Abstract
Greater resilience is needed for farms to deal with shocks and disturbances originating from economic, environmental, social and institutional challenges, with resilience achieved by adequate adaptive governance. This study focuses on the resilience capacity of farms in the context of multi-level adaptive governance. We define adaptive governance as adjustments in decision-making processes at farm level and policy level, through changes in management practices and policies in response to identified challenges and the delivery of desired functions (e.g. private and public goods) to be attained. The aim of the study is twofold. First, we investigate how adaptive governance processes at farm level and policy level influence the resilience capacity of farms in terms of robustness, adaptability and transformability. Second, we investigate the “fit” between the adaptive governance processes at farm level and policy level to enable resilience. We study primary egg and broiler production in Sweden taking into consideration economic, social and environmental challenges. We use semi-structured interviews with 17 farmers to explain the adaptive processes at farm level and an analysis of policy documents from the Common Agricultural Policy program 2014–2020, to explain the intervention actions taken by the Common Agricultural Policy. Results show that neither the farm level nor policy level adaptive processes on their own have the capacity to fully enable farms to be robust, adaptable and transformable. While farm level adaptive processes are mainly directed toward securing the robustness and adaptability of farms, policy level interventions are targeted at enabling adaptability. The farm- and the policy level adaptive processes do not “fit” for attaining robustness and transformability.
Highlights
Farming systems in Europe face increasing uncertainty due to frequent shocks and disturbances originating from economic, environmental, social and institutional challenges
In this study we focus on the resilience capacity of farms in the context of multi-level adaptive governance (AG)
Farm Level Processes Enabling Robustness At farm level, “farm demographics” and “risk management” are the main categories of AG processes shaping the robustness of the farms in the case study
Summary
Farming systems in Europe face increasing uncertainty (e.g. delivering healthy food products, generating adequate incomes, providing good working conditions etc.) due to frequent shocks and disturbances originating from economic, environmental, social and institutional challenges. To be resilient, farming systems should be robust to absorb disturbances, and to allow adaptations for necessary adjustments and transformations to enable the system to overcome the exposure to disturbances by developing into something new if business as usual is no longer possible (Walker et al, 2004; Darnhofer, 2014; Meuwissen et al, 2019). That is when the farming system cannot ensure provision of the desired functions such as, for example, securing healthy food products, while attaining high animal and environmental standards, generate adequate incomes, provide good working conditions for employees and ensuring the attractiveness of rural areas (Reisma et al, 2020). While delivering the desired functions, AG connects multiple level actors, e.g. primary producers, policy makers, industry and NGOs, in collective action (e.g. Ostrom and Janssen, 2004; Folke et al, 2005; Rijke et al, 2012) to cope with the present (i.e. show robustness), as well as responding to challenges (i.e. enabling adaptive and transformative changes) (Gregg et al, 2015; Mathijs and Wauters, 2020)
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