Resilience and why it matters for farm management

Abstract

Resilience is being widely taken up by both researchers and policy makers, leading to lively scientific debates. This paper examines the concept of resilience and its increasing use in the face of both economic uncertainty and climate change, and applies it to farm management. In this context, resilience is understood as encompassing three capabilities: buffer capability, adaptive capability and transformative capability. I argue that resilience thinking opens up new perspectives and provides the potential to better understand the choices made by farmers in the real world. It offers alternative insights into farm management and how farmers balance short-term efficiency and long-term transformability, balance the exploitation of current strengths with exploration of new options, balance path dependencies with path creation. However, while farm resilience emphasizes how farms can weather shocks and adapt, it should not be understood as promoting the individuation of responsibility. Indeed, farm resilience can be strengthened or eroded by policy measures and family dynamics, i.e. processes at both a higher and a lower level. Overall resilience proposes an alternative conceptual lens to one building on equilibrium, thus highlighting and complex dynamics and the role of farmer agency in navigating change.

Sustainability—Risk—Resilience: How Does the Case of the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions Measure up?

“…Resilience of farms is dealt with by [2,17,20,31,[79][80][81], with the objective of negotiating the key aspects of effective farm economics. It is "the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks" [19] (p. 259).…”

“…For example, Austrian family farms tend to focus on resilience as the ability to face challenges, to adapt, to learn and transform practice as necessary. Farmers have been adapting to unexpected weather events, drought, hail, and winter extremes since time immemorial [17]. They see economic deregulation as one of the risks that has to be factored into land management decisions of increasing complexity.…”

“…Next to such new challenges, a new concept of farm resilience has emerged to face the risks brought about by modern agriculture. Farm resilience was negotiated intuitively, before it was recognised as an integrative domain of public discourse [17][18][19][20][21]. Resilience was gradually defined as the capability of a system to return to a stable state after a shock, upheaval or major disturbance.…”

Enhancing social-ecological resilience through social learning: A case study of communal pasture management in the Highlands of Ethiopia

“…the ability to radically change the management system when the pasture was no longer able to fulfill its function, and adaptive capability, that is, the ability to implement marginal, incremental changes (e.g. to the access rules) (Walker et al, 2004;Darnhofer, 2014). Indeed, the establishment of the informal institution was transformative, both in the structure of the feedback loops between the community and the pasture, and in how community engaged in social learning, collaborated and approached change.…”

“…Coping with change, i.e. the capability of a system to adjust its responses to change in external drivers and internal processes is usually understood as including adaptation as well as occasional transformation (Magis, 2010;Ross and Berkes, 2014;Darnhofer, 2014). In the context of social-ecological systems, adaptation has been defined as changes in the structures and activities of the system but without changing the dominant feedbacks between ecological and social subsystems; while transformation is a more significant change, one that recombines existing elements in fundamentally novel ways (Moore et al, 2014).…”