Tackling climate change under time‐poverty: Cooperatives as temporal pacers

Abstract We help to unravel how smallholder farmers in agricultural cooperatives can address the consequences of climate change. Climate change‐oriented actions often pose an extra challenge to cooperative members in time‐poverty, that is, to those who have no choice but to work long hours yet remain consumption poor. Tackling climate change requires future‐oriented action toward unpredictable events, whereas time‐poverty requires people to deal with the bare necessities of the present. Through a qualitative inductive study of Rwandan smallholder farmers in agricultural cooperatives, we observe that climate change increases time‐poverty, especially for women, and that smallholder farmers are hesitant to invest their time in making climate change adaptations. We find that smallholder farmers can overcome these challenges through membership of agricultural cooperatives, which can help in pacing climate change actions.