Abstract
The European Commission has emphasised that a more resilient farming sector is required to better respond to current and future economic, societal, and environmental challenges. Consequently, supporting resilience has become an important aim of the proposals of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020. However, interactions between public policies and resilience outcomes have hardly been researched in-depth. This study analyses whether and how the CAP and its national implementations enable or constrain the resilience of farming systems. For this purpose, we introduce the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT): a heuristic that conceptualises how policy outputs enable or constrain farming systems’ resilience. The tool consists of three dimensions (robustness, adaptability, and transformability) with four indicators each. The ResAT is applied to a Dutch case study: the intensive arable farming system in De Veenkoloniën. We conclude that the CAP and its national implementation strongly support the robustness of this farming system, but that the policy enables adaptability much less and rather constrains transformability. The article ends with a reflection on how the application of the ResAT allows for new insights into how EU agricultural policies influence the resilience of farming systems.
Highlights
The European Commission (EC), when presenting its legislative proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020, emphasised the aim to better support the resilience of agricultural sys tems in the European Union (EU) (EC, 2018b)
The CAP’s support for robustness resonates strongly with ideas that legitimise specific state support for farming to provide resources for established farming prac tices and to continue business-as-usual. This finding fits with other analyses of the CAP (e.g. Feindt, 2010; Lowe et al, 2010; Alons, 2017; Greer, 2017), in which it is argued that the CAP is char acterised mainly by agricultural exceptionalist ideas that justify and legitimise the EU’s special treatment of the agricultural sector; and that the CAP 2013 reform hardly introduced substantive change in the CAP but reinforced policy elements that focus on retaining the status quo
This article started with the question of how to analyse whether and how the CAP enables or constrains farming systems’ resilience
Summary
The European Commission (EC), when presenting its legislative proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020, emphasised the aim to better support the resilience of agricultural sys tems in the European Union (EU) (EC, 2018b). Phil Hogan, Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development (2014–2019), declared that the CAP would deliver on “genuine subsidiarity for Member States; ensuring a more resilient agricultural sector in Europe; and increasing the environmental and climate ambition of the policy” (EC, 2018a) This strong emphasis on resilience is based on the concern that the agricul tural sector should be supported in responding to current and future economic, societal, and environmental challenges and uncertainties. We address the research gap by proposing a new heuristic: the Resilience Assess ment Tool (ResAT) This heuristic consists of a set of indicators to assess the capability of a policy to support the resilience of a farming system. Conceptualising the relationship between public policy and farming systems’ resilience
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