PUBLIC POLICY PLANNING TO ENHANCE THE RESILIENCE OF SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS TO CLIMATE CHANGE: OPERATIONALIZING RESILIENCE CONCEPTS FROM A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

This study outlines a system dynamic based approach to the planning for resilience in food systems to climate change. The processes described and the insights gained are novel in the literature since they focus on describing operational aspects of resilience that can be generalized to multiple contexts and problems. On the one hand, the process described offers an aid for researchers and practitioners operationalizing resilience in public sector settings. Simultaneously, the insights gained from multiple stakeholder discussions and modelling work open new questions regarding the general mechanisms driving resilience in food systems. Climate change is threatening the extent to which social, economic and technical development will contribute to increase global food security. The increase on weather variability and extreme events are expected to have a direct impact on crops’ yields and hence on the three main outcomes of food systems: food affordability, access and quality. The impacts of climate change are likely to increase food insecurity, specially among the rural poor, and there is a need urgent actions are needed for adapting food systems to the new and challenging conditions. Resilience is commonly used to describe the means to maintain food systems’ outcomes despite extreme weather events or unpredictable weather. Resilience, as a concept, is appealing to researchers and policymakers but is rarely used beyond a metaphor for describing an idealized system. Limited applications of resilience as policymaking and planning framework are related, among other factors, to the lack of an approach to operationalise the concepts described in the literature into a planning process This study contributes to close this gap by outlining an approach for operationalising resilience in socio-ecological systems. Specifically, it explores the use facilitated system dynamics to support the planning for resilience in small-scale agricultural systems within public sector settings. Namely, the lessons learned while working with two small-scale agricultural systems in Guatemala are used as instrumental cases to provide insights about the benefits and challenges of using facilitated system dynamics in the process of planning for resilience. The process consisted of intense field work (collecting data, interviewing stakeholders, organizing participatory workshops) and back office modelling. Tangible outcomes and feedback from the stakeholders were later analysed and confronted in the literature to yield the conclusions synthetized into academic articles and this study. This study concludes that the interpretation of what resilience means is socially constructed by the stakeholders addressing the problem. This process benefits of including a wide range of stakeholders engaged in a facilitated modelling exercise to ensure that different perspectives are taken into account. Moreover, the complexity embed in the adaptive mechanisms driving resilience requires, or at least benefits, from using computer simulations to explore potential behaviours of the systems’ outcomes. Evaluating this outcomes in the light of resilience characteristics not only offers an operational perspective of resilience, but also helps to identify thresholds and to plan accordingly. Finally, the experience documented in this study shows that planning for resilience benefits of focusing on key strategic social, environmental and economic resources. Strategic resources play an important role on resilience mechanisms and can be directly linked to concrete activities and process. Moreover, focusing on managing resources showed to be a good way to engage with process oriented policymakers in the public sector.