Demographic challenges and agricultural abandonment: solutions for semi-arid winegrowing regions

The main aim of this research is to assess how internal and external drivers influence the abandonment or resilience of vineyard land. The analysis focuses on the wine sector of the Region of Valencia (Comunidad Valenciana, Spain), a semi-arid area with varying dynamics. Despite urban pressures in agriculturally intensive areas along the coast, inland areas face depopulation problems. The presence of multiple demographic and sector-related issues in winegrowing means that different recipes can be used to tackle situations of high or low abandonment of vineyards. The diverse combinations of factors provide opportunities to define tailored strategies to address the specific challenges in each type of area. In this study, a configurational approach is used to examine causal complexity, instead of applying latent or net effects models. Scholars have highlighted the benefits of configurational methods such as fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, or fsQCA. In this sense, configurational approaches analyze the casual complexity as group interconnected ingredients (conditions) that are specify by three characteristics: (i) conjunction, (ii) equifinality and (iii) asymmetry. By contrast, correlation-based methods are designed to deal with “general linear reality or net effects thinking” (Misangyi et al., 2017:256 see also Gabriel et al., 2018; Marx et al., 2014).