From climate shocks to risk accumulation: Survival under cultural tourism development in coastal Vietnam

This article examines how coastal livelihoods are reorganised when climate risk no longer operates as episodic disruption but stabilises as a condition embedded in everyday life. Drawing on mixed-methods fieldwork with 50 fishing households in Son Tra ward, Da Nang City, central Vietnam, the study identifies how repeated and overlapping exposures are not resolved through recovery but carried forward within livelihood structures. Quantitative analysis indicates a systematic association between cumulative exposure, household debt accumulation, and financial constraint, while qualitative materials show how risk becomes incorporated into routine livelihood decision-making rather than treated as exceptional disruption. The analysis specifies a mechanism through which disruption is retained across cycles: exposure destabilises production, income instability increasingly leads to borrowing practices, borrowing constrains reinvestment, and constrained reinvestment increases sensitivity to subsequent exposure. Within observed livelihood trajectories, this recursive process does not necessarily culminate in collapse or transformation. It stabilises livelihoods within a narrowed field of action in which productive capacity is not restored. Within this configuration, survival is conceptualised as a mode of organisation rather than an outcome of successful recovery. Practices such as income fragmentation, maintenance borrowing, and scale reduction sustain continuity while reproducing the conditions that constrain it. Read in relation to evidence from Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the case suggests a trajectory of climate response in which persistence may become more analytically visible than transition under conditions of prolonged exposure. By making this mechanism explicit, the article reframes livelihood persistence under prolonged exposure as a structured condition rather than an outcome to be measured. It reconsiders adaptation and resilience within a temporal setting where recovery no longer organises expectation and where continuity is achieved through the management of constraint.