Resilience Framework

Building on the adaptive cycles conceptualization, we include three system capacities as crucial properties to understand the resilience of farming systems:  Robustness, Adaptability and Transformability.

Ilustring the three resilience capacities:

Furthermore, the framework is designed to understand resilience in the context of specific challenges (specified resilience) as well as to understand a farming system’s capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise (general resilience).

We therefore developed the framework along five steps, whereby the ‘top-down’ steps 1 to 5 address the specified resilience, while ‘bottom-up’ question 5 addresses the general resilience of farming systems. With regard to the specified resilience, steps follow the questions posed by Carpenter et al. (2001) and Herrera (2017), i.e. ‘resilience of what’, ‘resilience to what’, and ‘resilience for what purpose’ – to which we added two extra questions:  ‘what resilience capacities’, and ‘what enhances resilience’.