The graph lines in Fig. 5.2 show clearly that 2017 and 2018 did not mark the beginning of a trend but rather were idiosyncratic events. This is evidenced by the return to a low level of occurrence in 2019 and a yet lower level in 2020, with occurrences falling to 19 and nine, respectively, in those years.

The second stage of the lexical trend analysis focused on the relative prevalence of "*resilience"* within a given report. Looking beyond the absolute value of occurrences for a given year of SOFI, prevalence indicates whether "*resilience*" occurred on only a few pages or appeared across many sections of a SOFI report. In this way, data on prevalence revealed the consistency with which "resilience" appeared throughout a given SOFI volume. Figure 5.3 graphically depicts the relative prevalence of "resilience" within a given report and across years. The solid line traces occurrences for a given year and the dotted line represents the linear trend across the 17 years of observations.

As reflected in Fig. 5.3, the prevalence-based results paint a different picture from that represented by the absolute number of occurrences shown in Fig. 5.2. While the trend lines suggest an overall increase in relative occurrence, the change over time is erratic in comparison with the

**Fig. 5.3** Appearance of *"resilience":* trends in SOFI (2004–2020) (*Source*  Author)

results obtained from simple frequency counts of articles within a given year.

The increase observed for the lexical presence of "resilience," followed by a marked descent, raises questions about the durability of resilience as a concept around which ongoing policy discussions on food security might be structured. In principle, resilience is a cross-cutting topic. It has, for example, been suggested as a perspective that could support efforts to build the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus (e.g., Béné et al., 2018; EU, 2021; Hilhorst, 2018; Howe, 2019). The original motivation that drove researchers and policymakers to focus on resilience was grounded in shared recognition of a more complex risk landscape. As noted above, shocks and stressors have become more pronounced and less predictable. With COVID-19 as a massive global shock, the motivation to draw on resilience should be amplified. If this is the case, one would expect resilience to exhibit a certain durability in discussions of food security. In the two periods following the SOFI that was thematically oriented toward resilience, dramatic decline in the appearance of "resilience" occurred. This decline may simply reflect the fact that SOFI is organized around themes that change from year to year. The designation of SOFI themes for each year may, in and of itself, generate discontinuities or discursive shifts in what is emphasized. In its first three years (1999– 2002), SOFI was published under a single title, *Food Security When People Live with Hunger and Fear Starvation*. For the next two years (2003

**Fig. 5.4** Appearance of *"resilience"* in the research literature (*Source* Author)

and 2004), another title was used: *Monitoring Progress Towards the WFS and the Millennium Development Goals*. From 2005 onward, SOFI was published under a different title or theme each year.13

#### *Results of Lexical Trends in Representative Peer-Reviewed Journals*

The lexical search, covering nine years of articles in *Global Food Security*  and *Food Policy*, revealed an overall pattern of increase in the appearance of the term "resilience." The graph lines shown in Fig. 5.4 display the relative frequency of the appearance of "resilience" in the two peerreviewed journals from 2012 through 2020. Following the same format as above, the solid lines depict actual occurrences in a given year and the dotted lines show linear trends in use over time.

For *Global Food Security*, the pattern of increase was consistent, starting with a low of six articles in 2012 and increasing to 50 articles in 2020. The rate of increase varied, with the most dramatic increase occurring between 2019 and 2020, where the number of articles containing "resilience" more than doubled, from 20 to 50. The period with the next largest increase occurred between 2017 and 2018, when the number of articles increased from 12 to 20. The pattern of increase for *Food Policy* was less consistent and less dramatic. From 2012 through 2020, the number of

13 A complete listing of SOFI titles is provided in Appendix 5.1.

articles with the term "resilience" increased from six to 16. The largest increase occurred between 2012 and 2014, when the number of articles increased from three to 10. The doubling observed is largely inconsequential in light of the small base number and the absence of an overall consistent increase.

The observed trends are shown as simple frequencies (absolute values) of journal articles over time, so it is important to consider the possibility that the results become distorted by year-to-year fluctuations in the number of articles published. To account for differences in articles published per year, the number of articles containing "resilience" in any given year was divided by the overall number of articles published in that same year. Figure 5.5 graphs trends in the appearance of "resilience" that are not biased by differences in the number of articles published in a given year by each journal. The figure also allows for a fair comparison between journals for any given year.

The trends displayed in Fig. 5.5, based on prevalence, are not as pronounced as the trends based on absolute occurrences shown in Fig. 5.4. The relative differences between journals regarding prevalence is, however, roughly consistent with results of the simple frequency count. While the presence of an overall pattern of increase for *Global Food Security* is reflected in both Figs. 5.4 and 5.5, the absence of clear evidence of a pattern of any kind is suggested for *Food Policy*. A comparison of the

**Fig. 5.5** Relative prevalence of "resilience" in the research literature: Food Policy and Global Food Security (*Source* Author)

occurrences of "resilience" in the initial time period (2012–2014) with such occurrences in the most recent time period (2018–2019) suggests a modest pattern of increase in both *Food Policy* and *Global Food Security*. While these findings are less dramatic than those based on the simple frequency count of articles, the trend lines (the dotted lines) shown in Fig. 5.5 reveal a modest pattern of increase in relative frequency.

#### *Results from the Content Analysis of the Use of "Resilience" in SOFI*

Using the results of the lexical trend analysis as a point of departure, the content analysis offers a more detailed view of how the concepts of food security and resilience were discussed in SOFI. Following the categories included in the food security dimension of the conceptual model (Fig. 5.1), each occurrence of "resilience" was reviewed to see if and how the concept was discussed in connection with food security. Any mention of "food security" was examined to categorize it as a general reference (i.e., "food security" mentioned but not differentiated), as a specific reference to one or more of the 1996 WFS pillars (availability, access, utilization, or stability), as a reference to food systems, or as a reference to food sovereignty (including references to power dynamics and the right to food). In those cases where resilience was connected to something other than food security, food systems, or food sovereignty, the connection was recorded as "Other or General." The year-by-year results are displayed in Table 5.2 with the most dominant pairing with "resilience" for any given year highlighted in yellow.

In addition to a year-by-year analysis, the column totals shown in Table 5.2 provide an aggregate picture of combinations for the 13 years of SOFI reports that were analyzed. On those occasions when resilience was discussed in a SOFI report, 11 of 13 years were categorized as referring to resilience under the heading "Other or General." Examples of occurrences that fall into this category include phrasing such as "build on a foundation of resilience" (FAO, 2004, p. 26), "many countries remain on the list for several years owing to the lingering effects of drought and/or conflict and low resilience" (FAO, 2008b, p. 19), "-; reduce risk and increase the resilience of the most vulnerable" (FAO, 2012, p. 33), and "build lasting climate resilience" (FAO, 2018, p. 94). When "resilience" was mentioned, it was paired with "food security" or "food systems" but rarely with both. Of the 110 instances where "resilience" was mentioned, only two involved a pairing with "food security" and "food systems" at

**Table 5.2** SOFI—resilience, food security, and food systems

*Note* (1) Numbers indicate whether occurrences were discussed in connection with food and nutrition security, food systems, or food sovereignty (*Source* Author)

the same time. Both instances were found in the 2018 SOFI report when the theme was *Building Climate Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition*. Somewhat surprisingly, no explicit pairing was found in the 2020 SOFI report, when the title and theme for that year was *Transforming Food Systems for Affordable Healthy Diets*. Most noticeable in the results is the complete inattention to food sovereignty in SOFI reports for any year.

One notable observation that emerged from the SOFI content analysis was the lack of conceptual clarity. In not a single case where resilience was mentioned did such a mention include a definition or conceptual discussion of the meaning of "resilience." No clear distinction was made between resilience as a capacity and resilience as an outcome or property of an outcome, such as food security. It follows from this point that no distinctions were made between distinct types of resilience capacities and the relationship between resilience capacities and food security was not discussed.

Overall, the results of the SOFI content analysis reveal that connections between resilience and food security and between resilience and food systems are typically low. SOFI 2017 featured the greatest cooccurrence of "food security" and "resilience," with 23 co-occurrences recorded. This, however, was to be expected when considering the theme and title of SOFI 2017—*Building Resilience for Peace and Security*. The same lack of connection found between "resilience" and "food security" was observed between "resilience" and "food systems." While SOFI 2008 included more references to food systems in connection with resilience, only three co-occurrences of the terms were identified in that period. Only once did SOFI (FAO, 2018) connect "resilience" and "food systems" at an appreciable level, with 23 occurrences. Interestingly, this occurred in a year when the food systems concept was not an explicit focus of the 2018 report. That report, titled *Building Climate Resilience for Food Security and Nutrition*, did not highlight food systems in its forward or key messages. It appears, however, that challenges associated with climate change provide a compelling case for exploring points of intersection between the concepts of resilience and food systems.14 This is a plausible explanation, as climate change is frequently identified as a driver of many kinds of shocks to which the development of more resilient food systems is a needed response. The complete lack of connection between resilience and food sovereignty presents a starkly contrasting picture. This finding is somewhat surprising when one considers that the FAO, as one of the organizations leading SOFI, has a history of drawing attention to food sovereignty and the right to food (Gordillo, 2013).

#### *Content Analysis Results: The Use of "Resilience" in Global Food Security Articles*

Because the lexical analysis of the journal articles included articles in which "resilience" occurred in any part of an article in the frequency counts for a given year, the first stage of the content analysis required a culling of articles from the 143 articles that were selected from 2012 through 2020. One criterion for narrowing this set of articles was based on article type. The focus was on research articles, while reviews were excluded. To ensure that the concept of resilience was an actual focus in any given article, only articles that included "resilience" in the title or the abstract were included.

Of the 143 articles in the inclusive set for the lexical search, 12 included "resilience" in the title, the abstract, or keywords/highlights.

14 Connections among climate change, resilience, and food security are examined in detail by De Pinto, Islam, and Katic (Chapter 7 in this volume) in an analysis of 12 Adaptation Fund projects.

It should be reiterated here that the original set of 143 articles was based on "generous" inclusion criteria. For an article to be selected, "resilience" needed to appear at least once anywhere in the article. At this stage, no additional criteria were applied to determine whether an article actually focused on resilience in any part. Table 5.3 lists the titles of the 12 articles from *Global Food Security* that were included in the content analysis.

As shown in Table 5.3, 11 of the 12 selected articles were published in 2020 and one was published in 2019. Thus, prior to 2019 no articles included "resilience" in the title, abstract, or article highlights. While one might argue that this temporal bunching is an artifact of the inclusion criteria, the criteria were applied consistently over the nine-year search period (2012–2020). With 12 articles as a sample of peer-reviewed research articles with a focus at the intersection of food security and

**Table 5.3** *Global Food Security* articles examined for content analysis

*"Resilience" Appeared in Titles, Abstracts, or Highlights*

1. Small farms' resilience strategies to face economic, social, and environmental disturbances in selected regions in Poland and Latvia (Czekaj et al., 2020) 2. Interplay of trade and food system resilience: Gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency (Kummu, et al., 2020) 3. A brighter future: Complementary goals of diversity and multifunctionality to build resilient agricultural landscapes (Frei et al., 2020) 4. Choosing awareness over fear: Risk analysis and free trade support global food security (Adamchick & Perez, 2020) 5. Policy options for mitigating impacts of COVID-19 on domestic rice value chains and food security in West Africa (Arouna et al., 2020) 6. Filling knowledge gaps to strengthen livestock policies in low-income countries (Serra et al., 2020) 7. Global changes in crop diversity: Trade rather than production enriches supply (Aguiar et al., 2020) 8. Food policy and the unruliness of consumption: An intergenerational social practice approach to uncover transforming food consumption in modernizing Hanoi, Vietnam (Wertheim-Heck & Raneri, 2020) 9. Perspective article: Actions to reconfigure food systems (Loboguerrero et al., 2020) 10. Food securers or invasive aliens? Trends and consequences of non-native livestock introgression in developing countries (Leroy et al., 2020) 11. Alternative discourses around the governance of food security: A case study from Ethiopia (Jiren et al., 2019)

12. Using local initiatives to envision sustainable and resilient food systems in the Stockholm city region (Sellberg et al., 2020)

*Source* Compiled by the author

resilience, the content analysis proceeded to a stage that entailed a more carefully detailed reading.

Before discussing the main findings from the content analysis, several basic qualities of the papers should be discussed. Regarding study types, four of the studies (Adamchick & Perez, 2020; Arouna et al., 2020; Loboguerrero et al., 2020; Serra et al., 2020) categorized as policy papers were non-empirical studies. Of the remaining eight studies, four were quantitative, three were qualitative, and one was a mixed methods study. The question regarding how resilience is defined in research articles revealed that the majority of the articles did not provide explicit definitions or conceptions of resilience. Of the 12 articles examined, only two (Adamchick & Perez, 2020; Czekaj et al., 2020) offer explicit definitions or conceptions of resilience. Czekaj et al., (2020, p. 2) state that resilience "refers to the capacity and ability of physical or socio-ecological systems to recover from a disturbance of any type and maintain the original function." As part of their definition, Czekaj et al. (2020) also note that resilience includes elements of persistence, adaptability, and transformability. Adamchick and Perez (2020, p. 3) state that "[r]esilience includes the readiness to anticipate and mitigate the impact of epidemic events that are expected to happen without knowledge of when or where they will occur." Four out of 12 articles (Frei et al., 2020; Jiren et al., 2019; Loboguerrero et al., 2020; Sellberg et al., 2020) offer what can be interpreted as implied definitions that reveal varying perspectives on resilience. In these cases, one can deduce the intended meaning of resilience even though no explicit definition was provided. Sellberg et al. (2020), for example, note that "enhancing resilience requires substantial innovation, experimentation and transformation." In work that was based on the stakeholder view of food security in Ethiopia, Jiren et al. (2019) state resilience "typically takes a complex adaptive systems perspective, emphasizing feedbacks, slow drivers of systems behavior, and emergent system dynamics resulting from self-organization."

None of the remaining articles among the selected 12 provide either an explicit or an implied definition of resilience (Aguiar et al., 2020; Arouna et al., 2020; Kummu, et al., 2020; Leroy et al., 2020; Serra et al., 2020; Wertheim-Heck & Raneri, 2020). Arouna et al. (2020) state that the aim of their study was "to reduce the current and potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on domestic rice value chains' resilience and their capacity to sustain food security in West Africa." Loboguerrero et al. note that "[f]ood systems need to shift towards more sustainable, inclusive, healthy and climate-resilient futures." In these cases, and others where no definitions are offered, resilience as a concept is mentioned but not developed. Such usage suggests that, as a concept, resilience stands in need of definition rather than being used simply as a "*buzzword*" (Béné et al., 2017; Staal, 2016).

Regarding instances where resilience might be connected to food security and/or food systems, eight of the 12 selected articles focus on food security alone. In several articles that highlight food systems, references are general and specific definitions or conceptions of food systems are not included. This is true for five of the eight articles that make reference to food systems (Czejak et al., 2020; Kummu, et al., 2020; Adamchick & Perez, 2020; Leroy et al., 2020; Loboguerrero et al., 2020).

Discussions of the shocks-and-stressors context are similarly mixed and typically general. It appears that most of the work was motivated by shocks and stressors, but the references are not accompanied by associated empirical work that involved corresponding metrics or analyses. This is true for all 12 articles examined. The conclusions that are offered highlight resilience only occasionally. The three articles that do reference resilience in their conclusions (Adamchick & Perez, 2020; Arouna, et al., 2020; Czekaj et al., 2020) do so on a conceptual level with limited detail. Table 5.4 synopsizes the content analysis findings from the 12 resilience-oriented articles that were examined in *Global Food Security*.

Perhaps, the most basic finding to highlight is that, over a nineyear period, only 12 of 143 articles met the criteria for inclusion (i.e., "resilience" or "resilient" in the title, abstract, or keywords/highlights). While the results of the lexical analysis suggest increasing interest in resilience over time, there is also little evidence of evolution. Referring back to the three dimensions that were part of the conceptual model presented earlier, a lack of detailed conceptions was found for food security, for the discussion of shocks and stressors, and for the description of resilience capacities. Most concerning was a marked tendency to use "resilience" without defining the concept.15 On the whole, there is no basis for concluding that progress has been made regarding how resilience is being used research or in policy. The 2020 surge in resilience-related publications in *Global Food Security* may suggest that an inflection point has been reached. Time will tell if such an inflection point will be marked

15 This finding aligns with the results obtained by De Pinto, Islam and Katic (Chapter 7 in this volume).

**Table 5.4** Summary of findings of the content analysis of *Global Food Security*

*Czekaj et al. (* 2020*) Small farms' resilience strategies to face economic, social, and environmental disturbances in selected regions in Poland and Latvia [empirical]*

**Conclusion**: "[The study] illustrates the overall spectrum of strategies employed by SSFs in these two countries, thereby providing a basis for further analysis of the differences in, and prevalence of, specific resilience strategies of SSFs in different countries"

*Kummu et al. (* 2020*) Interplay of trade and food system resilience: Gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency [empirical]*

for global actors, as well as national policy makers"

*Frei et al. (* 2020*) A brighter future: Complementary goals of diversity and multifunctionality to build resilient agricultural landscapes*

diversity of ecosystem functions"

#### **Table 5.4** (continued)

*Research Articles from* Global Food Security*, 2012–2020*

*Adamchick and Perez (* 2020*) Choosing awareness over fear: Risk analysis and free trade support global food security [non-empirical]*

understanding of underlying system dynamics will contribute to resilient and enduring food systems"

*Arouna et al. (* 2020*) Policy options for mitigating impacts of COVID-19 on domestic rice value chains and food security in West Africa [non-empirical]*

security in the region"

*Serra et al. (* 2020*) Filling knowledge gaps to strengthen livestock policies in low-income countries [non-empirical]*

modeling ought to be prioritized in low-income, livestock-rich countries to strengthen livestock policies and enhance the positive impact on household incomes and dietary diversity"

#### **Table 5.4** (continued)

Aguiar et al. (2020) *Global changes in crop diversity: Trade rather than production enriches supply*

**Conclusion**: "Our results indicate that the expansion and diversification of crop trade was the main driver of the global diversification of supply since within-country production slightly increased"

*Wertheim-Heck and Raneri (* 2020*) Food policy and the unruliness of consumption: An intergenerational social practice approach to uncover transforming food consumption in modernizing Hanoi, Vietnam*

**Conclusion:** "…Traditional shopping and food preferences is strong; creative agency results in food security resilience; and pester power is driving food preparation and subsequently dietary changes at the home dinner table"

*Loboguerrero et al. (* 2020) *Perspective article: Actions to reconfigure food systems [non-empirical]*

**Conclusion**: "Food systems need to shift towards more sustainable, inclusive, healthy and climate-resilient futures".

*Leroy et al. (* 2020*) Food securers or invasive aliens? Trends and consequences of non-native livestock introgression in developing countries*

#### **Table 5.4** (continued)

*Research Articles from* Global Food Security*, 2012–2020*

*Food Security Focus, Location & Study Type Shocks and Stressor Context Definition and/or Application of Resilience*

**Conclusion:** "Animal genetic resources can be regarded as the centre of a complex social, environmental and economic system, so policies need to address the challenges related to sustainability in a holistic manner, accepting trade-offs where necessary, and considering, at different scales, the relationships and dynamics between the animals, their herders, the production systems, agroecosystems, and the market"

*Sellberg et al. (* 2020*) Using local initiatives to envision sustainable and resilient food systems in the Stockholm city-region*

methodology helped to understand more of the dynamics and divergent views in a transformation process in a specific social-ecological context"

*Jiren et al. (* 2019*) Alternative discourses around the governance of food security: A case study from Ethiopia*

*Notes* (1) "GR" denotes general reference only; (2) "ND" denotes not defined

as only a shallow rhetorical shift that fails to apply the concept of resilience in a meaningful way, or as a shift that draws on foundational work on resilience (Holling, 1973), resilience thinking (Walker & Salt, 2006), resilience theory for development (Barrett & Constas, 2014), or resilience for food security (Béné et al., 2016).

## Conclusion

Ongoing applications of resilience to food security make it clear that the initial interest in resilience is not ephemeral. The effort to integrate food security and resilience, however, represents a new challenge. In response to this challenge, the present chapter offers a conceptual model, the *integrated food security resilience model*, that highlights possibilities for integration. The model can be used as a heuristic to explore how resilience and food security may be combined. It may also support work toward a data architecture to develop a more comprehensive set of indicators for resilience analysis that is concerned with food security. Guided by the model, the review of a sample of policy documents revealed uneven application of the resilience concept over time, with very little evidence of the adoption of an integrated perspective at any given point in time. The peer-reviewed articles that were reviewed exhibited greater consistency in the use of resilience, but with little evidence of integration. In both reviews, neither food security nor resilience was conceptualized effectively. The findings compel us to consider a more basic question of how food security and resilience, as standalone concepts, are defined and used in research and policy.

In closing, the findings presented in this chapter suggest that there is room for improvement in work that aims to integrate resilience and food security in policy discourse and in research. If resilience is to be a meaningful addition to our understanding of food security, the specific requirements introduced by resilience need to be explored (see Constas et al., 2020). Growing attention to food systems as a means of understanding the challenge of food security (HLPE, 2017; Pingali & Sunder, 2017; Reardon & Timmer, 2012) must be given closer attention. Building on both the early work of Via Campesina (2007) and the more recent work of the HLPE (2020), greater attention must also be paid to agency and food sovereignty as emerging elements of food security. The ways in which resilience and food security may be integrated to reflect the full complexity of each concept need further attention. Future work will reveal whether the aspiration for integration will remain an undeveloped effort that lacks precision or will be realized as a true substantive shift that leads to greater conceptual coherence.

## Appendix

See Table 5.5.

#### **Table 5.5** SOFI titles/themes 1999–2020

### References

*19 May 2017,* Brussels. Retrieved from www.consilium.europa.eu/media/ 24010/nexus-st09383en17.pdf

Zseleczky, L. & Yosef, S. (2014). Are shocks really increasing? A selective review of the global frequency, severity, scope, and impact of five types of shocks. 2020 Conference Paper 5, May. IFPRI

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## Food Systems, Resilience, and Their Implications for Public Action

*John Hoddinott*

## Introduction

The last 15 years has seen global food systems subject to two major shocks—the 2008 food prices crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic that began in early 2020. Country-level shocks such as drought and floods continue—in 2020 alone, nearly 34 million people in China and India were affected by flooding (CRED, 2021). While global per capita food production continues to increase, the multi-decade trend of falling numbers of persons considered to be undernourished appears to be coming to an end. There is also increased concern over the quality of

Division of Nutritional Sciences, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and Department of Global Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
185

J. Hoddinott (B)

C. Béné and S. Devereux (eds.), *Resilience and Food Security in a Food Systems Context*, Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23535-1\_6

diets that global food systems provide, and the environmental impacts of the farming practices that provide the food for these diets.1

These stylized facts have informed increased use of two concepts: food systems and resilience. This chapter seeks to contribute to efforts that bring these two notions together with a view towards understanding how a resilience lens can improve our understanding of food systems at local and global levels, how resilience can be better measured and assessed, and how this, in turn, contributes to improving food security interventions and policy. It consists of three sections: Building blocks; Linking resilience to food systems; and Implications for public action.

## Building Blocks

The last ten years has seen an outpouring of work on the concept of food systems, based on a recognition that because of the multiplicity of factors that underpin food security, a too heavy emphasis on a single component (say production or markets) is insufficient (Reardon & Timmer, 2012). Examples of this work include HLPE (2017), Béné (2020), FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2020), FAO (2021), and Herrero et al. (2021). While these approaches differ in detail, common to many are the following actors—producers; processors; distributors; and consumers and a view that the objective of a resilient food system is to meet dietary needs in a sustainable fashion (HLPE, 2017). These approaches to food systems are careful to note that there are multiple food products within a food system, each characterized by its own value chain and that there are heterogeneities within each element. Further, distinctions between these elements are not always clear cut—a notable example being households in low-income countries who are food producers, processors, and consumers of their own production.

Just as there are many definitions of food systems, there are many definitions of resilience. These include: (1) Resilience as the *capacity* to withstand or absorb sudden or chronic shock (Béné, 2020; Constas et al., 2014; FAO, 2016); (2) Resilience as *recovery*; the extent to which food

1 I have benefitted from ongoing discussions about food systems and resilience with Chris Barrett, Andrea Cattaneo, Mark Constas, Marco d'Errico, Rebecca Pietrelli, and Maximo Torero. This chapter has been made substantially better by the detailed comments provided by Chris Béné and Stephen Devereux. Errors are mine.

security (or other measure) returns to its pre-shock state. This conceptualization of resilience hews closely to the use of the concept in ecology and engineering, and to the word's etymological roots (Hoddinott, 2014; Hoddinott and Knippenberg, 2017; Béné, 2020); and (3) Resilience as a *normative condition*; the capacity to avoid adverse well-being states (or achieve a desirable state) in the face of exposure to shocks and stressors (Barrett & Constas, 2014; Cissé & Barrett, 2018).

Central to discussions of resilience are the concepts of shocks and stressors to different actors within the food system. Shocks are events, either positive or negative, the timing and severity of which cannot be precisely predicted in advance. A stressor is a long-term trend that adversely affects a system and increases the vulnerability of actors within that system to shocks. Shocks emanate from the settings (Hoddinott & Quisumbing, 2010)2 —physical, social, political, legal, and economic—in which actors operate (a covariant shock), or they could be restricted to only one person or household (an idiosyncratic shock) (Dercon et al., 2005). The distinction between covariant and idiosyncratic shocks is not always clear-cut. A drought in only one locality might result in poor, rainfall-dependent households selling assets to richer, non-rainfall dependent households so, although the event was common to both, it adversely affected only the poor. Further, shocks can vary in terms of speed of onset, duration, and intensity. These shocks can affect the settings themselves, household assets, or the processes by which these assets are used to generate income (Hoddinott & Quisumbing, 2010).

Building on these ideas, food systems resilience can be defined as the capacity over time of a food system to sustainably provide sufficient, appropriate, and accessible food to all, in the face of shocks and stressors.

2 The physical setting refers to natural phenomena such as the level and variability of rainfall, the natural fertility of soils, distances to markets, and quality of infrastructure. The social setting captures such factors as the existence of certain norms of behaviour, of social cohesion and strife. The legal setting can be thought of as the general "rules of the game" in which exchange takes place, which, in turn, is partly a function of the political setting that captures the mechanisms by which these rules are set. Finally, there is an economic setting that captures policies that affect the level, returns, and variability of returns on assets (Hoddinott & Quisumbing, 2010).

## Linking Resilience to Food Systems

Two themes underpin this section. First, more is known about the resilience of some (but not all) components of food systems than is commonly recognized. Second, there is relatively little understanding of how the resilience of these components fit together.

Some additional comments about the first theme are warranted. There is a long-standing literature within agricultural economics that examines how (and how successfully) food producers manage risk (see for example, Moschini and Hennessy [2001] for a summary of the older literature on this topic and Tack and Yu [2021] for a more recent review, defined as the possibility of different types of shocks (covariate or idiosyncratic) being realized. Characterizing these ex ante actions is consistent with the notion of resilience as the *capacity* to absorb shocks. Within the literature on the functioning of food markets (distributors, both wholesalers and retailers), there has been a considerable body of research into the extent to which these markets are integrated and why some markets are more integrated than others. As discussed below, such approaches are consistent with the notion of resilience as *recovery.* Lastly, there is a large literature on household resilience, much of which will be discussed elsewhere in this book. This literature will be very briefly summarized. By contrast, there appears to be much less work on food systems resilience (or related literatures such as risk management), the focus of this chapter.

#### *Food Production Resilience*

Food production is seen as a core component of food systems (FAO, 2021; HLPE, 2017). However, with the recent exceptions of FAO (2021) and Constas et al. (2021), there is much less explicit work on measurement of food production resilience. In part, this reflects enormous variations in agro-ecological conditions and in how food is produced around the world. As described by Savary et al., "These production units include the large-scale commercial farms of the global North, with their high level of mechanisation and inputs (synthetic and also biological, with highly selected and specialised seed) as well as the smallscale, smallholder farms of the global South, with their large labour force, their crop diversity, the frequent inclusion of livestock in agriculture, and their limited reliance on external inputs" (Savary et al., 2020, p. 695). That noted, consider the notion of resilience as the capacity to withstand or absorb sudden shocks or chronic stressors. Measures of the resilience of food production can either be a summary statistic that captures this ability or as characteristics of the organization, structure, and process of food production that are believed to be associated with the summary statistics. With the important caveat that the ideas below are exploratory, we describe both approaches below.

Before doing so, we briefly set out a conceptual model of food production. The farming unit has endowments of capital and labour. Capital includes physical capital (agricultural tools, livestock), natural capital (land), human capital (in the form of knowledge, skills, and health), financial capital, and social capital (Scoones, 1998). The farmer allocates these endowments, along with purchased inputs, across a series of agricultural activities. (For simplicity, we ignore allocations to non-agricultural activities.) These allocations are based on perceptions of the level and variability of activities returns, as well as their covariance. For example, farmers may decide to grow a mix of crops that embody differing levels of susceptibility to climatic shocks and returns. Crops may be grown in different locations, may be temporally diverse (that is, grown at different times or different crops may grow to maturity at different speeds) or may be intercropped. Once these allocations are made, shocks that threaten crop or livestock production (covariant or idiosyncratic) occur; these are outside the direct control of the farmer. It may respond to these shocks through undertaking compensating or reinforcing actions (for example, undertaking additional weeding in fields affected by a weed infestation; spending more time harvesting a field where production had been atypically high) (Hoddinott & Quisumbing, 2010).

A summary statistic of food production resilience at the national level—or to phrase more precisely, a summary statistic of domestic food production resilience—captures the outcome of these allocations, the shocks and the compensating or reinforcing actions can be measured in physical or monetary terms; it does not attempt to disaggregate or disentangle how the outcome has come about. One such summary statistic is outlined in Zampieri et al. (2020); a simplified version of their approach goes as follows.

Consider circumstances where the shocks adversely affecting food production are so severe, or the ability of farmers to respond to shocks so limited, that the consequence of the shocks is total crop failure. The probability that this occurs is given by *F* where 0 < *F* < 1. We can think of a farm (or locality or country) with resilient food production as the

reciprocal of the probability of total crop failure.

$$R = 1/F \tag{6.1}$$

As *F* → 0, *R* rises in value. As *F* → 1, *R* approaches 1 and so an increase in the value of *R* captures the notion of greater resilience of food production. Next, make the strong assumptions that mean production over time and variations in production over time are both trendless. Following Zampieri et al. (2020), define *P* as the level of production that occurs when conditions are optimal and allow only two states of the world: one where crop production is optimal and one where crop production fails totally. With these strong assumptions in mind, over time, the mean and variance of food production are given by:

$$
\mu = P(1 - F) \tag{6.2}
$$

and

$$
\sigma^2 = P^2 (1 - F)(F) \tag{6.3}
$$

Manipulating these expressions yields:

$$R = \mu^2 / \sigma^2 \tag{6.4}$$

Equation (6.4) is the summary statistic. Food production resilience is the inverse of the coefficient of variation of production squared. A higher value for *R* corresponds to greater production resilience. Note that this is consistent with intuition. Variability in production (the denominator) increases when farmers are less able to minimize the effects of adverse shocks (for example, where farmers lack access to irrigation, there will be greater year-to-year fluctuations in output because of differences in rainfall over time; this increased variability increases the magnitude of the denominator and thus lowers *R*. Conditional on σ2, increased production is associated with greater resilience; the intuition here being that at higher levels of production, a given level of variability represents a small fraction of total output.3

3 Zampieri et al. (2020) show how to adapt this approach to circumstances where production is non-stationary or where more than one crop is produced.

We end this section noting the following. First, elements of the conceptual model described above contain characteristics believed to be associated with summary statistics for food production resilience. For example, we should expect that measures of endowments and actions that reduce variability in production will be correlated with increased production resilience. Examples include measures of farming practices that reduce the likelihood of crop failure (for example, intercropping and crop rotation), the availability of irrigation (or more generally, resources that reduce reliance on rainfall and improve water control), and improved availability of inputs (captured, for example, through measure of the thickness of input markets.) Second, as Savary et al. (2020), FAO (2021), and many others have noted, diversification—the choices farmers make about what they grow, where, and when—is seen as one way in which farming can be made more resilient. Diversification indices for what is grown include the Shannon and Simpson diversity indices; as the literature on farm fragmentation shows, these can also be adapted to capture spatial diversity in production (see Knippenberg et al., 2020, for references and FAO (2021) for more recent work on measuring production diversity). However, there is a risk that "too much" diversification might come at the cost of reduced efficiency in production, for example, because of a loss of economies of scale or in comparative advantage.

Second, this measure pertains to resilience of domestic food production. It does not account for international trade. In principle, low domestic production resilience can be offset through food imports, though this does expose domestic food supply to shocks that emanate outside the country. We return to this point when we discuss implications for public action.

#### *Resilience in the Food Processing Sector*

Globally, the food processing sector is enormously heterogeneous, ranging from the large meat processing plants employing hundreds of workers to women grinding grain harvested from their own fields. Unlike food security, there are no well-developed, validated metrics for resilience in the food processing sector. Nor, unlike food production or food markets, are there measures that can be adapted to capture aspects of resilience. That said, literatures on supply chains and on recent experiences arising from the COVID-19 pandemic suggest several possible metrics that could be developed to capture resilience within the food processing sector.

The supply chain literature: Aboah et al. (2019) argue that flexibility is a key attribute in the resilience of value chains. Applying their approach specifically to the processing sector, flexibility includes the ability to: reorganize production/processing in response to a shock; obtain raw foods from other sources should disruptions affecting existing suppliers; and tap alternative distribution channels. Relatedly, stock holdings can also play a role by reducing processors' vulnerability to transitory shocks in the supply of inputs.

COVID-19 experiences: Taylor et al. (2020) document the spread of COVID-19 among workers in US livestock plants. They note that such operations are susceptible to the transmission of coronaviruses for several reasons, including that their employees work long shifts in close proximity to coworkers. They also note that in the United States, 12 plants produce more than 50 per cent of the country's beef and 12 other plants are responsible for more than 50 per cent of pork production. Rotz and Fraser (2015) also document increased concentration within the North American food processing sectors. Three examples from their paper illustrate this:

Given all this, Savary et al.'s (2020) description of how COVID-19 affected the North American food processing sector is not surprising. "Labour shortages have also been an issue for large-scale food processors and suppliers. A growing number of workers are taken ill in food processing facilities where the operational model is not conducive to safe physical distancing. Consequently, a large number of food processing plants temporarily suspended production in Europe and North America" (Savary et al., 2020, p. 704).

Putting these disparate studies together suggests that resilience within the processing sector reflects three considerations: (a) the extent of market concentration within the sector. Countries where food processing is dominated by a small number of firms may be less resilient to shocks that affect their workforces; (b) the availability of substitutes, for example, through imports. While the shocks described by Savary et al. (2020) were disruptive—particularly for meat processing and packaging—the availability of other sources of animal source foods lessened their impacts on consumers; and (c) more speculatively, the degree of labour intensity within the processing sector with greater intensity associated with lower resilience (Reardon & Swinnen, 2020). We do not have good candidate summary statistics that capture all of this.

#### *Resilient Food Markets*

There is a vast academic literature on the structure, conduct, and performance of food markets in low-, middle- and high-income countries. This literature rarely speaks directly to the notion of resilient food markets. However, the literature on spatial market integration provides relevant insights.

We begin with an adaptation of the Takayama—Judge model described by Fackler and Goodwin (2001) and Fackler and Tastan (2008) as a point-location model. Geographically separated locations are represented by points or nodes. Assume that no node is connected to another. Within each node, the price of food is determined by local production (supply) and local demand. An adverse shock to supply—say a drought or flood occurs—causing supply to fall. With no means of offsetting this, food prices rise and remain persistently high until supply is restored. In extreme versions of this (and where there are no offsetting increases in wages or income), the result could be famine; see Devereux (1988) and Ravallion (1987, 1997). Seen in this way, these unconnected geographically separated food markets are not resilient—they lack the *capacity* to withstand or absorb sudden or chronic shock and their *recovery*—the extent to which prices return to their pre-shock state—is slow.

Next, we relax the strong assumption that no node is connected to another by introducing a set of transportation routes or links. Links and nodes together constitute a trade (market) network (Fackler & Tastan, 2008). Again, consider a supply shock in one node. The initial effect is to raise prices in that node but, by so doing, prices differ across the two nodes. Traders can exploit this through arbitrage, buying food in the node not affected by the supply shock, then transporting it to and selling it in the node where the supply shock occurred. This has the effect of slowing the rise in food prices in the affected node, allowing them to return to their pre-shock state more quickly. But it also, potentially, causes prices to change in the non-affected node. The extent of the transmission of the exogenous price shock in the affected node to prices in the non-affected node is captured by measures and methods of assessing market integration. These include error correction models, cointegration analysis, and parity bounds models (von Cramon-Taubadel, 2017; Kabbiri et al., 2016; Varela et al., 2012).

With caveats that we return to below, we assert that more integrated food markets are more resilient food markets. In turn, this takes us to the question as to what features influence the extent to which markets are integrated. These fall into four categories: (1) Information flows; (2) Transactions costs; (3) Government regulations on trade; and (4) Market structure.

Knowing that prices differ across markets is necessary for arbitrage to take place (Jensen, 2010). Quantifying these information flows is challenging. A proxy measure used in a handful of studies is some measure of access to communications technology. An older study by Goletti et al. (1995) examining rice market integration in Bangladesh between 1989 and 1992 found that the number of telephones per capita was associated with reduced market integration, a somewhat counterintuitive finding. By contrast, Aker (2010) finds that the introduction of mobile phones reduces dispersion in prices in rural Niger, and Jensen (2007) shows how arbitrage in south Indian fish markets increased after the introduction of mobile telephony.

Transaction costs may also affect market integration. *Ceteris paribus*, these will be higher the farther markets are away from each other, and several studies show this (for example, see Varela et al., 2012). Direct measures of transaction costs are rare, however with Zant (2013) being an exception. Instead, road density and quality can be used as proxies for transaction costs—higher quality roads can be travelled more quickly and can support larger vehicles, allowing for greater economies of scale in transport. FAO (2021) extends the measurement of road networks to encompass two additional ideas: route redundancy (the availability of alternative routes when a road link is broken); and detour costs, the extra costs incurred when a route is closed and the shortest alternative route needs to be taken. Scale economies may also arise when markets are larger (put differently, per unit transportation costs are an inverse function of

volume, Jensen, 2010). Some studies capture this idea of scale economies by including measures of the size of the market, population or population density or incomes per capita.

Arbitraging across spatially separated markets will be affected by government regulations on trade as well as the broader legal and policy environment in which trade takes place. The strongest version of these are prohibitions on the movement of food products across administrative borders. Requirements that marketed surpluses be sold to state-owned entities accompanied by the use of fixed, below market procurement prices are another form of intervention as is the use of government buffer stocks (both purchases for and sales to). Dercon (1995) and Rozelle et al. (1997) document that reductions in government involvement in grain markets in Ethiopia and China, respectively, improved market integration. That said, Ismet, Barkley, and Llewelyn (1998) argue that government intervention in Indonesian rice markets enhanced market integration but with the caveat that procurement prices were relatively high. Martin and Anderson (2012) argue that restrictions on movement of food products, specifically exports, was a significant factor in contributing to the rise in global food prices in 2008; noting that once a few countries started to do so, others quickly followed suit resulting in a cascade of export bans and subsequently panic buying by other countries that were dependent on food imports to meet domestic food security needs. Possibly having learned from the policy mistakes made in 2007–08, fewer governmentimposed restrictions on food exports; by late 2020, only 13 countries had done so. These affected only a minimal amount of the volume of food traded globally, around one per cent of global-traded calories (Martin & Glauber, 2020) and many of these were subsequently rescinded.

Market structure could contribute to either enhancing or detracting from market integration. As Kabbiri et al. (2016) note, market concentration may allow for economies of scale in the collection of information on prices and on transport, thus allowing such traders to respond more quickly to price differentials. But they also note that traders may have an incentive to sustain market segmentation to keep prices artificially high. Evidence on the impact of market structure on market integration appears to be lacking.

We end with two interrelated caveats. First, the description provided here focuses on domestic markets. Integration into regional and/or global markets can also provide resilience to domestic food markets as well as potentially reducing prices. Just as with domestic food markets, the quality of infrastructure linking markets in different countries along with the regulatory environment—specifically rules and tariffs governing crossborder trade—will affect the extent of market integration; see Brenton et al. (2014) for an example. Second, tensions exist between open and closed food systems. Food markets that are more regionally and globally integrated are more likely to be affected by shocks that occur elsewhere, see Bekkers et al. (2017). Put differently, while integration into global markets that creates *dependence* on imports may result in a less resilient food system whereas *diversification* of food supplies so that they include imports (or the ability to import as needed) may increase food system resilience.4

### *Food Security Resilience*5

Up to this point, our focus has been on the supply side of the food system. Analyses of food systems, however, also include the demand side; more specifically food security outcomes (see, for example, HLPE, 2017). In contrast to other elements of the food system, extensive attention has been paid to resilience at the level of households as consumers, often described as food security resilience or more generally as development resilience. We summarize four approaches here. Three of these are based on the concept of "resilience as ex ante capacity", the fourth uses the idea of "resilience as a normative condition".

Resilience as ex ante capacity can be thought of as "the capacity to withstand or absorb sudden or chronic shock; cope with temporary disruption while minimizing the damages and costs from hazard; restore after an event; manage or maintain basic functions and structures to become suitable for future situation" (Birhanu et al., 2017, p. 2). In the existing literature, this is operationalized in several ways.

One approach is to build on the Sustainable Livelihoods framework that conceptualizes well-being as a function of five asset categories: financial, human, natural, physical, and social capitals (Scoones, 1998; Quandt et al., 2019). For example, Ranjan (2014) focuses on the roles that social and financial capital play in dealing with drought. Quandt et al. (2019) constructs a series of composite indices across the five asset categories

4 My thanks to Stephen Devereux for suggesting this phrasing.

5 This material draws heavily on joint work found in Barrett et al. (2021).

using principal components (Browne et al., 2014). Composite indicators implicitly allow for substitution across asset categories (that is, two households could score at the same aggregate level but hold different types of assets in different quantities). An alternative approach used, for example, by Stanford et al. (2017) argue that households who score highly on each asset category (as well as a sixth that they call institutional capital) are best placed to be resilient. In contrast to the approach taken by Browne et al. (2014) and Quandt et al. (2019), Stanford et al. (2017) make the strong assumption that assets in different categories do not substitute for each other.

A limitation of the asset approach is that it does not account for resources beyond the household, such as infrastructure and social services that might also contribute to resilience (Birhanu et al., 2017, Stanford et al., 2017). A second approach to "resilience as ex ante capacity" seeks to remedy this weakness, the Resilience Indicators for Measurement and Analysis (RIMA), developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). An updated version, RIMA-II (FAO, 2016), uses factor analysis to estimate four latent variables, labelled "pillars". One is assets (AST) and as such, is similar in spirit to the approaches based on the Sustainable Livelihoods framework. RIMA-II adds three additional pillars—Access to Basic Services (ABS), Social Safety Nets (SSN), and Adaptive Capacity (AC). Data for all pillars are typically found in standard household and community surveys. These are combined into an overall resilience capacity index (RCI). For example, in d'Errico et al.'s (2018) study of resilience in Tanzania and Uganda, AST has four elements: an agricultural asset index, a wealth index, tropical livestock units, and land. ABS is captured through consideration of an infrastructure index and distances to schools and markets. SSN includes public and private transfers. AC is based on income diversification, education, and income earners' share.

A third approach to "resilience as ex ante capacity" is found in Smith and Frankenberger (2018). They also conceptualize resilience as a latent capacity but use different pillars than those found in RIMA-II. Smith and Frankenberger consider three capacities. Absorptive capacities seek to mitigate the impact of shocks and include the availability of cash savings, access to informal safety nets, assets, bonding social capital (local norms of trust and reciprocity), and the availability of disaster mitigation. Adaptive capacities show the extent to which households can alter their livelihood strategies in the face of changing circumstances—diversity of livelihoods, assets, education, access to information, and bridging and linking social capital all contribute to these adaptive capacities, as does confidence in one's abilities to adapt. Finally, transformative capacity refers to "enabling conditions that foster more lasting resilience. It relates to governance mechanisms, access to markets, services and infrastructure, community networks, and formal safety nets that are part of the wider system in which households and communities are embedded" Smith and Frankenberger (2018, p. 366).

The fourth approach, "resilience as a normative condition" is developed in Barrett and Constas (2014) and Cissé and Barrett (2018). Here, resilience reflects the capacity to avoid adverse well-being states, rather than a capacity itself. Cissé and Barrett (2018) translate this conceptualization into an econometric method, estimating resilience as a conditional probability of satisfying some normative standard of living; for example, a food consumption score.

## Implications for Public Action

We begin by noting significant knowledge gaps in our understanding of food systems resilience.

First, although this paper is situated within the literature on food systems, it is important to recognize that there is no one "food system". Food systems differ by commodity and country's income level. There is also likely to be path dependence. Historical circumstances, legal traditions, and the like will all have influenced how food systems have developed. A consequence of all this is that households may be simultaneously exposed to very different food systems. For example, a smallholder Ethiopian farmer might grow maize and coffee. The former being a crop that is produced, processed, and consumed without ever leaving the household, while production of the latter is the first step in a complex value chain that encompasses multiple actors across multiple continents.

Second, we know much more—both conceptually and empirically about some components of the food system, notably production and consumption, than we do about processing. Even in those sectors where the knowledge base is substantial, there are significant evidence gaps—a notable example being that of limited information on market structure in the distribution and processing sectors.

Third, language used in discourse surrounding food systems and resilience (including that found in this paper) often defaults to words such as households or actors. But households differ by place, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status and this can have implications for how different households interact with the food system. Further, as Barrett et al. (2021) note, much of the discourse surrounding food security resilience ignores the crucial role of gender. The chapter by Bryan et al. (Chapter 8 in this volume) discusses this at length.

Fourth, our understanding of how these components fit together is limited. Do all elements within a food system need to be resilient for the system to be resilient? Or can greater resilience in some elements compensate for more limited resilience in others? Questions such as these are relevant to how we prioritize public investments.

Given these knowledge gaps, it would be unwise to make strong statements regarding the implications of applying a resilience lens to food systems for the purposes of contributing to improved food security interventions and policy. Mindful of this important caveat, we note the following.

Adapting the language of United Nations (2020), governments can enhance the resilience of food systems through improved anticipation, prevention, absorption, adaptation, and transformation. While, by definition, the timing of shocks cannot be precisely predicted in advance, it is possible to improve knowledge of when and where they are most likely to occur. The famines of the 1980s spurred investment in early warning systems such as FEWSNET now encompassed within the Integrated Phase Classification (see IPC Global Partners, 2021) are a good example of strengthening resilience through improved anticipation. However, access to this information remains uneven—in many cases, researchers in highincome countries may have better knowledge about when these shocks are likely to occur than do poor people in low-income countries. Investments in information dissemination will better equip all actors within food systems to anticipate and pre-emptively react to shocks before they occur. Better information flows will also enable food markets to function more efficiently. Investments in infrastructure that also facilitate to integrate market infrastructure such as roads are also likely to enhance resilience, improving both absorptive and adaptative capacities. Social safety nets and deepening of financial markets (improving the availability of savings products and insurance) can improve the ability of households to cope or absorb shocks. On the former, there is growing evidence that safety nets that were in place prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic were effective in mitigating the pandemic's adverse effects on food security (see Bottan et al., 2021 and Abay et al., forthcoming for evidence on this from Bolivia and Ethiopia); it is less clear that, at least in lowincome countries, safety nets that were hurriedly implemented in response to the crisis were effective. This suggests that in a world that is increasingly shock-prone, governments and their development partners need to invest in social protection measures that are shock-responsive. This should include mechanisms that permit the rapid implementation of increased benefit levels to existing clients when needed (vertical expansion) and the ability to incorporate new beneficiaries into existing programmes (horizontal expansion) (Devereux, 2021). It also suggests that moving towards standing or rights-based social safety nets might be advantageous. Finally, governments can undertake investments in adaptation and transformation and/or undertake actions that incentivize the private sector to make such investments. That all said, it is less clear what government actions should be prioritized. Should they focus on protecting individuals and households from the likelihood that shocks will occur, on minimizing the impacts on income generation or maintaining consumption levels through, for example, social safety nets.

A theme in much of the work on resilience is the beneficial effects of diversification. But there is a tension between diversification and gains from specialization. How can public action reduce this tension, for example, through improving access to financial services such as savings and insurance (both public and private)? Relatedly, what role does diversification within food systems play in making them more resilient. For example, are systems with multiple value chains more resilient? As noted above, in high-income countries, certain parts of the food system (such as processing) are highly concentrated. Anti-trust policy and interventions can be used to limit excessive concentration but at the potential cost of loss of economies of scale.

Tensions exist between open and closed food systems. The last 40 years have seen horrific famines in Ethiopia and North Korea. While both had multiple and complex causes, both were exacerbated by limited intraand international market integration. For example, during the 1972– 74 famine in Wollo, Ethiopia, limited road networks outside the major cities were a significant factor in preventing food from reaching drought affected areas (Devereux, 1988); during the 1984 famine, grain prices in drought affected areas rose by 2.5 times their pre-drought levels (Cutler, 1991). By contrast, severe flooding in 1998 covered, at one point, 75 per cent of Bangladesh but famine was averted because of policy changes that allowed food to be imported from India (del Ninno & Dorosh, 2001). That said, as noted above, open food systems expose countries to shocks that occur elsewhere. So here, the policy trade-off is one between an open system that reduces the likelihood that really bad outcomes such as famines occur but potentially increases susceptibility to more frequent, but possibly less severe, shocks.

Finally, it is important to note that public action can be a means of enhancing resilience, but it can also be a source of shocks; for example, where governments unexpectedly intervene in food markets. Such actions can be a source of shocks in themselves; further, such actions may create disincentives to investment in food system resilience.

## References

recurrent droughts in Borana Zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia: A grounded theory approach. *International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14*(2), 118. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14020118

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## Food Security Under a Changing Climate: Exploring the Integration of Resilience in Research and Practice

*Alessandro De Pinto, Md Mofakkarul Islam, and Pamela Katic*

## Introduction

Climate change already affects vulnerable populations in many low- and middle-income countries and is expected to alter the lives of many more people in even more areas of the world in the future (IPCC, 2018). The nutritional status of these people is of particular importance because climate change will exacerbate the incidence of malnutrition in these

© The Author(s) 2023

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Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, London, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Béné and S. Devereux (eds.), *Resilience and Food Security in a Food Systems Context*, Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23535-1\_7

areas (Fanzo et al., 2018; Myers et al., 2017; Phalkey et al., 2015). Some projections show an increase of 4.8 million undernourished children worldwide by 2050 due to climate change, and 97% of the people at risk of hunger will be in low-income countries (IFPRI, 2017). Climate change has a direct influence on food availability because it affects habitats and crop productivity. Furthermore, ensuing increases in prices are expected to reduce accessibility to healthy foods such as vegetables, fruits, and animal-source foods with repercussions on people's diets (Springmann et al., 2016; Wiebe et al., 2015). Despite the uncertainty in these projections, regional differences in agricultural production are expected to widen the gap between the rich and the poor (Nelson et al., 2010; Parry et al., 2004; Stevanovic et al., 2016). Trade (including food aid) might not be able to fully buffer localized food shortages and ease these problems (Elbehri et al., 2015; Nelson et al., 2009; Stevanovic et al., 2016).

Climate change will not only affect food production and sourcing; its effects are expected to ripple throughout value chains and food systems. Studies indicate that higher temperatures and prolonged exposure to high levels of CO2 concentration could lead to losses in nutrient content (e.g., zinc, iron, proteins) of key food crops, induce changes in important quality parameters (e.g., dry matter, sugar content, citric and malic acid, organic acids, antioxidant compounds) (Dong et al., 2018; Högy & Fangmeier, 2009; Moretti et al., 2010; Myers et al., 2014), and increase the incidence of foodborne pathogens and mycotoxins (Battilani et al., 2016; Tirado et al., 2010). Storage, marketing, and retail systems will need to adapt as areas become hotter and transportation will have to negotiate with less durable and more frequently flooded roads as well as damaged port infrastructure (Nicholls & Cazenave, 2010; Shi et al., 2015). Electrical grid failures caused by hydroelectric dams that run dry or by an overburdening demand will affect retail shops as well as consumers (Portier et al., 2013). The utilization of food will also be affected. Studies suggest that increased contamination of drinking water supplies and increases in the prevalence of respiratory diseases and diarrhoea are possible, particularly in semiarid areas (Signorelli et al., 2016).

Concerns for vulnerable populations have increased not only because of the likely impact of climate change and a better understanding of the long-lasting implications of malnutrition (Alderman et al., 2006; Martins et al., 2011), but also because researchers, practitioners, and development agencies have developed a greater appreciation for the complexities

of the issues surrounding food security. For example, discussions about food security immediately after World War II were mostly related to commodity trade, tariffs, barriers, food processing, and calorie availability with little primary concern regarding malnutrition (FAO, 1946). By the beginning of the 1980s, new and richer ideas had entered into the debate. Notably, Amartya Sen pointed out how, during twentieth-century famines, it was not the lack of food (total calories output from agriculture) that caused problems of hunger, but rather the inability of the poor to access it. Today, there are numerous definitions of food security, but most recent ones share common traits and describe it as a multifaceted problem linked to the availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability of food over time that affects people's physical, social and economic development (see Mark Constas' Chapter 5 in this volume). These multidimensional definitions are better suited to comprehend and address the complexity of the threats posed by climate change.

Given the magnitude and the broad reach of the challenges that the world is facing, it is not surprising that the scope of development interventions has broadened from food production to integrated approaches that target entire food systems (FAO-WHO, 2014; Mbow et al., 2019; Oliver et al., 2018). One obvious consequence of this new paradigm is that interventions require approaches of increasing complexity and collaboration among experts from different fields.

A relatively new concept supporting contemporary development thinking and interventions in climate change, humanitarian, and food security contexts is that of resilience. Resilience is now regularly used in the academic literature and within the international development community as an approach to deal with adverse shocks and to promote sustainable development (Serfilippi & Ramnath, 2018). Prosperi et al. (2016) and Vonthron et al. (2016) note that research on resilience and vulnerability could provide support when framing the principles of sustainable food systems and that the concept of resilience can be useful to rethink food emergencies and development. Because it is integrative by construction, resilience has been recognized to link together research areas that have often been considered in isolation (e.g., gender, social protection, health and nutrition, climate change, energy, infrastructure) (Béné et al., 2016), and it is expected to provide support for a systems approach with recognition for the relations among human capabilities and natural systems (Xu et al., 2015). Given the multifaceted impacts of climate change that can affect virtually all dimensions of food security, resilience has the potential to be a useful concept to help develop a coherent and inclusive method to support decision-making and plan for interventions that require work at the intersection of multiple disciplines (Grafton et al., 2019; Quandt et al., 2017; Wilson, 2010).

In this chapter, we explore how the concept of resilience has been integrated into the work on climate change and food security and whether its use has helped researchers and practitioners advance their agenda. First, we review the academic literature to determine how academics have engaged with the concept of climate resilience in a food security context. Then, we provide a case study of the way resilience is used by implementers on the ground. Finally, we draw key conclusions and suggestions on how to move the climate resilience agenda for improved food security forward.

## Resilience in the Academic Literature on Food Security and Climate Change

Two parallel processes should be considered when analysing the influence of resilience on the work on climate change and food security. First, during the last two decades, published research became increasingly receptive of the progress made in the field of food security research and broadened its scope from a distinct focus on agricultural production and agricultural policies (Nelson et al., 2009, Rosegrant et al., 2014) to considering instruments associated with social inclusion and protection as well as a vision for entire food systems (Nelson et al., 2018; Rosenzweig et al., 2020; Schwan & Yu, 2018). Second, at approximately the same time, the interpretation and use of the concept of resilience went through changes that made it more usable for researchers and practitioners. The concept evolved from one describing ecosystem stability (Holling, 1973) to one illustrating the ability of social systems to absorb shocks and stressors and, through adaptive processes, to reorganize into fully functioning entities. This conceptual broadening is also how resilience became a prominent concept in the literature on food security and disaster and risk management during the first decade of the twenty-first century (Alinovi et al., 2008; Pingali et al., 2005). Furthermore, after an initial focus on resilience as an end in itself and the ensuing efforts to quantify and measure it, researchers moved to an interpretation of resilience as a means to achieving an ultimate end such as food security (Ansah et al., 2019).

A search in the Web of Science Core Collection shows that researchers working on climate change have steadily and increasingly included the concept of resilience in their work. The search of the published literature reveals that the words 'climate change' and 'resilience' appeared together in the published literature a total of 48 times during the period 1996– 2000 and 8,626 times during the period 2016–2020 (Fig. 7.1).

A similar pattern is apparent when a comparable search is carried out for articles in which the words 'food security' and 'resilience' or 'climate change', 'food security', and 'resilience' appear together. In all combinations, the incidence of the word 'resilience' increases significantly after the year 2005 and even more pronouncedly after 2015 (Fig. 7.1).

**Fig. 7.1** Incidence of the words 'climate change and resilience'; 'food security and resilience'; 'climate change, food security and resilience' in selected academic literature, years 1996–20201 (*Note* 1Search strings used in the Web of Science Core Collection literature search: TS = [climate change] AND TS = [resilience]; TS = [food security or food insecurity] AND TS = [resilience]; TS = [climate change] AND S = [Food Security or Food Insecurity] AND TS = [Resilience]. *Source* Authors)

What follows is a brief review of selected research at the nexus of climate change, resilience, and food security. This review reveals the wide range of responses covering all the major components of food systems that have been investigated and the wealth of information on actions and interventions that have the potential to increase people's resilience to climate shocks and stressors and improve people's food security under a changing climate.

#### *Agricultural Food Production*

While discussions on agricultural risk management have overwhelmingly concentrated on the use of crop insurance and index-based insurance (Cole et al., 2013; Giné & Yang, 2009; Giné et al., 2008; Hill et al., 2016, 2019), a range of viable strategies beyond financial instruments are available to lower climate-related risks by reducing vulnerability or by making food production systems better able to cope with and recover from shocks (Hallegatte et al., 2017; Lipper et al., 2018). Improved agricultural and pest management practices have also been widely demonstrated to have positive impacts on crop production (Arefi et al., 2017; Deb et al., 2018; Garnett et al., 2013; Midega et al., 2018). They are expected to increase and stabilize yields in the face of long-term changes in temperature, precipitation, and of the frequency and severity of extreme weather events (De Pinto, Cenacchi et al., 2020; Rosegrant et al., 2014). Gains in productivity and reductions in yield volatility are possible in both rainfed and irrigated systems through the expansion of soil and water management practices that increase water availability for crops in rainfed systems (Rockström & Barron, 2007) and the introduction of water-saving technologies in irrigated systems (Molden et al., 2010). Increasing the availability of diverse genetic material (FAO, 2011), advances in crop breeding and new genome editing systems such as CRISPR/Cas (Mojica et al., 2009) can protect crop production from a deteriorating climate (Rosegrant et al., 2014). A closer integration of crops, trees, and livestock into more complex systems is expected to stabilize or increase productivity and protect agricultural production from extreme weather events (Altieri et al., 2015; Asfaw et al., 2019; Lin, 2011; Weindl et al., 2015) and to increase the resilience of agricultural livelihoods (Quandt et al., 2017). Climate-related advisory services are considered essential to protect production and reduce output volatility

by facilitating preparedness and timely responses (Aker & Mbiti, 2010; Goddard, 2016; Schimmelpfennig, 2016; Woodfine, 2009).

#### *Distribution, Processing, and Marketing*

Investment in processor and distributor networks can make supply chains less vulnerable to climate change and better suited to withstand shocks from extreme weather events (Zilberman et al., 2012). Innovations in packaging, processing, and storage practices improve efficiency, reduce waste, and increase the availability of nutritious albeit perishable foods (James & James, 2010). Expanding rural electrification is expected to increase the availability and reduce the cost of nutrient-rich, highly perishable foods such as vegetables and fruits, not only by facilitating their production using irrigation, but also by providing more cold-storage options (Arndt, 2019). Investments in processing and cold-storage facilities, feeder roads, and cooled transportation have the additional benefit of smoothing income shocks that small producers face from seasonality, market volatility, and weather shocks (da Silva & Fan, 2017). Risks of food poisoning and food spoilage can be abated with the development of quality assurance and control tools and methods that prevent or control microbiological risks (Jacxsens et al., 2010; Tirado et al., 2010). Processing foods (e.g., drying and salting meat and fish, processing milk into yogurt and cheese) is shown to reduce the need for cold storage and prevent the spoilage of nutritious foods, thus increasing its availability to consumers (Berlin et al., 2008; GLOPAN, 2016).

The general consensus in the literature is that trade will play an important role in adjusting to the shifts in agricultural and food production patterns resulting from climate change (Brenton et al., 2022; Nelson et al., 2009, 2010), improving household food access by moderating price increases, and reducing shocks to food availability (Brown & Kshirsagar, 2015; Brown et al., 2017; Lybbert & Sumner, 2012). However, in order to ensure that the stabilizing power of trade is realized, investments in maintaining, expanding, and climate-proofing existing infrastructure are considered necessary, particularly in order to reach geographically isolated, poor, and/or socially marginalized communities (Thacker et al., 2019).

#### *Food Preparation and Consumption*

The consequences of hunger and malnutrition on people's health greatly affect already vulnerable people's capacity to respond, cope, and adapt to the negative consequences of climate change (Tirado et al., 2015; Wheeler & von Braun, 2013). Addressing undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies under a changing climate requires that micronutrientrich foods such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and pulses are made widely available and affordable despite unfavourable production conditions (Headey et al., 2018; Nelson et al., 2018; Ruel et al., 2017). Efforts to develop fortified food, biofortified crop varieties, and the supplementation of targeted micronutrients can help reduce people's nutritional deficiencies (Chakrabarti et al., 2018; Martorell et al., 2015) and mitigate the reduced nutrient quality in crops caused by climate change (Beach et al., 2019). In low-income countries, food processing and preservation techniques can increase food safety and preserve nutritional value of foods while minimizing the need for cold storage (FAO, 2016). Communication and participatory approaches are essential in both rural and urban settings to change consumers' behaviour and promote a dietary shift from carbohydrate-rich staples to a more diverse and healthier diet that addresses micronutrient deficiencies (Leroy & Frongillo, 2007; Ruel, 2001; Ruel et al., 2017). Nutrition labelling, advertising restrictions, taxes on unhealthy foods such as sugar-rich sodas, and nutrition education in schools and health centres are suggested policy levers that can be used to encourage behaviour change that favours resilience to climate change (Fanzo et al., 2018; Hawkes et al., 2017).

#### *Capacity Building in Institutions and Governance*

The role of national and regional governments, community organizations, and market institutions is now recognized as essential to provide information and encourage the types of innovation and investments necessary to manage climate risks (Meinzen-Dick et al., 2013). In particular, investments in improving governments and local organizations' capacities to provide effective leadership are considered necessary for the coordination of responses that span across numerous stakeholders and economic sectors (Babu et al., 2019). Many new technologies that are expected to improve people and systems' resilience require that coherent policies and regulatory procedures be in place (England et al., 2018; Saito, 2013) and that at times, these must be globally harmonized (such as in the case of genetic engineering) to avoid trade bans and implementation bottlenecks (Duensing et al., 2018).

Informal institutions, for example social networks, are recognized to promote cooperation in resource management and income diversification, and thereby contribute to livelihood and ecological resilience (Kristjanson et al., 2017). They can also help reduce the gender gap in information about climate risks and in decision-making power which are recognized as detrimental to develop efficient responses to climate change and to achieve better nutrition and health outcomes (Bryan et al., 2017; De Pinto, Seymour et al., 2020; Peterman et al., 2014). Stronger governance is essential to reduce investment gaps that penalize vulnerable groups and to ensure that resilience-enhancing investments are spread across economic, social, and environmental dimensions (McGregor et al., 2020; Meinzen-Dick et al., 2013).

#### *An Operational Problem*

Notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the research at the nexus of climate change, food security, and resilience, our review reveals some of its limits. We found that, overwhelmingly, studies use the word 'resilience' to give an intuitive depiction of a desirable trait of food systems, without connecting it with a specific theory or framework to back up their claims about increasing the resilience of households or communities to climate stresses or shocks. We also found that despite the complexity of the system analysed, the characterization of resilience (resilience of what and to what) often lacks specificity. Only a small portion of the literature actually attempts to model or measure resilience or how resilience contributes to food security (Bene et al., 2017). Furthermore, most studies linking resilience and food security track multiple commonly available production-oriented proxies (e.g., yields, production, and revenues) but very few consider multiyear resilience-related outcomes. These observations mirror what other authors have found in their reviews of the literature. Hogeboom et al. review the nexus water, energy, and food (Hogeboom et al., 2021) and find that only a few studies model (20%) or measure (13%) resilience. In a thorough analysis of papers that look at resilience in agri-food supply chains, Stone and Rahimifard (2018) find that there is a poor consensus on what elements are the most important for resilience. Ansah et al. (2019) suggest that since studies do not resort

to a common resilience framework, the number of different indicators used, the length of time that they were tracked, the different units of analysis, and the different approaches (statistical vs modelling) all make comparing the results difficult, if possible at all. Constas et al. (2014) note how variable selection tends to be context-specific and driven by data availability rather than theory.

Operational issues might be at the root of these shortcomings. Largely guided by the work of the WFP/FAO 'Resilience Measurement Technical Working Group', important conceptual progress has been made in the measurement of resilience in the context of food security and humanitarian interventions (Constas et al., 2014). Efforts to increase the operational viability of the concept of resilience can be found in studies that attempt to connect more formally agricultural and household activities with resilience and human well-being (for example, Quandt et al., 2019; Robinson et al., 2015; Rockström, 2003; Silici et al., 2011; Verchot et al., 2007). However, despite these valuable contributions, difficulties remain in connecting concepts that are both intuitive and complex. This is in part due to the structural complexities of working with systems made of many interconnected parts in which a shock affects the functioning or behaviour of one component of the system or of a group of people and then ripples through the system to reach other components or groups of individuals (Béné, 2020). Predicting the effects of investments and interventions that aim to abate the negative effects of climate change is also difficult because of positive and negative feedback loops (Bryan et al., 2017), non-linear relationships among factors that determine the system functioning, and because of the existence of thresholds below which a change in one component does not result in some appreciable difference in the performance of the whole system (Levine, 2014).

These conceptual difficulties might also explain why the literature provides limited evidence on the causal relationship between actions that purportedly increase resilience to climate stresses and shocks and improved food security. For example, Wilson (2010) points to the limits of multifunctional agricultural systems in building resilience while Cochrane and Cafer (2018) find limits and exceptions to the expected positive effect of diversification in agricultural livelihoods and smallholder production on community resilience. Gil et al. (2017) review the literature on integrated farming systems and find that studies generally claim a positive association between integrated farm systems and enhanced resilience (by virtue of increased yields, reduced yield variance, or increased incomes), but they also stress that very few studies identify the causal pathways that lead to increased climate resilience. Rosenstock et al. (2019), perform an extensive review of the published literature on climate smart agriculture (CSA), an approach to agriculture that includes among its objectives improving resilience, and find that less than a fifth of all articles attempt to connect CSA practices with resilience. They find that most of the articles that do so focus on a few indicators (e.g., soil quality and input-use efficiency) and assume that improvements in these indicators signify an increased resilience to climate change. The authors also state that the general disagreement among researchers on what to measure and what indicators to use, might explain why the literature on CSA provides so little information on one of its foundational pillars. The few cases where resilience per se has been measured directly are through a self-assessed recovery index, estimated through series of recall questions and psychometric techniques (Béné & Haque, 2021). However, these tools have been developed to analyse resilience at the household level rather than at a broader food system level.

Therefore, it appears that despite the amount of research on how to respond to various climate threats, our knowledge of how these actions translate into resilience is still limited, and an identification of a sequence of investments that can generate climate-resilient pathways to food security still appears elusive.

## Resilience in Practice---The Case of Projects Implemented Through the Adaptation Fund (AF)

The international development community has embraced the concept of resilience as a proxy for long-term growth, with a clear recognition that resilience to stressors and adverse shocks is essential for individuals and communities to achieve sustainable development. As a result, the role of resilience is codified in several targets of the United Nations' 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., SDG targets 1.5, 2.4, 13.1). In order to understand how, up to now, practitioners on the ground have engaged with the concept of resilience in a climate change and food security context, we analysed a series of projects which were implemented through the Adaptation Fund (AF). The AF was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, the AF was created specifically to finance adaptation projects in low- and middle-income countries that are parties to the Kyoto Protocol and are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change (Adaptation Fund, 2021a), and secondly, agriculture and food security are two of the key areas in which the AF provides support (Adaptation Fund, 2021b).

As of April 2021, the AF had financed over 160 projects since its inception in 2010 (Adaptation Fund, 2021c). Of these, we selected twelve projects (Table 7.1) for in-depth analysis based on the following criteria: (i) the projects had to have a strong 'food security' component, (ii) they had to have 'resilience' building as a key objective, and (iii) they had to be at the implementation stage or completed. We selected cases from diverse countries and regions to account for variations in climatic, ecological, and socioeconomic contexts. We excluded projects that were in highincome countries (e.g., Moldova), funded primarily for readiness building of recipients, or were of very short duration, e.g., one year or less.

Within each project, we explored: (i) whether resilience was conceptualized as a means to achieving food security and/or other developmental outcomes or was conceptualized as an end in itself; (ii) whether a characterization of resilience (resilience of what and to what) was provided; (iii) the type of interventions proposed for enhancing resilience; and (iv) what indicators and methods were used to evaluate whether resilience was achieved. From a methodological viewpoint, our approach is 'descriptiveexploratory' in nature and uses 'typical' or 'illustrative' cases (Yin, 2009).

With few exceptions (e.g., PN10), the projects we analysed commonly framed resilience as an 'end' goal for the project. However, only two projects (PN7 and PN8) provided a formal definition of resilience. In all the projects, the term was often framed in contrast to the 'vulnerability' of certain entities against various climate changes and stresses. This narrative indicates that resilience was considered as an 'antidote' to vulnerability. Another term, 'adaptive capacity', which was conceptualized as a mediatory variable between vulnerability and resilience, was commonly found. The implicit Theory of Change (ToC) common to all those projects implied that certain interventions would increase the adaptive capacity of vulnerable entities, reduce loss and damages, and eventually reduce vulnerability, which, in turn, would improve resilience (as an end-goal) (Fig. 7.2).

Depending on the project, the targeted beneficiaries included smallholder farmers, farm households, agropastoralists, rural communities, small pond-based aquaculture systems, agricultural sector, livestock systems, or even 'natural systems' such as forests (Fig. 7.2). Project narratives about specific entities of interest were not obvious and often involved

**Table 7.1** Case study projects

*Source* Compiled by the authors

**Table 7.1**

an overlap of these various entities, with some projects specifying one entity (PN2, PN11) and others (e.g., PN1, PN6, PN10) referring to the resilience of multiple entities.

Climate-induced 'variability' and 'extremes' were common vulnerability factors and differed from country to country. The most common concerns were erratic rainfall, unpredictable monsoon season, high temperature, dry spells, droughts, and floods. Some other climateinduced biotic and abiotic stresses were also mentioned including water shortages, soil fertility loss, agricultural drainage issues, landslides, soil erosion, pest infestations, deforestation, and bushfires. These shocks and stresses were said to lead to yield/productivity decline, loss of income, loss of livelihood, and reduced food security. References to specific properties of related ecosystems were provided in some cases. Examples include: desert or arid ecosystems, special protected areas with valuable biodiversity, and fragile mountain ecosystems and grasslands (pasturelands). Vulnerability framing however was not limited to climatic reasons. Low income or poverty, discriminatory socio-cultural norms of exclusion (e.g., women, youth, and ethnic minority groups), lack of institutional capacities and services as well as inadequate awareness and knowledge of various actors regarding climatic change and appropriate adaptation options were argued to be key reasons for vulnerability.

The proposed interventions varied widely, with a common one being the promotion of new and improved agricultural technologies and practices. This included intensification and diversification of crop and animal species; crop rotations; Integrated Pest Management (IPM); better water management practices (e.g., polytunnels, microdams, irrigation schemes, rainwater harvesting, water mills, and drip irrigation systems), soil conservation (e.g., planting legumes and soil conservation practices); new planting time and techniques; agroforestry (e.g., planting native, fastgrowing, and multipurpose perennials and/or tree species that provide food, fuel, timber, and other ecosystem services); conservation agriculture practices (e.g., minimum tillage and retention of crop residues); agricultural flood control techniques (e.g., semi-circular bunds, check dams, gully plugs, infiltration ditches, swales, and agroforestry plantations); drought tolerant field crops and livestock species; and integrated management of grasslands.

A few projects (e.g., PN8, PN9) mentioned risk management and market-related types of interventions such as market analysis and business plan development, contract farming, value chain development, agricultural insurance, microcredit, and new funding packages for farmers. Training of farmers about climatic changes, new agricultural practices, and new financial and market opportunities, was a common intervention.

All the projects showed a clear ambition to improve adaptive capacity at the institutional level. Enhancing the technical capacity of government and non-government institutions, especially meteorological and agricultural extension services, for monitoring local agroclimatic contexts and delivering location and weather-specific, timely, and climate-proof services (e.g., seasonal forecasts) featured prominently in all the projects. Staff training and development of new educational materials (e.g., manuals) appeared as common forms of intervention. Other interventions included: fostering learning and knowledge exchange through improved data analysis and management; communication and advocacy through short films, publications, printed materials, and press; forming new climate-smart farmer field schools or strengthening the capacity of existing ones; and demonstration plots. Engaging with and influencing policies through feedback and advocacy, and the mainstreaming of climate field schools were also among the institutional level interventions.

Interventions were targeted at the community level as well. These included: forming new resource user groups and/or strengthening the adaptive capacity of existing groups; training of local institutions (e.g., village *Panchayats* in India and *Village Development Committees*  in Nepal) on climate change; developing community-based adaptation action plans; forming community grain banks, seed banks, and fodder banks; community-managed storage of agricultural produce, community forestry, and community-based drinking water and biogas facilities.

At both the household and community levels, there was a strong emphasis on creating new Income Generating Activities (IGAs) for target beneficiaries. Examples included: rabbit and duck rearing, medicinal and aromatic plants, oil extraction, organic farming for niche market, cultivation of high-value fruits and vegetables, milk processing, candle making, pickle making, growing herbs and mushrooms, and fuel-efficient cooking devices. An emphasis on women and youth was common in all these IGAs.

In all the projects, we found a strong emphasis on 'participatory learning and action' (PLA) involving project staff and beneficiaries. Almost all the projects abstained from top-down interventions and emphasized developing locally appropriate adaptation actions through participatory approaches. Consultation with stakeholders (including beneficiaries) during project preparation was a prerequisite for funding application, as evident in the Adaptation Fund project proposal template. To fulfill this requirement, the projects used a range of methods—including stakeholder meetings, workshops, interviews, focus groups, surveys, visits, and participant observations—at the proposal development stage. Some projects also conducted vulnerability assessments, or utilized past vulnerability assessment reports, and included them in the project proposals (e.g., PN2, PN4, PN9, PN10). Almost all projects emphasized learning and knowledge-sharing using a range of interventions, e.g., community radio, farmer field schools, enhancing the capacities of agricultural extension services, and continuous sharing of project results and best practices.

While all the projects explicitly stated resilience enhancement as a goal, the indicators proposed for evaluating such outcome varied widely and were questionable in some instances. The common outcome indicators proposed included: percent changes in farmers' income, percent of farmers adopting new agricultural practices, percent of the target population aware of climatic changes, decreasing livestock mortality on farms, percent of communities with better access to water, improvement in agricultural outputs, reduced incidents of downstream flooding and soil erosion; number of farmers with increased access to irrigation schemes, rainwater harvesting, and drip irrigation; number of farmers benefitting from soil conservation and land husbandry infrastructure, availability of local planning tools, percent of farmers reporting income loss and increase in supplementary income, and increased community awareness and knowledge. A number of rather vague indicators, such as 'percent of farmers with climate-resilient livelihoods', were proposed, for which no measurement methods were described. At the ecosystem level, some listed indicators were increased availability of forage and water for animals, increased native grassland biodiversity, and improvement in Vegetation Index. All these outcomes were expected to be achieved within each project's lifetime, ranging from 3 to 5 years (Table 7.1).

The outcome indicators were proposed to be evaluated based on reviews of project documents, focus groups, discussions, baseline and endline surveys, and government statistics. Of these, baseline and endline comparison through surveys was common. However, no project provided details of such evaluation methods, e.g., randomization, use of counterfactual and the associated statistical methods. Moreover, although adverse impacts of climatic changes on food security were commonly framed as a rationale for the projects, none provided any indicator or methods for assessing food security outcomes over time, which could have potentially manifested the resilience of the entities of interest in the projects.

## Discussion

In this chapter, we aimed to assess how the concept of 'resilience' has been integrated into discussions about climate change and food security by both academics and practitioners. We first performed a targeted review of the academic literature on climate change, food security, and resilience. We found an overwhelming increase in the use of this concept in the literature over the last two decades, while the concept of resilience itself was going through a transformation, from describing the stability of ecological systems to embodying the adaptive and reorganizational capacity of social-ecological systems. As such, resilience has become most of all an intuitive way for researchers to describe the ability of a system to bounce back to normal functioning (or even improve) after a shock. Our review of the literature suggests that the combination of a more advanced understanding of food security coupled with the concept of resilience has given support to researchers to investigate the many aspects of food systems that are vulnerable to climate change and to find and propose solutions. This is reflected in the myriad insights that the literature offers into how to address climate threats. This wealth of knowledge gets diluted, however, in a cacophony of methods, metrics and indexes and logical leaps when it is used to connect resilience to food security more formally or empirically. It appears that the problem is not in identifying what actions can potentially improve food security but rather in determining the pathways through which such actions translate into resilience, and then into food security. The result is that the academic community is still far from having a robust method for identifying an efficient and rational sequence of interventions that improves people's food security in response to one or multiple climate threats.

At the practitioner level, our case study of twelve Adaptation Fund projects revealed that, unlike the more recent trend in the academic literature, resilience in those projects is still commonly framed as an end goal, rather than a means to achieve other outcomes. Similar to that in the academic literature, the projects refer to the resilience of a number of entities, including farmers, farm households, agricultural or natural resource systems, and agricultural sectors. Such a diverse, and often overlapping focus makes it challenging to identify appropriate resilience-building interventions and to evaluate project outcomes, since the requisite evaluation indicators are likely to vary across interventions and must be able to account for synergies and trade-offs. Such multilevel indicators were clearly missing in the Adaptation Fund projects we reviewed. The interventions for achieving resilience appear to be multifaceted and systemic in nature, combining technical interventions with institutional interventions at multiple levels, and are coupled with a strong focus on participatory learning and action. These interventions were generally in line with the theories of resilience found in the academic literature, even though their breadth falls short of what would be expected from a food systems approach—increasingly identified as crucial for food security interventions in a range of contexts. More importantly, the key limitation in the Adaptation Fund projects is in the evaluation of resilience outcomes, both in terms of appropriate indicators and methods. There is a lack of standardization of the definition and metrics of resilience that coincides with the problems described in the academic literature. It is possible that the absence of a common language and metrics for measurement we found in the literature hampers the ability of the development community to prioritize interventions and to monitor and evaluate resilience-building programmes. Although the lack of agreement on definitions and metrics may allow flexibility and strategic manoeuvring for development projects, it poses the risk of making resilience yet another buzzword in the lexicon of development.

## Conclusion

Resilience appears to have contributed to what, in our opinion, is a positive shift in the paradigm underlying climate change and food security work in ways that favour integrated approaches and interventions. However, despite its appealing qualities, the operationalization of resilience in the context of climate change and food security remains problematic. It seems clear that further support is required to develop a new generation of operational definitions that harmonizes frameworks and metrics in order to create a common language to advance core ideas. This is necessary to translate high-level concepts of resilience into actionable information and to develop resilience-enhancing actions at multiple levels. Beyond the efforts of the academic community to offer practical and systematic guidance to decision-makers on how to use resilience in development work, it is important that partnerships between academic communities and practitioners are developed and strengthened to give more coherence to the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of resilience-building activities. At present, such collaborative designs and implementations are the exception rather than the norm in climate change and food security policies, projects, and programmes.

## References

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Yin, R. K. (2009). *Case study research: Design and methods* (4th ed.). Sage.

Zilberman, D., Zhao, J., & Heiman, A. (2012). Adoption versus adaptation, with emphasis on climate change. *Annual Review of Resource Economics, 4*, 27–53.

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## Gender, Resilience, and Food Systems

*Elizabeth Bryan, Claudia Ringler, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick*

## Introduction

Resource-poor people face multiple, intersecting social, economic, health, political, and environmental risks and disturbances (Demetriades & Esplen, 2010; Hallegatte & Rozenberg, 2017; Leichenko & Silva, 2014). The concept of resilience has allowed researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to think more broadly about potential solutions to the confluence of challenges facing vulnerable communities, particularly where structural problems and inequalities, such as chronic poverty and gender inequalities, underlie persistent and recurrent shocks and stressors (Béné et al., 2014; Smyth & Sweetman, 2015; USAID, 2012). By lengthening the time frame for considering risks, the resilience lens has also helped

C. Ringler e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
R. Meinzen-Dick e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
E. Bryan (B) · C. Ringler · R. Meinzen-Dick International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Béné and S. Devereux (eds.), *Resilience and Food Security in a Food Systems Context*, Palgrave Studies in Agricultural Economics and Food Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23535-1\_8

to focus attention on the implications of humanitarian interventions on longer-term development and on safeguarding development gains against shocks, thereby bridging humanitarian and development efforts (Béné et al., 2016b; Frankenberger et al., 2014). Key elements for measuring the process of resilience include information on initial and subsequent states (well-being outcomes), disturbances (shocks and stressors), and capacities (Constas et al., 2014; Frankenberger et al., 2014).

While resilience is a complex concept that is understood and utilized in different ways by different disciplines, most definitions describe human resilience as the ability to draw upon a set of capacities to deal with shocks and stressors before, during, and after a disturbance, in a way that maintains or improves well-being outcomes (such as food security or adequate nutrition) (Frankenberger et al., 2014; Mercy Corps, 2016; USAID, 2012, 2017). In this paper, we use the definition of resilience as "the ability of people, households, communities, countries, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth" (USAID, 2012, p. 5). This approach prioritizes investments that build adaptive capacities, such as expanding economic opportunities, education, environmental sustainability, diverse livelihoods, and nutrition and health services, while also identifying and reducing risks.

Resilience approaches require studying and understanding the local context to ensure that interventions build on existing capacities and risk management institutions, and support people and institutions in pursuing their preferred strategies (Agrawal et al., 2010; Tschakert, 2007; Vaughan & Henly-Shepard, 2018). Attention to the specific context refers not only to a particular time and place, but also to the many social differences of people living in a specific geography at a given time. In designing and evaluating resilience-oriented programs and policies, development actors need to consider questions such as which kinds of capacities are important for building resilience in a particular context for specific groups of people, and how best to support people in developing these capacities and responding to shocks and stressors in a way that protects or improves well-being outcomes.

Growing evidence shows that men and women are differently exposed to and have different preferences and capacities to respond to shocks and stressors, which include some of the largest threats facing the global community like climate change, conflict, and COVID-19 (Jordan, 2019; Smyth & Sweetman, 2015; Theis et al., 2019). Because shocks and stressors occur in local contexts with different power structures, institutions, infrastructure, and socio-cultural norms, it is difficult to generalize the ways in which men and women of different backgrounds are differently affected by and respond to these disturbances. Moreover, the ways in which men and women experience and react depends on the types of overlapping shocks and stressors that they experience and the individual capacities that they possess.

Underlying structural inequalities in society, including between men and women, shape the ways in which shocks and stressors are distributed and impact people, and the capacities and options men and women have at their disposal to respond to these disturbances (Njuki et al., 2022). Even members of the same household do not necessarily face the same set of risks or share the same capacities, vulnerabilities, preferences, and decision-making power. Similarly, men and women in rural farming communities face different challenges and have different resilience capacities and response options than poor urban consumers, as they are embedded in different food environments.1 These differences can result in differential well-being outcomes, including food security and nutrition outcomes, and can exacerbate existing gender gaps in food systems as people experience and respond to multiple shocks and stresses. Thus, understanding the interactions between gender and resilience as they relate to food systems and food security is an important topic for the research for development agenda.

This chapter highlights the key gendered dimensions of resilience in the food system, drawing on evidence from the literature, including systematic reviews and global indicators, where available, as well as case study examples that highlight important linkages between gender, resilience, and food security. The chapter builds on a conceptual framework for gender and resilience (Theis et al., 2019) by incorporating a food systems lens that expounds dimensions related to gender and resilience at different stages of the food value chain from production to consumption and in different food environments (rural and urban). After presenting

1 The food environment "refers to the physical, economic, political and socio-cultural context in which consumers engage with the food system to acquire, prepare and consume food" (HLPE, 2017, p. 11). Key elements of the environment are physical and economic access to food (proximity and affordability); food promotion, advertising and information; and food quality and safety.

the conceptual framework, this chapter applies it to case studies from the literature, which are used to highlight the components of the framework and how these link to key elements of food systems. It concludes by discussing how to strengthen attention to gender in resilience policies, programs, and investments and by highlighting remaining research and evidence gaps.

## Conceptual Framework

This chapter uses a conceptual framework developed by the authors for the Gender, Climate Change, and Nutrition Integration Initiative (GCAN), which characterizes the relationships between resilience, gender, and nutrition (Bryan et al., 2017; Theis et al., 2019). This chapter expands on this framework by integrating a food systems lens (Fig. 8.1). Food systems include all elements and activities related to the production, processing, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food, and the drivers and outputs of these activities, including food security and nutrition outcomes, as well as socioeconomic and environmental outcomes (HLPE, 2017). Specifically, this chapter integrates the three main elements of food systems—food value chains,2 the food environment, and consumer behavior—which influence the ways in which shocks and stressors affect well-being outcomes—especially food security and nutrition outcomes.

The framework can be applied to different scales of analysis, including intrahousehold, household, community, and national levels. In this chapter, we mainly focus on individuals within households to illustrate that members of the same household do not necessarily share the same capacities, vulnerabilities, preferences, and decision-making power. While introduced here briefly, the interactions between gender and resilience are discussed in more detail in relation to each component of the framework in the following sections, drawing on evidence from the literature. The literature selected to illustrate the main components of the framework focuses more on gender dimensions at the household level; however, the enabling environment, including policies, investments, and interventions

2 Food value (or supply) chains consist of all actors and activities involved in moving food from production to consumption including activities related to producing, processing, distributing, and preparing food (HLPE, 2017).

**Fig. 8.1** The Gender, Climate Change, and Nutrition Integration Initiative (GCAN) framework (*Source* Adapted by the authors from Bryan et al. [2017] and Theis et al. [2019])

also influence all the other elements of the framework from exposure and sensitivity to resilience outcomes.

We then discuss how a food system lens relates to each component of the framework. The added food system elements are summarized in purple boxes in Fig. 8.1 and linked to the components of the framework. Shocks and stressors affect people depending on their level of exposure and sensitivity to the disturbance, their resilience capacities to cope with, adapt to, and transform their livelihoods, and the enabling environment. Well-being outcomes also depend on intrahousehold decisionmaking processes which determine which responses are chosen and who benefits from these choices. Depending on these response choices, wellbeing outcomes follow along several potential impact pathways, including changes in food production practices, sources and allocation of income, asset dynamics, labor allocation, natural resource management, collective action, and human capital investments. The well-being outcomes resulting from current shocks and stressors then influence exposure, sensitivity, and resilience capacities to future disturbances through a feedback loop. Similarly, the greenhouse gas implications of different response options, such as consumption changes, changes in farming practices and land use changes, also influence future climate change, one of the key challenges facing vulnerable communities in low-income countries. Viewing this iterative cycle through a gender lens illustrates how differences between men and women emerge along each of these steps.

First, individuals are exposed to different disturbances (shocks and stressors) and experience the same shocks and stressors differently. Food security and nutritional (and health) status and the food environment can influence men's and women's sensitivity to shocks and stressors. Moreover, men and women's livelihood activities along agricultural value chains may be differently exposed to shocks and stressors (Limuva & Sinnevag, 2018).

Second, people have different resilience capacities (absorptive, adaptive, transformative), subject to gender and other social distinctions as well as the intersection of these identities, including those related to age, class, caste, ethnicity, marital status, and sexual identity, among others (Béné et al., 2014; Djoudi et al., 2016). Narratives that depict women as perpetually vulnerable and men as inevitably antagonistic toward gender equality ignore the ways in which women are agents of change and neglect the constraints faced by men as well as the opportunities to mobilize men as allies for gender and social equity (Doss et al., 2018). Nutritional status, food security, and the food environment are important determinants of men's and women's resilience capacities. In addition, the range of response options for men and women may differ, based on their individual capacities and livelihood activities in which they are engaged, including along agricultural value chains.

Third, within households, institutions, and communities, each response to a disturbance—even if that response is to do nothing—is the result of choice and negotiation, albeit among restricted options (Demetriades & Esplen, 2010; Quisumbing & Maluccio, 2003). Individuals do not all have the same preferences, knowledge, priorities, or decision-making power. The decision-making context, or an actor's ability to negotiate for a preferred response option within a household or community, is a key element within the process of resilience that has strong differences by gender but is often overlooked (Behrman et al., 2014). Importantly, men and women have different consumer preferences and behavior, including different roles in procuring food—with women generally being in charge of food preparation and cooking, but in many cases eating last (Hathi et al., 2021)—and in their dietary preferences (Fig. 8.1).

The process of negotiation can lead to a set of observed response choices that can be characterized in different ways. Response choices are reflective of the resilience capacities and livelihood roles of the actors (Ngigi et al., 2017). This framework, therefore, characterizes the responses along similar lines as coping, risk management, adaptive, and transformative responses (Béné et al., 2014; Keck & Sakdapolrak, 2013). Coping responses are usually short-term, ex post responses to experienced shocks or stresses and include actions like selling assets or changing consumption patterns, and, at larger scales, humanitarian interventions (Corbett, 1988; Dercon, 2002; Nguyen et al., 2020). While coping responses may aim to maintain well-being at pre-shock levels, they are often associated with a deterioration in well-being, such as poorer diets and increased indebtedness. Risk management strategies, like diversifying production or livelihood activities, and adaptive responses, like adopting new agronomic practices, tend to be proactive and aimed at avoiding or minimizing harmful impacts of shocks and stresses over the medium to long term (Corcoran-Nantes & Roy, 2018; Jost et al., 2016; Lawson et al., 2020). Transformative responses aim to change the fundamental attributes of a system or context to improve well-being outcomes, such as actions that directly address underlying social inequalities (Carr, 2020; McOmber et al., 2019).

Finally, responses to shocks and stressors can have differential impacts on the well-being outcomes of men, women, boys, and girls through several pathways, such as changes in gendered asset dynamics or labor allocation, and there may be trade-offs across different outcomes or different groups of people (Lee et al., 2021; Quisumbing et al., 2018). Men and women may take up new livelihood activities or practices along food value chains that affect well-being outcomes, including by influencing the flow of nutrition along food value chains (Brownhill et al., 2016; Gnisci, 2016). Drawing attention to outcome pathways helps uncover some of the key mechanisms driving well-being outcomes and how these outcomes are distributed among different groups of people.

## Application of the Framework to the Literature

#### *Gender Differences in Exposure and Sensitivity to Disturbances*

Resilience-informed policy and programming require active investigation of how risks, and exposure and sensitivity to shocks and stressors differ within a local population. The literature discussed in this section illustrates gender differences in exposure and sensitivity to shocks and stressors and the reasons for these differences.

#### *Gender and Exposure*