Food System Resilience: Concepts, Issues, and Challenges

Abstract

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 47 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Translating community resilience theory into practice: A deliberative Delphi approach

“…The panel members identified critical challenges and points of tension relating to the definition of rural community resilience, both from practical and theoretical perspectives. In particular, the panel members’ contributions echoed existing research that has found that community resilience as a concept lacks a clear, agreed upon and cohesive definition, with different types of stakeholders defining and perceiving the concept in different ways (see Zurek et al., 2022, for a review of definitions used by different academic and practitioner communities). While ‘emergency’ interpretations of community resilience are reflected in the resilience rhetoric in current Scottish Government policy, panel members preferred to note the importance of ‘everyday’ resilience, whereby communities have the ability to respond to gradual change over longer timescales.…”

“…This may be particularly challenging for evaluating resilience as a form of reorientation or transformation as proposed by Zurek et al. (2022). When communities make more radical changes in response to change, for example, transitioning from retail to service‐ and community‐oriented offerings in town centres or transforming a local economy from manufacturing to tourism, there will always be winners and losers.…”

“…‘Community resilience’ is a term used in a range of contexts with varying emphases and interpretations. This has led several authors to consider whether community resilience relates to the ‘readiness’ of communities to respond to sudden events or whether it can encompass both disaster response and other factors, such as long‐term decline and/or demographic change (e.g., Zurek et al., 2022). While the ‘readiness’ of communities may refer to the ability of a system to accommodate disturbances without experiencing changes to the system (Robinson, 2019), there are several ‘other factors’ to consider.…”

“…In response to this debate, Zurek et al. (2022) proposed a three ‘Rs’ definition of resilience that encompasses ‘robustness’, ‘recovery’ and ‘reorientation’, emphasising the need to move beyond adaptation to maintain existing outcomes to consider more fundamental transformations in the structure, organisation and outcomes of systems in response to change. Despite this variation in interpretations, it has become generally accepted that community resilience is strongly related to the capacity of a community to absorb change or disturbance and to adapt or transform the functions of the community in response (e.g., Fischer & McKee, 2015; Magis, 2010; Robinson, 2019; Wilson et al., 2018).…”

Social innovation and food provisioning initiatives to reduce food insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…Food systems appeared increasingly vulnerable to the strong interconnections among operators along the food chain. This was seen in the dominance of a small set of retailers, the reliance on just-in-time supply chains, and a dependence on imported food ( Zurek et al, 2022 ). Stringent lockdown measures fuelled short-term food shortages and caused supply restrictions, food wastage, and volatile prices from demand-supply feedbacks ( Harris, 2020 ).…”