Household demographic and socio-economic predictors of agricultural practices, land use and environmental degradation perception of the Paute catchment (Ecuador)

This paper seeks to improve the understanding of the household-level dynamics (life-cycle) and its relationship to agricultural practices, land use & environmental perception focusing on long-settled communities in the Andes.
A primary data generation (the 3-Paute survey) has been carried out obtaining 239 surveyed households. Gathered data have been analyzed by the Factor Analysis for Mixed Data (FMDA), the Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components (HCPC); as well as Chi2 (test of independence), ANOVA & Kruskal-Wallis tests.
The presented findings advance our understanding of the complex dynamics in long-settled communities in the Andes region in five ways: 1) some household life-cycle variables influence the availability of the household labor force, that may impact the diversification of economic activities and cropping, the type of agriculture, and the use of intensive and/or extensive agriculture; 2) gender roles are well defined in function of the production scale; 3) we argue that household access to hired labor and focus on profit beyond subsistence; 4) migration plays an important role on the different dynamics under study mainly on wealthy households; and 5) the local livelihoods, adaptations, and environmental outcomes extend beyond a focus on macro-level to those operating at the household life-cycle level.