Abstract
The concept of socio-ecological farm resilience is used to understand how farmers manoeuvre in a context of change, what choices and priorities they make, and how that subsequently influences the development of the farming landscape. The author uses farm resilience, the capabilities of buffering, adaptation and transformation, and the response of bouncing back or forward as a conceptual frame in a study of farmers in a mountain community in Norway. Interviews were held with selected farmers. The results indicated that the resilience framework is useful in order to understand farmers’ priorities and situations. The author finds that the responses and decisions are in line with all three capabilities as well as with bouncing back and forward. However, most responses were categorized as bouncing back (i.e. adjustments and changes) but the logic of the farm system remained the same.
Highlights
In agrarian studies there is a substantial and increasing body of literature on the sustainability of farming, structural changes in farming, and environmental issues, as well as a focus on the social and cultural aspects of farming and the farming community
This paper aims at contributing to the literature on farm resilience through a study in the context of a Norwegian mountain community
With the aim of contributing to the literature on farm resilience, the following research questions have been addressed in this paper: How can mountain farmers’ views and decisions regarding how they run their farms be understood in the light of socio-ecological resilience? how do farmers’ reasoning and decisions correspond to the capabilities of buffer, adaptation or transformation, and do their responses indicate bouncing back or forward?
Summary
In agrarian studies there is a substantial and increasing body of literature on the sustainability of farming, structural changes in farming, and environmental issues, as well as a focus on the social and cultural aspects of farming and the farming community. Resilience thinking is seen as a conceptual framework that points to processes of change and transformation in a new and more dynamic and holistic way, and it recognizes the intertwined nature of social and ecological systems [5,6]). Darnhofer et al [2] point to the resilience concept in the context of farming as a means to grasp the complexity of farming as an adaptive and ever-changing system or set of systems spanning several spatial scales and involving ecological, economic and political-social domains. Wilson et al [7] add to the concept by writing about ‘the five resilience domains’: economic, social, cultural, political, and natural. The literature points to resilience as a concept that is able to include perspectives of transformation and change, risks, and uncertainty to a greater extent than can the concept of sustainable development, and that resilience can represent a further development of the sustainability concept [2,4,7]
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