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AcknowledgementsWe are very grateful to the research assistants and field officers in Zambia for facilitating communication with farmers and the implementation of individual interviews as well as the participatory system dynamics model building workshops. Our sincere gratitude goes to the traditional leadership in the workshop communities for their support and to all the farmers who generously shared their time and insight with us. Funding sourcesWork on this article was supported by the Norwegian Research Council through the project "Simulation based tools for linking knowledge with action to improve and maintain food security in Africa" (contract number 217931/F10) and the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study through the project "Knowledge analysis in coupled social-ecological systems. A pilot study in smallholder farmer communities in Zambia". The views and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding sources. The funding sources had no role in study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of this article or in the decision to submit this article for publication. Conflicts of interestThe authors declare no conflict of interest. AbstractFood systems will need to undergo considerable transformation. To be better prepared for and resilient to uncertainty and disturbances in the future, resource users and managers need to further develop knowledge about the food and farming system, with its dominating feedback structures and complexities, and to test robust and integrated system-based solutions. This paper investigates how participatory system dynamics modeling can be adapted to groups at the community level with low or no formal educational background. The paper also analyses the refinement of workshop participants' mental models as a consequence of a participatory system dynamics intervention. For this purpose, we ran two workshops with small-scale farmers in Zambia. Analysis of workshop data and postworkshop interviews shows that participatory system dynamics is well adaptable to support an audience-specific learning-by-doing approach. The use of pictures, objects and water glasses in combination with the basic aspects of causal loop diagramming makes for a wellbalanced toolbox. Participants acquire understanding that is also relevant beyond systems thinking in that it offers a range of practical insights such as a critical evaluation of common food security strategies.

This paper operationalizes an analysis of resilience for social‐ecological systems using system dynamics (SD) modelling. Resilience is a versatile concept that continues to gain popularity among researchers who study ways to reduce the vulnerability of social‐ecological systems to a wide range of disturbances. However, its application in the policymaking domain still remains underdeveloped because it is difficult to understand the mechanisms that might enhance resilience and to measure the impact of potential policies. This paper proposes to use SD modelling as a tool to analyse resilience using simulations to quantify system response to disturbances and a causal analysis to identify ways to influence this response. With this aim, this paper proposes a set of fundamental characteristics of resilient responses and describes how to measure them using the results produced by SD models. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.