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Summary One of the aims of the post‐2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to improve the resilience of Europe's farming systems. The CAP of the budget period 2014–2020, however, has insufficiently supported the resilience of farming systems. The ongoing CAP reform process offers an appropriate opportunity to integrate a broader perspective on resilience in the CAP. We therefore propose a set of policy recommendations on how to improve the capability of the CAP to support more fully the resilience (i.e. robustness, adaptability and transformability) of farming systems in the EU. The policy recommendations are based on a comparative analysis of six national co‐design workshops with stakeholders and a final EU‐level workshop with Brussels‐based experts. We concluded three key lessons about the CAP's influence on resilience: (1) resilience challenges, needs and policy effects are context‐specific; (2) resilience capacities are complementary, but trade‐offs between robustness, adaptability and transformability occur at the level of policies and due to budget competition; (3) there is a need for a coordinated long‐term vision for Europe's agriculture, which is difficult to achieve through the bargaining processes associated with a CAP reform. We propose specific policy recommendations that could contribute to a better balance between policies that support robustness, adaptability and transformability of Europe's farming systems.

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Ecological restoration projects may provide solutions for degraded ecosystems in estuaries, but are challenging due to complex governance processes. Scientific studies on the latter are limited. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the governance process aiming at ecological restoration in estuaries. Based on a literature review, five success conditions for ecological restoration projects in estuaries were formulated. These conditions concern: (1) the presence of options for experimentation; (2) the use of the right communication strategies; (3) a pro-active role of key individuals; (4) sufficient project support; (5) active stakeholder and knowledge integration. These conditions were elaborated upon in a case study on the reopening of the sluices in the Dutch Haringvliet and by conducting seven expert interviews. The case study was a clear "example of failure" due to absence of several conditions. We conclude with some recommendations to enhance future ecological restoration projects.

The concept of resilience has been increasingly adopted on the European Union's (EU) policy agenda as a principle for agro‐food policy‐making. However, resilience is an ambiguous concept, allowing for different understandings and uses in the context of agro‐food policy‐making. This study analyses whether and how resilience is framed and contributes to framing in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post‐2020 reform process by policymakers and stakeholders. Combining deductive and inductive coding, we analysed 123 policy documents of EU institutions and stakeholders related to the CAP post‐2020 reform debate and the associated Farm‐to‐Fork Strategy. Five distinct resilience frames were identified: (1) income resilience frame, (2) farmers’ supply chain position resilience frame, (3) climate change impact resilience frame, (4) disease resilience frame and (5) ecological resilience frame. Whereas the resilience concept has been deployed by various actors, they differ in their preferred policy actions towards greater resilience.

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The resilience of European farming systems is increasingly being put under pressure due to social, economic, and environmental challenges. These challenges make it difficult for farming systems to maintain delivering their public and private goods. Scholars and practitioners therefore call for strengthening farming systems' resilience through EU agricultural policy. However, research to understand the link between resilience and public policies has remained scarce. This dissertation aims to expand the scientific knowledge on how EU agricultural policies, especially the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), influence farming systems' resilience, consisting of three capacities: robustness, adaptability, and transformability. The central research question of this dissertation is: How does EU agricultural policy shape the resilience of European farming systems? The research in this dissertation was guided by four sub-questions: (1) how do policy goals and instruments of the CAP 2013 reform, and its implementation in the Netherlands, support or constrain the resilience of a Dutch farming system?; (2) how do actors at the farming-system level experience the influence of policies on the resilience of farming system cases in Flanders, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the UK?; (3) how is the concept of resilience framed in the CAP post-2020 reform process and which policy actors and stakeholders deploy these frames?; and (4) what policy recommendations on how to improve the capability of the CAP to support the resilience of farming systems in the EU are preferred by stakeholders and policymakers? This dissertation concludes that EU agricultural policy, headed by the CAP, largely puts forth a one-sided way to strengthen resilience and, therefore, shapes the resilience of European farming systems with uneven and adverse effects. The policy is focused on ensuring that farming systems can bounce back to a familiar situation after short-term shocks by resorting to familiar and conventional policy interventions, which are often insufficient to support adaptability or