1. Conceptualising resilience for policymaking

Abstract

This chapter examines the concept of resilience and explores how it applies to risk management in agriculture. It identifies three core capacities that are necessary to improve resilience in agriculture – the capacity to absorb the impacts of shocks, the capacity to adapt to an evolving risk environment, and the capacity to transform if the current system is no longer sustainable. Finally, it considers how to apply a resilience lens to agricultural risk management policies, including the need to define the target scale, source of risk and time frame.

    

1.1. Introduction

By its very nature, agriculture is an industry where uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. Producers face many different forms of risk in their decision-making processes, including production risk as a result of fluctuations in weather, market risk due to price volatility, institutional or political risks from disadvantageous changes in policy, and financial risk resulting from the need to borrow funds to finance operations. In today’s competitive market atmosphere, for many farmers, achieving success is highly dependent upon how well these risks are managed.

But the agricultural risk landscape is changing. Given likely projected climate change scenarios, farmers across the globe will have to adapt their operations to evolving physical circumstances, including higher average temperatures and the increased incidence of natural disasters that can be particularly devastating to the agricultural sector, such as droughts or more frequent high-intensity rain events (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018[1]). Moreover, despite the support for improved risk management policies over the past few decades, the financial impact of natural disasters continues to rise (Bevere et al., 2018[2]). If this trend continues, some viable farmers may not be financially capable of dealing with the consequences of negative shocks, and governments will find themselves needing to intervene in order to prevent total market failure. Further on, the COVID-19 epidemic has reinforced that exogenous risks from outside the agriculture sphere can also cause substantial shocks to the sector, simultaneously impacting input markets, labour, logistics and consumer demand in unpredictable ways (Box 1.1).

Box 1.1. Agriculture and COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic provides a stark example of how adverse events outside of agriculture can affect the sector. Although COVID-19 is fundamentally a public health issue, the disease has caused devastating impacts on the world economy – both directly, and through measures to contain the spread of the disease. These consequences are increasingly spilling over to the agriculture sector.

A variety of shocks have been observed at different points of the food value chain. On the production side, limits on the mobility of people across borders and lockdowns have contributed to labour shortages for agricultural sectors characterised by periods of peak seasonal labour demand, such as fruits and vegetables, or labour-intensive production, such as processing of livestock products. A shortage of seasonal labour has implications not only for near-term food availability for fresh produce, but can also impact medium-term supplies, as farmers are now making planting decisions facing uncertain harvest-time marketing dynamics. There is also a potential risk that labour shortages upstream of production agriculture may also affect the availability of key farm inputs, from fertilizers to seeds.

Measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 have caused delays and disruptions to transport and logistics: border closures and additional procedures and checks have led to congestion and delays, affecting the transit of perishable products, and social distancing requirements have reduced the number of import and export inspectors at borders, further compounding congestion and delays. Value chains that are largely export-oriented have experienced the most serious disruptions, as border restrictions and port closures have reduced the availability of shipping capacity, resulting in drastically higher shipping costs and longer transport times. Labour impacts have also been felt downstream in the processing and distribution sectors, as processing plants have been either closed due to infected workers, or forced to reduce capacity to comply with social distancing requirements and ensure worker safety. These measures have increased costs and reduced processing capacity even as consumer demand in supermarkets increased. This in turn has increased the demand for on-farm or near-farm storage facilities.

Finally, there have been abrupt changes to food demand, with ripple effects for supply chain organisation. On the one hand, restaurants and open markets have closed in response to government mandates, resulting in both the overnight collapse of demand for some niche and high-value products (such as seafood or high-quality cuts of meat), but also challenging supply chains that are generally oriented toward restaurants, food service, or hospitality sectors. With these outlets closed, supermarket purchases have increased, and demand has shifted towards staple goods with long shelf lives. These shocks to demand may have further impacts on future supply, as some governments have moved to institute price freezes or export bans to ensure domestic food supplies are sufficient. In this context, public information on market conditions can help calm consumers otherwise prone to hoarding and panic-buying.

While the COVID-19 crisis has provided many examples of how farmers and firms have successfully adapted to the shifting circumstances, it has also provided an opportunity to critically assess chokepoints and vulnerabilities in agricultural and food systems, and subsequently inform needed investments or reforms that would strengthen the sector’s resilience to future shocks (OECD, 2020[3]).

Confronting this reality will require disciplined application of an holistic risk management strategy – specifically, ensuring that decisions are no longer made from a paradigm of reactivity, but from a “resilience” perspective instead, with the goal of either reducing the impact of events, or significantly reducing the likelihood of certain risks. To accomplish this, the resilience approach emphasises the importance of ex ante strategies, including risk awareness, contingency planning, innovation and evolution The approach also stresses the importance of considering systems instead of individuals, both to ensure that the decisions of individual actors are placed in context for the resilience of the food system, as well as to ensure the consideration of linkages and potential knock-on effects for the sector at large.

The resilience approach is increasingly applied for policy development in a variety of sectors. However, given the unique exposure of agriculture to risk and the cascading effects of agricultural shocks on rural areas and the food chain, it is worth first exploring how the concept can be applied to the agricultural sector. Toward that end, this chapter defines resilience for the agricultural context, details the different capacities that contribute to resilience, and provides context on integrating resilience thinking into policymaking for risk management.

1.2. What is resilience?

Many countries aim to build the resilience of their farmers to a wide range of risks, from market volatility and more variable weather conditions, to pest and disease outbreaks and natural disasters. As a result, the concept of resilience is increasingly incorporated into agricultural policy frameworks. Despite this interest and the increasing use of the term, the concept lacks clarity. This ambiguity has various sources: the idea of resilience has been applied to and interpreted differently in various fields, such as ecology, engineering, and psychology (Keating et al., 2014[4]); resilient systems take many forms, and as such, resilience is highly contextual (Bahadur et al., 2015[5]); and resilience within even a single sector is multidimensional, with aspects of financial, social, cultural, and ecological resilience all relevant to agriculture. Even within the policy space, countries differ in their interpretations of the term, depending upon how the concept is positioned in their overall risk frameworks (OECD, 2014[6]). As such, definitions tend to be context specific (Box 1.2). The ambiguity of the term is also part of its attractiveness. The concept covers both the idea of preserving the system after a disturbance, and the idea of transforming the system into something new in response to disturbances and the evolving risk environment.

Box 1.2. Resilience definitions

Previous OECD work on resilience has noted that different countries (and even occasionally different agencies within the same country) have perceived the term “resilience” differently (OECD, 2014[6]). Moreover, even international bodies have put forward different definitions based on their own organisational objectives. For example, different definitions can be found depending on whether resilience is being considered in the agricultural development, climate change, and disaster risk reduction fields, or even in the context of governance of critical risks. Definitions from international actors in these areas include:

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: The ability of individuals, households, communities, cities, institutions, systems and societies to prevent, resist, absorb, adapt, respond and recover positively, efficiently and effectively when faced with a wide range of risks, while maintaining an acceptable level of functioning and without compromising long-term prospects for sustainable development, peace and security, human rights and well-being for all (FAO et al., 2018[7]).

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance, responding or reorganising in ways that maintain their essential function, identity, and structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning, and transformation (IPCC, 2014[8]).

• United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management (UNISDR, 2017[9]).

• OECD Council Recommendation on the Governance of Critical Risks: The ability to resist, absorb, recover from or successfully adapt to adversity or a change in conditions (OECD, 2014[10]).

Nevertheless, the different definitions have common features, emphasising the ability of systems to function, recover and transform in the face of risk and disturbances. Following Box 1.2, resilience can be understood as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt and transform in response to adverse events.”1 This definition is appropriate in the agricultural context, as it encompasses all possible adverse events (given that agricultural risk can come from production, market, or other sources), emphasises the multidimensional capacities needed to achieve resilience (in particular, absorbing the impacts of risks, recovering from them, and learning and adapting to them), and recognise that in the long-term, a system needs to be able to change in order to persist (through more successful adaptation or transformation).

In addition to being defined, resilience must also be placed in context – that is, in order to be a useful foundation for policymaking purposes, governments need to formulate a common understanding of resilience for whom (the target scale or unit of analysis), and resilience to what (the target source of risk), and recognise that in an operational sense, building resilience will likely involve targeted measures rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. With respect to agriculture, the relevant scale could be the field, farm, region, country, or even the global food system (Bullock et al., 2017[11]). When considering the target risk, policy makers will need to consider all disturbances, hazards and shocks that have potential negative impacts on the agricultural sector. These events should be deviations from a trend, and not trends themselves (for example, climate change is a trend, but not a risk, while more intense rainfall events as a result of climate change are a risk). Moreover, policy makers can consider resilience with respect to either a single risk (referred to as “specified resilience”, which would include, for example, resilience to floods or resilience to price volatility), or resilience to all risks (referred to as “general resilience”) (Anderies et al., 2013[12]). Some specified risks are more likely to be associated with known probabilities than others, but may increasingly have uncertain risk distributions as the risk environment shifts due to climate change. Rare events tend to be more uncertain because there is less information about their frequency and severity.

Improving resilience requires actors to both manage the consequences of shocks, and to anticipate and prepare for their occurrence – including for shocks whose probability of occurrence are highly uncertain – by reducing or managing exposure and reducing vulnerability2 through the building of resilience capacities. Exposure and vulnerability are important in this context because they will determine both the risk of a given event, and the magnitude of the impacts when the event occurs (IPCC, 2012[13]). To manage risk exposure and reduce vulnerability, the literature considers three capacities to be crucial for improved resilience: the capacity to absorb the impact of an adverse event; the capacity to adapt to an evolving risk landscape; and the capacity to transform – the type of farming system or even the agricultural sector itself – if the current system is no longer able to adapt to or recover from shocks (Box 1.3) (Béné et al., 2012[14]; Mitchell, 2013[15]; Douxchamps et al., 2017[16]; Tanner, Bahadur and Moench, 2017[17]; FAO et al., 2018[7]).3

Box 1.3. Key capacities for resilience in agriculture

The literature identifies three overarching capacities as crucial for resilience in agriculture.

• The capacity to absorb the impact of a shock reflects the ability to respond to and cope with an adverse event in the short-term. Previous OECD work defined this capacity as “the ability of a system to prepare for, mitigate or prevent the impacts of negative events using predetermined coping responses in order to preserve and restore essential basic structures and functions” (Mitchell, 2013[15]). In the context of agriculture, absorption is closely linked to traditional risk management strategies, including prevention strategies to reduce the exposure to an adverse event, mitigation strategies to reduce the potential impact of an adverse event, and coping strategies to reduce the impact of an adverse event on indirect losses once the risky event has occurred (OECD, 2009[18]; OECD, 2011[19]). Prevention and mitigation strategies focus on income smoothing, while coping strategies focus on consumption smoothing. For example, a relevant prevention or mitigation strategy for agriculture could be an early warning system that alerts tree crop farmers to take action when there is a high probability of frost. A coping strategy, in contrast, could be purchasing a crop insurance policy to allow farm operations to continue even in the face of a catastrophic crop loss.

• The capacity to adapt is characterised by the ability to make incremental changes to a system in response to current or expected future circumstances. OECD has previously defined adaptation as “the ability of a system to adjust, modify or change its characteristics and actions to moderate potential, future damage and to take advantage of opportunities, all in order to continue functioning without major qualitative changes in function or structural identity” (Mitchell, 2013[15]). In agriculture, adaptation often takes the form of adjustments to farm operations management, such as shifting planting dates, adjusting crop mix, adjusting the source of labour or reducing the need for labour through mechanisation, or investing in more efficient water use technologies or better quality seeds – flexibility is key. Particularly with respect to climate change, adaptation is often aligned with best agricultural practices and sustainable resource management, and as such does not require radical changes in behaviour (Ignaciuk, 2015[20]).

• In contrast to the absorptive and adaptive capacities, which seek to preserve the current system, the capacity to transform reflects “the ability to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic or social structures make the existing system untenable” (Mitchell, 2013[15]). While there is some discussion in the literature as to where to draw the line between adaptation and transformation, for policymaking purposes, the two can largely be distinguished as capacity for change for the medium-term versus change focused on long-term viability. This is because, in some cases, incremental changes – adaptation – may not sufficiently reduce an agricultural system’s exposure and vulnerability to a given shock, such that the system cannot continue in its current form, and must therefore transform. In agriculture, transformative changes can include technologies adopted at large scale, introducing new crops to a particular region or ecosystem, changes that transform places and shift locations (such as large scale irrigation projects that allow agriculture where it was before not possible), actions that reinvent the target business by taking advantage of demand for niche or high value-added products, the reorganisation of a value chain to better address current or future market opportunities, or even an exit from agriculture, see for example, (Kates, Travis and Wilbanks, 2012[21]). In addition, a transformation can be either deliberate and anticipatory, or forced and reactive (Tanner, Bahadur and Moench, 2017[17]). That is, actors can either take purposeful transformative actions in anticipation of future conditions, or else they can be forced to take transformative action due to the crossing of some sort of threshold (typically an ecological threshold) that renders the previous system infeasible. Because of this focus on completely reworking the present system, there is also an element of possibility in transformation – shocks can be viewed as negative events, or as opportunities for building something new. Taken further, the capacity for transformation implies that agricultural systems are stronger because they operate in an environment of uncertainty, not in spite of it.

These three capacities are needed for resilience, but there may be trade-offs between measures that absorb shocks to preserve the system, and measures to transform the system to address evolving realities of risks and uncertainties. For example, a farming operation that periodically floods could either take measures to reduce the impact of flooding (such as improved drainage), or could relocate entirely to another location. The two approaches have different costs and benefits, and will have different effects on the long-term risk profile of the farm. The risk environment of different countries (and individual farms) will influence the choice of which capacities need to be developed, and to what extent.

The three capacities are closely related. For a farm, the capacity to absorb the impact of a shock is the ability to better manage exposure to an adverse event, reducing either the event’s probability and/or severity, or the farmer’s vulnerability when coping with the event’s impacts. The capacity to adapt means being able to change the farming system in response to current disturbances and in preparation for future events. The capacity to transform can be considered as an extension of the capacity to adapt, but implies a more extreme response in the form of deeper structural change (which may become increasingly necessary as systems approach biophysical thresholds under climate change) (Sinclair et al., 2014[22]). These three capacities are sometimes distinguished conceptually or temporally. For example, in the short-term, off-farm income may help a farmer to absorb the effects of a production shock caused by low rainfall in a given year and move forward without altering operations. However, faced with more variable climate conditions going forward, some type of change to the farming system may be called for in the medium-term (adaptation) or long-term (transformation) (Anderies et al., 2013[12]). All three capacities are needed for resilience, but the combination of measures that contribute to improved absorption, adaptation, or transformation will differ among farms, responding to the entrepreneurial allocation of their individual capacities and assets.

Applying a resilience lens to agricultural risk management implies an emphasis on planning and prevention to the extent possible, while also ensuring that farming systems remain flexible enough to respond to future uncertainty – a holistic management approach often referred to as “resilience thinking” (Folke, 2016[23]). At the farm level, resilience thinking can be considered as a form of human capital – decision-makers are able to take into account the entire risk landscape, consider the array of potential responses, and be aware of how those responses will affect operations at different points in time. Farmers are called on to not only bounce back from negative events, but also to prevent, experience, and learn from shocks in order to adjust their practices with a view toward long-term sustainability. At the policy level, resilience thinking means holistically considering the long-term implications of policies for the sector, taking preventative actions to mitigate systemic risks where possible, and ensuring that producers have the tools necessary to engender on-farm resilience while considering the possible implications and trade-offs for the sector at large.

There is no one stable, desirable state for either a farm or a country’s agricultural sector. But resilience thinking applied to policymaking means that the actions of today ensure that, although they may look different, the farm today and the farm of tomorrow will meet both individual and larger societal objectives.

1.3. Integrating resilience thinking into agricultural risk management policies

In order to achieve greater resilience and use this concept as a lens for formulating risk management policy, policy makers will need to evaluate the risk landscape in a holistic way, considering a range of options as well as the potential trade-offs in promoting one approach over another, depending upon the target objectives of their resilience policy frameworks. In this respect, three dimensions should be considered – scale, source of risk, and time frame – with potentially significant implications for the kinds of policies needed, their budgetary impacts and likely trade-offs.

When considering the scale for resilience policy, the systems approach is commonly advocated, wherein resilience is considered holistically for the entire food system, to better account for interactive effects and minimise negative externalities (Kuhl, 2018[24]; Tendall et al., 2015[25]). This is, for example, the focus of the EU SURE Farm approach (Meuwissen et al., 2018[26]). This holistic approach is advocated because focusing on a lower scale of a country’s agro-food system may undermine resilience at a higher level, and may underestimate the importance of linkages to the sector’s overall resilience (Walker et al., 2004[27]; Bahadur, Ibrahim and Tanner, 2013[28]). Although farmers are the target actor of most agricultural risk management policies, it is important to consider the potential trade-offs of how policies applied at the farm level will affect the resilience of the sector as a whole (and vice versa) (Walsh-Dilley and Wolford, 2015[29]). This is best illustrated in terms of utilisation of common pool resources – an individual farmer may improve his or her resilience to water scarcity risks by drawing on an aquifer for irrigation, but this action may reduce the resources available for other producers. When such actions improve the well-being of the individual but damage the long-term resilience of the system, they become maladaptations – the individual is better off, but the system is worse off. At the same time, there may be some risks that warrant a more targeted approach if their impacts are nonlinear, or if targeting prevents more widespread diffusion of impacts. As an example, this targeted approach (hotspot approach) has been advocated by OECD when dealing with water risks (OECD, 2017[30]).

With respect to source of risk, when evaluating whether to pursue a policy targeting specific or general resilience, policy makers should be mindful that improving resilience solely in one area can cause the system to be less resilient in other ways (Sinclair et al., 2014[22]; Adger et al., 2011[31]). Moreover, when actors concentrate on addressing only specific shocks, they may reduce their options for dealing with unanticipated future shocks. Similarly, focusing on one frequently occurring shock may reduce the capacity to deal with less frequent ones (Folke, 2016[23]). In contrast, a focus on general resilience also involves a wide degree of uncertainty about risks that are unknown or not well-known, and this can be costly. When focusing on specific resilience, the source of the shocks is better defined, and, if the events are frequent enough, typically their probabilities and likely financial impacts are easier to analyse. In cases of general resilience, there are events for which no probability can readily be offered to inform risk management policy, complicating the quantification of expected benefits. In this situation, policy makers will be called to choose their level of resilience given existing budgets, policy frameworks and the existing uncertainties. It may be the case that certain investments in general resilience are at present too great to justify their cost (Carpenter et al., 2012[32]). In formulating plans for improved resilience, policy makers will have to prioritise and decide which risks are most relevant to their own agricultural sectors and more likely to generate market failures, and whether or not it is most cost-effective to promote strategies of general resilience or to instead target a more specific risk. This prioritisation is part of the holistic approach, and it should be re-evaluated over time when better information becomes available.

The final consideration required for resilience policymaking is the time frame. Implicit in the concept of resilience is the idea that systems should be able to persist or transform in the long-term despite repeated exposure to disturbances. However, improving resilience in the long-run may come at the expense of efficiencies in the short-run (Nelson, Adger and Brown, 2007[33]). Furthermore, it is possible that decisions taken to help cope with a risk in the short-term may increase exposure and vulnerability in the future (IPCC, 2012[13]; Carpenter et al., 2001[34]).

Even though resilience emphasises decision-making for the long-term, from a policy perspective this can be difficult to achieve – without proper incentives, decision-making processes tend to be biased toward the immediate future and neglect the long-term focus that resilience thinking implies (Carpenter et al., 2012[32]). These kinds of policy biases also apply to the scale and the source of risk. Governments tend to bias their policy responses in favour of risks that are better known or more visible in the media, and in favour of the actors and scales for which there is also more visibility. These behavioural biases apply as well to farmers and other actors, and they tend to favour baselines and trends from the past in risk perceptions, such that they can generate misalignments and maladaptations.

These biases can be somewhat ameliorated (and the possibility of implementing policies that increase future vulnerability can be reduced), by shifting towards ex ante thinking, including undergoing scenario analysis and implementing value-for-money policies that will have positive benefits over a wide range of potential futures. Ex ante thinking can be combined with an iterative assessment approach, which involves a periodic stocktaking of conditions to see if new information is available, and if practices or policies need to be adjusted as a result (Engle et al., 2014[35]). In this way, policy decisions can take into account both current conditions and the best and most cost-effective ways to ensure a viable future. A good resilience policy needs to be proactive in improving information and learning from experience. For example, scenario analysis can help to improve both policy analysis and design (Antón et al., 2012[36]; Antón et al., 2013[37]).

Based on this foundational understanding of resilience, its component dimensions, and the importance of context, the next chapter takes a deeper dive into the academic and policy literature for evidence of resilience-improving measures relevant to the OECD agricultural context.

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Notes

← 1. Definition based on National Research Council (2012[39]).

← 2. The IPCC defines exposure as, “The presence of people; livelihoods; environmental services and resources; infrastructure; or economic, social, or cultural assets in places that could be adversely affected,” while vulnerability is, “The propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected,” (IPCC, 2012[13]).

← 3. Different authors throughout the theoretical literature offer up their own suggestions for key resilience capacities. Even amongst authors that describe three capacities, the terminology can differ, with absorption sometimes referred to as “persistence” (Folke et al., 2010[38]) or “robustness” (Meuwissen et al., 2018[26]) instead, for example.