Resilience and household food security: a review of concepts, methodological approaches and empirical evidence

By I. Ansah, C. Gardebroek, R. Ihle. Food Security, 2019

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The way economic studies conceptualize and measure resilience is very heterogeneous. This does not only challenge scientific progress, but also raises the question of whether they measure one identical concept with different methods or whether they measure different understandings of resilience. This paper provides a review of concepts, methodological approaches and empirical evidence on resilience from a food security perspective, focusing on socio-economic research. We perform a systematic literature search to identify recent publications that analyze resilience from the perspective of household food security. We examine the historical evolution of concepts and methods used for measuring resilience and synthesize the evidence. We find that conceptual and analytical models have evolved over time, with important technical adjustments. Studies initially focused on measuring resilience as an end in itself, but more recently resilience is understood as a means to an ultimate end, hence resilience capacity is measured instead. Also, resilience was initially measured as an indicator of food security. Currently it is measured distinctly from food security. Multivariate techniques are found to be frequently used to quantify resilience. The empirical evidence suggests that households with higher resilience capacity tend to have less child malnutrition and better food security. We find that causal pathways through which resilience capacity affects food security in a microeconomic framework are barely explicitly considered in empirical analyses. Therefore, we suggest a model which explicitly addresses these pathways.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Nutrition and Dietetics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e9dec48dc9a01576e382ec953971d5070ec4b93

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In General Health Professions

In Nutrition and Dietetics

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Resilience of local food systems and links to food security – A review of some important concepts in the context of COVID-19 and other shocks (2020, background): “…was produced in the last 5 to 7 years on household resilience in the context of food security crises (e.g. Constas et al. 2014; Brück et al. 2018; Ansah et al. 2019; Béné et al. 2020) and identify what and how the lessons and principles that emerged from this new body of work can be useful in…”
A scoping review of the development resilience literature: Theory, methods and evidence (2021, background): “2017; Serfilippi and Ramnath 2018), or seem to have captured just a small share of the literature (Ansah et al. 2019).”