Natalia Zugravu-Soilita, Séverine Bouard, Leïla Apithy, Rajwane Kafrouni, Centre d'études sur la mondialisation, les conflits, les territoires et les vulnérabilités (Cemotev), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), Institut Agronomique Néo-Calédonien (IAC), Illinois Arts Council, IAC Metro South Health, MSH Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement, CIRAD, and We express gratitude to the IAC and CIRAD for permission to exploit the original and confidential tribal agriculture survey. We would also like to thank the associate editor and the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have contributed significantly to improving this article. We would like to thank Vincent Geronimi for our very rich and constructive discussions around the concepts explored in this work. We are also grateful to the participants in the UNESCO's SIDS Knowledge Day, in the CEMOTEV (University of Versailles) and MSH (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme / The House of Human and Social Sciences) Paris-Saclay seminars, and in the ?Vulnerability? and ?Resilience? international conference, organized by CEMOTEV and UMI R?siliences (IRD), for their valuable comments on the previous versions of the paper. Any errors or shortcomings remain the authors' own responsibility.
International audience; This paper proposes an empirical investigation of the impact of social relations, referred to as structural social capital, and cultural values, referred to as intangible cultural capital, on tribal agricultural production in New Caledonia. By using microdata from an original survey on tribal communities, we construct a simultaneous equations model to explore the mechanisms by which cultural values and social relations interact with agricultural performance. Several original findings emerge from this study. First, agricultural performance (production and yield) is a result and, simultaneously, an explanatory factor of social relations, highlighting the limited substitutability between these two sources of wealth (agriculture and social capital). Second, cultural values appear to be an explanatory factor of tribal social relations and thus indirectly affect economic performance. Moreover, our results suggest that the complementarity between the forms of capital is essential for the extensification—maintenance/scaling up—of tribal agriculture (crop production) and even more essential for the intensification (performance, i.e. crop yield) of this activity and the persistence of social ties. Our results thus show that the neoclassical hypothesis of perfect substitutability between the components of wealth is not valid for socioeconomic sustainability.