Farming Resilience: From Maintaining States towards Shaping Transformative Change Processes

Abstract

Resilience is a concept that focuses on change: it includes the ability of a system to maintain its current state despite disturbances, its ability to adapt, and to transform. While resilience covers both stability and change, conceptual developments and empirical studies have put more emphasis on identifying what enables a farm to cope with the impact of a shock, such as a shift in markets or an extreme weather event, while remaining essentially unchanged. Much less emphasis has been put on what enables a farm to shape change, especially transformative change. I argue that this bias is partly due to the ecological roots of the concept, and partly to the use of conventional methods and their underlying substantialist worldview. A process-relational approach might be better suited to capture change. This approach shifts the conceptualization of a ‘farm’ as a stable material structure, to ‘farming’ as an open process of becoming, composed of heterogenous relations that are continuously made and remade. By exploring the differences between these two approaches to farm/farming resilience, I show how a process-relational approach displaces the presumption of structural determination and thus allows to highlight the ever-present openings for change.