Strategies of family farms to strengthen their resilience

Resilience thinking offers a framework to emphasize dynamics and interdependencies across time, space and domains. It is based on understanding social–ecological systems as complex, and future developments as unpredictable, thus emphasizing adaptive approaches to management. In this paper the four clusters of factors that have been identified as building resilience in large-scale social–ecological systems are applied at the farm level. Suggestions on how these factors could be operationalized at the farm level are derived from workshops held with family farmers in Austria. The results show that farmers understand change as unpredictable and unfolding, have a number of strategies to ensure the flexibility and adaptability of their farm and build extensive networks to diversify information and income sources. However, these strategies, while ensuring adaptability and transformability, compete for scarce resources. The farmers thus face trade-offs between strategies that ensure the adaptive capacity of their farm over the long term and those ensuring profitability over the short term. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

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