A framework to assess the resilience of farming systems
By Miranda P. M. Meuwissen, P. Feindt, Alisa Spiegel, C. Termeer, E. Mathijs, Yann de Mey, Robert Finger, Alfons Balmann, Erwin Wauters, J. Urquhart and 22 more. Agricultural Systems, 2019
657 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms, farmers' organizations, service suppliers and supply chain actors are embedded in local environments and functions of agriculture. We define resilience of a farming system as its ability to ensure the provision of the system functions in the face of increasingly complex and accumulating economic, social, environmental and institutional shocks and stresses, through capacities of robustness, adaptability and transformability. We (i) develop a framework to assess the resilience of farming systems, and (ii) present a methodology to operationalize the framework with a view to Europe's diverse farming systems. The framework is designed to assess resilience to specific challenges (specified resilience) as well as a farming system's capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise (general resilience). The framework provides a heuristic to analyze system properties, challenges (shocks, long-term stresses), indicators to measure the performance of system functions, resilience capacities and resilience-enhancing attributes. Capacities and attributes refer to adaptive cycle processes of agricultural practices, farm demographics, governance and risk management. The novelty of the framework pertains to the focal scale of analysis, i.e. the farming system level, the consideration of accumulating challenges and various agricultural processes, and the consideration that farming systems provide multiple functions that can change over time. Furthermore, the distinction between three resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability, transformability) ensures that the framework goes beyond narrow definitions that limit resilience to robustness. The methodology deploys a mixed-methods approach: quantitative methods, such as statistics, econometrics and modelling, are used to identify underlying patterns, causal explanations and likely contributing factors; while qualitative methods, such as interviews, participatory approaches and stakeholder workshops, access experiential and contextual knowledge and provide more nuanced insights. More specifically, analysis along the framework explores multiple nested levels of farming systems (e.g. farm, farm household, supply chain, farming system) over a time horizon of 1–2 generations, thereby enabling reflection on potential temporal and scalar trade-offs across resilience attributes. The richness of the framework is illustrated for the arable farming system in Veenkolonien, the Netherlands. The analysis reveals a relatively low capacity of this farming system to transform and farmers feeling distressed about transformation, while other members of their households have experienced many examples of transformation.
Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Environmental Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8dfcdafbec4c91fd45ce6beffb4a5604cfccdc51
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Citations in the corpus
- A review of types of risks in agriculture: What we know and what we need to know (2020, positive): “Examples include the SURE-Farm project and the INFORM index for risk management (Bornhofen et al., 2019; Meuwissen et al., 2019).”
- 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): “…instance while it is often assumed that being connected to the market is an important prerequisite for farmers to strengthen their resilience (e.g. Meuwissen et al. 2019; Kangogo et al. 2020), we also know that too much connectivity is likely to expose people to “concatenated shocks” (Biggs et…”