Food System Resilience: Concepts, Issues, and Challenges

TLDR

Food system resilience encompasses multiple dimensions and its operationalization requires negotiating normative trade‑offs among stakeholders. The study reviews resilience framings across communities, poses four guiding questions, and calls for new approaches that incorporate actors’ perceptions and goals to build more future‑resilient food systems. The authors propose enhancing food‑system outcomes through three “Rs”—robustness, recovery, and reorientation—by prompting actors to adapt their activities in response to opportunities or threats.

Abstract

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.