Resilience for Whom? Agent-Based Modeling of Water Infrastructure Access and Agricultural Adaptation Inequalities in Egypt's Fayoum Irrigation System

Contemporary agricultural resilience measurement relies predominantly on backward-looking outcome metrics that obscure how present infrastructure choices configure future adaptation options. This temporal blindspot proves particularly problematic for climate adaptation finance, where quantifying long-term benefits remains challenging compared to straightforward mitigation metrics. We address this methodological gap through the first implementation of pathway diversity theory in agricultural agent-based modeling, demonstrating its application to water infrastructure inequality analysis in Egypt's Fayoum irrigation system. Pathway diversity theory enables explicit analysis of intervention effects across three critical layers: (1) what development programs nominally provide (infrastructure access, subsidies, technical assistance), (2) what farmers actually perceive as available to them given binding constraints, and (3) what farmers ultimately choose from their constrained option sets. Traditional resilience metrics capture only layer three (revealed choices), missing systematic inequalities in layers one and two that determine who has access to adaptive pathways before shocks reveal their necessity. Our ABM simulates heterogeneous farmer agents, operationalizing pathway diversity through archetype-based enumeration of viable livelihood strategies. Each farmer's pathway set emerges from combinations across water sources, crop portfolios, and infrastructure investments, constrained by wealth, farm size, and canal position. Farmers employ satisficing decision-making with bounded rationality, while pathway diversity operates as an analytical lens measuring resilience external to farmer cognition, capturing what farmers could access, not just what they choose. Model results reveal that farm size creates stratification in pathway diversity, far exceeding spatial effects from canal position. The pathway diversity framework’s novelty manifests by: (i) advancing understanding of infrastructure-mediated feedbacks linking water access to adaptive capacity distributions, (ii) introducing novel computational methods for evaluating ex-ante (before-shock) resilience inequalities rather than ex-post (after-shock) outcome disparities, (iii) providing policy evaluation tools that make equity-efficiency tensions explicit rather than implicit, and (iv) enabling identification of intervention targeting criteria that prioritize farmers facing most constrained option sets rather than merely lowest current outcomes. This work demonstrates that rigorous equity-focused development policy requires forward-looking measurement of option inequality, not merely backward-looking assessment of outcome inequality, water infrastructure functions as resilience infrastructure by shaping who can adapt.