Ecological constraints on sustainable agricultural development in palestine: A socio-ecological and environmental justice perspective

Agricultural sustainability in Palestine is increasingly shaped by the interaction of ecological stress, political restrictions, infrastructure fragility, and uneven institutional support. This study examines how ecological and governance-mediated constraints affect sustainable agricultural development in Palestine, using field evidence from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. A mixed-methods design combined a structured survey of 250 farmers, semi-structured interviews with 17 experts, and secondary evidence from official statistics, GIS-based reports, policy documents, and peer-reviewed literature. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS through descriptive statistics, composite indices, non-parametric and categorical tests, rank correlations, and binary logistic regression, while expert interviews were analyzed thematically and integrated through triangulation. The findings show that ecological constraints are severe and multidimensional. The overall Ecological Constraint Severity Index reached 4.08 ± 0.61 on a five-point scale, with water-related constraints recording the highest severity score (4.34 ± 0.58), followed by regulatory-political constraints. These pressures were associated with declining production, reduced product quality, income losses, rising production costs, and weakened household food-security capacity. Adaptation practices, including drip irrigation, soil management, crop adjustment, solar pumping, rainwater harvesting, and water reuse, were present but unevenly adopted due to constraints in finance, infrastructure, energy, extension, technology, and institutional support. The study distinguishes resilience-building adaptation from distress coping, showing that responses such as reducing cultivated area may reflect shrinking livelihood options rather than sustainable transformation. The paper contributes to sustainability scholarship by framing ecological constraints as socio-ecological, governance-mediated, and political conditions requiring integrated and equity-oriented agricultural policy.