Climate-Induced Resilience and Humanitarian Response Gaps for Syrian Refugee Women in Agriculture under Environmental Stress in Jordan

dc.abstract.en	This thesis examines the climate-related vulnerabilities and coping mechanisms of Syrian refugee women engaged in small-scale, informal, and seasonal agriculture in Jordan. Situated at the intersection of climate change, forced displacement, gender, and agriculture. Adopting a qualitative research design using secondary data, the study draws on grey humanitarian literature, national and international policy frameworks, programme evaluation documents, and peer-reviewed academic sources. Two complementary theoretical frameworks structure the analysis. The Social Vulnerability Perspective provides the overarching analytical lens, situating climate risk within broader structures of power, inequality, and institutional exclusion rather than treating it as a function of physical exposure alone. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach operationalises this lens at the household and individual level, mapping the 5 capital assets, through which Syrian refugee women navigate climate stress and pursue adaptive strategies. Jordan provides the geographic and institutional context. Among the world's most water-scarce countries, Jordan faces accelerating temperature increases, declining and erratic precipitation, and chronic aquifer depletion. Syrian refugee women, represent a significant but systematically undercounted share of the agricultural workforce. Agriculture remains one of the few legal livelihood sectors accessible to Syrian refugees in Jordan, and within it, women are disproportionately represented in the most informal, lowest-paid, and least protected arrangements. The findings document coping mechanisms across all 5 capital domains. Syrian refugee women have accumulated substantial adaptive agricultural knowledge through years of farming in Jordanian conditions, diversify livelihoods across seasonal wage labour and home-based income activities, rely heavily on informal social networks, and repurpose domestic infrastructure for productive use. However, these mechanisms are predominantly reactive and capital-depleting rather than adaptive and capital-building. Debt is chronic and rising, informal land access carries no legal protection, and child labour functions as a household-level coping response. The structural conditions that would enable genuine adaptive investment (secure land access, formal employment, affordable credit, climate-appropriate infrastructure) are systematically unavailable to this population. A gap analysis of the institutional response identifies critical shortfalls across all documented climate risks, including water scarcity, extreme heat, erratic precipitation, flash flooding, and pest pressure. These are compounded by persistent programme design failures: short project cycles, absent post-implementation follow-up, and non-participatory planning that fails to draw on the field-level knowledge this population has accumulated. The gendered dimensions of climate vulnerability, care burden, restricted mobility, permit inaccessibility, and institutional invisibility, are not addressed as an integrated objective by any programme in the reviewed landscape. The thesis concludes that the response gap is structural rather than primarily financial, produced by the misalignment between the legal and institutional architecture governing refugee livelihoods and the climate adaptation requirements of the population it excludes. Addressing it requires reform of the underlying conditions, land tenure access, work permit equity, financial inclusion, and participatory programme design, that determine whether the adaptive capacity Syrian refugee women demonstrably possess can be mobilised at the scale Jordan's accelerating climate trajectory demands.
dc.affiliation	Uniwersytet Warszawski
dc.affiliation.department	Wydział Prawa i Administracji
dc.contributor.author	Ayurveda, Diva
dc.contributor.promoter	Heidrich, Dorota
dc.contributor.reviewer	Mikos-Skuza, Elżbieta
dc.contributor.reviewer	Heidrich, Dorota
dc.date.defence	2026-07-31
dc.date.issued	2026
dc.date.submitted	2026-06-19
dc.identifier.apd	251734
dc.language	en
dc.language.other	pl
dc.publisher	Uniwersytet Warszawski
dc.rights	ClosedAccess
dc.subject.en	Syrian refugee women
dc.subject.en	climate change
dc.subject.en	agriculture
dc.subject.en	Jordan
dc.subject.en	climate resilience
dc.subject.en	forced displacement
dc.subject.en	gender
dc.subject.en	sustainable livelihoods
dc.subject.en	social vulnerability
dc.title	Climate-Induced Resilience and Humanitarian Response Gaps for Syrian Refugee Women in Agriculture under Environmental Stress in Jordan
dc.type	MasterThesis