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In the emerging literature on resilience in relation to food security, a growing number of studies stress the need to expand our analysis beyond conventional socio-economic factors such as assets or social capital, and to consider less tangible elements such as risk perception, self-efficacy or aspiration. Drawing on the recent literature and the authors’ own experience, a conceptual framework of subjective resilience is proposed. The framework helps locating the subjective element of resilience within the wider resilience conceptualization as currently developed in the literature on food security and to clarify how it links to the more tangible elements of that conceptualization. Empirical data are then used to test the framework. The analysis demonstrates the relevance of the concept of subjective resilience and the central role that psychosocial factors and individual perceptions play in people’s construct of resilience in the context of humanitarian and food security crises. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of those findings.

Summary Along with the rise of the development effectiveness movement of the last few decades, experimental impact evaluation methods – randomised controlled trials and quasi‐experimental techniques – have emerged as a dominant force. While the increased use of these methods has contributed to improved understanding of what works and whether specific projects have been successful, their ‘gold standard’ status threatens to exclude a large body of evidence from the development effectiveness dialogue. In this paper we conduct an evaluation of the impact on child stunting of CARE's SHOUHARDO project in Bangladesh, the first large‐scale project to use the rights‐based, livelihoods approach to address malnutrition. In line with calls for a more balanced view of what constitutes rigor and scientific evidence, and for the use of more diversified and holistic methods in impact evaluations, we employ a mixed‐methods approach. The results from multiple data sources and methods, including both non‐experimental and quasi‐experimental, are triangulated to arrive at the conclusions. We find that the project had an extraordinarily large impact on stunting among children 6–24 months old – on the order of a 4.5 percentage point reduction per year. We demonstrate that one reason the project reduced stunting by so much was because, consistent with the rights‐based, livelihoods approach, it relied on both direct nutrition interventions and those that addressed underlying structural causes including poor sanitation, poverty, and deeply‐entrenched inequalities in power between women and men. These findings have important policy implications given the slow progress in reducing malnutrition globally and that the widely‐supported Scaling Up Nutrition initiative aimed at stepping up efforts to do so is in urgent need of guidance on how to integrate structural cause interventions with the direct nutrition interventions that are the initiative's main focus. The evaluation also adds to the evidence that targeting the poor, rather than employing universal coverage, can help to accelerate reductions in child malnutrition. The paper concludes that, given the valuable policy lessons generated, the experience of the SHOUHARDO project merits solid standing in the knowledge bank of development effectiveness. More broadly, it illustrates how rigorous and informative evaluation of complex, multi‐intervention projects can be undertaken even in the absence of the randomisation, non‐project control groups and/or panel data required by the experimental methods.

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In the developed countries, the conventional experiment station‐based agricultural research system generally has served farmers well. In developing countries, however, the same model has had less success in addressing needs of many farmers, particularly those operating diversified farming systems in resource‐poor and risk‐prone environments. Hence, in the 1970s, the farming systems research and extension (FSRE) approach—which has a high degree of complementarity with experiment station‐based research—evolved to address their needs. Prior to this was the development of some analogous farm‐based approaches in the USA (e.g., balanced farming). In the USA, increasing concerns about limited research resources and ecological sustainability have sparked interest in harnessing the power of the farm‐based and systems‐oriented FSRE approach in a way that is complementary to other approaches and in a manner that produces results acceptable to all stakeholders (e.g., farmers, station‐based researchers, extension/development staff, and planners of policy/support systems). The Problem In the high income, or so‐called developed, countries the conventional experiment station‐based agricultural research system has generally served farmers well. However, the issue of increasingly limited research resources together with rising concern about ecological sustainability and recognition that the needs of certain farmers (e.g., smaller and more diversified farmers) are not being sufficiently addressed, has prompted questions to be asked about the potential of greater use of on‐farm, and hence farmer‐based, research. Literature Summary The relative lack of success of the conventional station‐based agricultural research system in many low income (i.e., developing) countries led to the evolution of a farmer‐based research approach popularly known as farming systems research and extension. The extensive literature on this subject, combined with our own experience in its development and application, provides the impetus for this paper, which also draws on the burgeoning literature on farm‐based research in the developed countries. Study Description After briefly charting the rationale and recent evolution of farmers' involvement in agricultural research in low and high income countries, we justify why on‐farm research should be encouraged in the high income countries such as the USA. We finish by considering four issues that need addressing if the full potential of the complementarity between station‐based (i.e., on‐station) and farm‐based (i.e., on‐farm) research is to be exploited. Applied Questions Should on‐farm research in the USA be encouraged? We believe that conventional station‐based research and on‐farm research have different roles, strengths, and weaknesses. The experience of others, and ourselves, has convinced us of the complementarity between the two approaches to research. Consequently, we believe that the two should be integrated (i.e., be part of a continuum) to a greater extent than is currently the case. Both constitute c...

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