibility, context-specificity and the recognition of various stakeholder perspectives in the co-production of knowledge.

In many countries, innovation in building design for improving energy performance, reducing CO2 emissions and minimizing life cycle cost has received much attention for sustainable development. This paper investigates the importance of optimization tools for enhancing the design performance in the early stages of Vietnam's cooling-dominated buildings in hot and humid climates using an integrated building design approach.

The methodology of this study exploits the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) optimization algorithm coupled with building simulation to research a trade-off between the optimization of investment cost and energy consumption. Our approach focuses on the whole optimization problem of thermal envelope, glazing and energy systems from preliminary design phases. The methodology is then tested for a case study of a non-residential building located in Hanoi.

The results show a considerable improvement in design performance by our method compared to current building design. The optimal solutions present the trade-off between energy consumption and capital cost in the form of a Pareto front. This helps architects, engineers and investors make important decisions in the early design stages with a large view of impacts of all factors on energy performance and cost.

This is one of the original research to study integrated building design applying the simulation-based genetic optimization algorithm for cooling-dominated buildings in Vietnam. The case study in this article is for a non-residential building in the north of Vietnam but the methodology can also be applied to residential buildings and other regions.

In late 2015, the El Nĩno phenomenon induced Vietnam’s worst drought in 60 years, which lasted until mid-2016 and intensified the most expansive saline intrusion in 90 years. The combination of the two hazards resulted in a large-scale disaster, which has led 18 provinces of Vietnam, most of them from the Mekong Delta, to water shortage, insanitation, human and animal diseases, food emergency need and a considerable disruption in local communities’ livelihoods. These devastating effects raise the question of what makes local households vulnerable to drought and saline intrusion. The chapter argues that vulnerability to the natural disaster is not something resulted from external threats, but rather, is derived from the interplay between social structures residing deeply inside the socio-economic systems and agency’s conditions presenting at the household level. Social structures are rules and procedures that constrain and/or enable human actions in agricultural production, risk taking and adaptation. Agency refers to the capacities of disaster-affected households in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta who cultivated third rice crop and suffered heavily from the 2015–2016 disaster. In addition to households’ lack of planning and coping capacities, the constitution of vulnerability to drought and saline intrusion can be attributed to the interaction between farmers’ choice of extra rice crops and the state’s policies and directions in agricultural and irrigation development since 1990s to date.

Since the late 1980s, social theorists championed for the birth of a new era, in which societies were increasingly exposed to growing global risks. The presence of increasing risks including natural disasters, technological errors, terrorist attacks, nuclear wars and environmental degradation suggests that human beings are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Therefore, an understanding of vulnerability is crucial. Vulnerability is often considered as the potential to suffer from physical attacks. This approach, however, has limited capacity to explain many forms of suffering including not only physical aspects, but also mental, social, economic, political and social dimensions. This chapter draws on the vulnerability literature to present an overarching framework for the book. It starts with an outline of the concept origins, then discusses its relationship with the risk society thesis before forming conceptualisation. The chapter then points out the key similarities and differences between vulnerability and other concepts such as risk, disaster, poverty, security and resilience. The authors rework an existing “security” framework to develop a new definition of the concept of vulnerability. Finally, the authors look into the root causes and the formation of vulnerability within social systems.

The crucial action program of United Nations is sustainable development. In the context of lockdown and food supply chain disruptions in many developing countries due to COVID-19, sustainable agribusiness entrepreneurship (SAE) must be investigated to contribute to the global safe-food supply chain resilience. Furthermore, this pandemic might have changed cognitive social capital (i.e. perceived shared norms, civicness and community cohesiveness) and relational social capital (i.e. social trust). Therefore, this study aims to examine their role in forming agribusiness entrepreneurs’ SAE intentions under the lens of sustainable development in the pandemic context.

This study uses a mixed-methods approach with resources for structural equation modeling. A sample of 499 Vietnamese agribusiness entrepreneurs to reconcile scales and test hypothesized relationships.

The study reconciles the existing constructs’ scales and develops a new scale measuring SAE intention. The findings show that the extended theory of planned behavior (ETPB) model is an ideal theoretical framework for predicting behavioral intentions in sustainability. The study also discovers the role of cognitive social capital and relational social capital in motivating SAE intentions. Also, some managerial implications are suggested for agribusinessmen to survive and succeed during the COVID-19 crisis.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is considered the first to investigate the role of cognitive social capital and relational social capital in motivating SAE in an emerging market using the ETPB. The findings will help emerging economies, where most farmers are family-business owners or micro-scaled entrepreneurs who have been facing the increasing trend of sustainable production and consumer.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has seriously affected the global economy. How agribusinessmen are overcoming this crisis is being noticed in emerging markets. Using social capital to diversify agribusiness for getting more customers is a useful solution for the growth of agribusiness. However, there is a lack of evidence on the aggregate measurement scale of social capital and the influence of behavioral goals on the intention toward agribusiness diversification. Therefore, this study aims to develop an integrated measurement of social capital and investigate its effect on agribusiness diversification intention using the expanded theory of planned behavior (TPB).

A mixed-methods approach is used, including four in-depth interviews, three focus group discussions and two surveys. Structural equation modeling is applied to a sample of 484 respondents to test the proposed hypotheses.

The study shows the role of social capital in influencing the intention to diversify agribusiness under the premises of the resource-based view (RBV). The scale of social capital is also developed, which is the first integrated measurement of this asset. The findings contribute significantly to the existing knowledge of social capital, the TPB and diversifying agribusiness.

This is the first study to explore the comprehensive effect of the facets of social capital on behavioral intention through behavioral goals and determinants of the TPB under the premises of the RBV. The findings will help emerging economies, for example, Vietnam, where most farmers are family business owners or microscaled entrepreneurs in agriculture.