A framework to assess the resilience of farming systems

Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms, farmers’ organizations, service suppliers and supply chain actors are embedded in local environments and functions of agriculture. We define resilience of a farming system as its ability to ensure the provision of the system functions in the face of increasingly complex and accumulating economic, social, environmental and institutional shocks and stresses, through capacities of robustness, adaptability and transformability. We (i) develop a framework to assess the resilience of farming systems, and (ii) present a methodology to operationalize the framework with a view to Europe’s diverse farming systems. The framework is designed to assess resilience to specific challenges (specified resilience) as well as a farming system’s capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise (general resilience). The framework provides a heuristic to analyze system properties, challenges (shocks, long-term stresses), indicators to measure the performance of system functions, resilience capacities and resilience-enhancing attributes. Capacities and attributes refer to adaptive cycle processes of agricultural practices, farm demographics, governance and risk management. The novelty of the framework pertains to the focal scale of analysis, i.e. the farming system level, the consideration of accumulating challenges and various agricultural processes, and the consideration that farming systems provide multiple functions that can change over time. Furthermore, the distinction between three resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability, transformability) ensures that the framework goes beyond narrow definitions that limit resilience to robustness. The methodology deploys a mixed-methods approach: quantitative methods, such as statistics, econometrics and modelling, are used to identify underlying patterns, causal explanations and likely contributing factors; while qualitative methods, such as interviews, participatory approaches and stakeholder workshops, access experiential and contextual knowledge and provide more nuanced insights. More specifically, analysis along the framework explores multiple nested levels of farming systems (e.g. farm, farm household, supply chain, farming system) over a time horizon of 1-2 generations, thereby enabling reflection on potential temporal and scalar trade-offs across resilience attributes. The richness of the framework is illustrated for the arable farming system in Veenkoloniën, the Netherlands. The analysis reveals a relatively low capacity of this farming system to transform and farmers feeling distressed about transformation, while other members of their households have experienced many examples of transformation

Organizational Conditions for Dealing with The Unknown Unknown Illustrated by how a Dutch water management authority is preparing for climate change

<p>The central question of this article is the extent to which organizations, governmental authorities in particular, are able to deal with the unknown unknown. Drawing on Weick's work on sensemaking, we introduce seven organizational conditions that can facilitate organizations to be reliable under trying and surprising situations. We analyse the utility of this framework by analysing how a Dutch water management authority is preparing for the unknowns of climate change, which are nearly impossible to predict and thus hard to prepare for. Our assessment reveals several strengths and weaknesses and helps to develop devices to make governmental authorities more resilient.</p>

The governance of adaptation:choices, reasons, and effects. Introduction to the Special Feature

The governance of climate adaptation involves the collective efforts of multiple societal actors to address problems, or to reap the benefits, associated with impacts of climate change. Governing involves the creation of institutions, rules and organizations, and the selection of normative principles to guide problem solution and institution building. We argue that actors involved in governing climate change adaptation, as climate change governance regimes evolve, inevitably must engage in making choices, for instance on problem definitions, jurisdictional levels, on modes of governance and policy instruments, and on the timing of interventions. Yet little is known about how and why these choices are made in practice, and how such choices affect the outcomes of our efforts to govern adaptation. In this introduction we review the current state of evidence and the specific contribution of the articles published in this Special Feature, which are aimed at bringing greater clarity in these matters, and thereby informing both governance theory and practice. Collectively, the contributing papers suggest that the way issues are defined has important consequences for the support for governance interventions, and their effectiveness. The articles suggest that currently the emphasis in adaptation governance is on the local and regional levels, while underscoring the benefits of interventions and governance at higher jurisdictional levels in terms of visioning and scaling-up effective approaches. The articles suggest that there is a central role of government agencies in leading governance interventions to address spillover effects, to provide public goods, and to promote the long-term perspectives for planning. They highlight the issue of justice in the governance of adaptation showing how governance measures have wide distributional consequences, including the potential to amplify existing inequalities, access to resources, or generating new injustices through distribution of risks. For several of these findings, future research directions are suggested.</p

Integrating Self-Governance in Heavily Regulated Policy Fields: Insights from a Dutch Farmers' Cooperative

Throughout the world, there is a growing interest in communities’ selfgovernance of natural resources. However, many self-governance initiatives proceed with difficulty, particularly when these initiatives conflict with established rules and institutions. This paper addresses the question of the extent to which, and under what conditions, self-governance initiatives can become successful in heavily regulated policy fields. It, therefore, analyses a self-governance initiative by a Dutch farmers’ association from two theoretical perspectives: Ostrom’s institutional design principles and insights from the politics of self-governance. Whereas, Ostrom’s principles focus on arranging interactions between the members of a self-governing community and their common resources, the focus of the politics literature is on the negotiations between the community and the governmental authorities to obtain room for self-governance. The paper reveals how the arrangements within the association influenced the negotiation between this community and the involved authorities, and vice versa. This mutual relationship can both positively and negatively influence the accomplishment of self-governance. Adequate self-governance arrangements can help to convince policy-makers to provide room in existing policies to accommodate self-governance. Conversely, policy-makers can help to set conditions for designing successful arrangements. Otherwise, both processes can negatively reinforce each other, and this can result in stalemates and blockades. KEY WORDS: self-governance, natural resources, institutional design principles, politics, agriculture, cooperative

Climate-proof planning for flood-prone areas: assessing the adaptive capacity of planning institutions in the Netherlands

Contains fulltext : 112013.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)6 januari 201315 p

Analytical lenses on barriers in the governance of climate change adaptation

Barriers to adaptation have become an important concept in scientific and political discussions in the governance of climate change adaptation. Over the past years, these discussions have been dominated by one analytical lens in examining barriers and proposing ways to overcome them: the problem solving lens. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate theoretically and empirically that the choice of analytical lens influences how barriers to adaptation are constructed and the intervention strategies proposed. Drawing from recent governance literature, we explore the rationale of three dominant philosophies in the study of governance: the optimist, the realist, and the pessimist philosophy. Next, we demonstrate how these philosophies are operationalized and guide scientific inquiry on barriers to adaptation through four empirically rooted analytical lenses: i) governance as problem solving, ii) governance as competing values and interests, iii) governance as institutional interaction, and iv) governance as dealing with structural constraints. We investigate the Dutch government’s Spatial Adaptation to Climate Change programme through each of the four lenses. We discuss how each analytical lens frames barriers in a specific way, identifies different causes of barriers, leads to competing interpretations of key events, and presents other types of interventions to overcome barriers. We conclude that it is necessary to increase analytical variety in order to critically engage in theoretical debates about barriers and to empower policy practitioners in their search for successful intervention strategies to implement adaptation measure