The resilience of family farms: Towards a relational approach

Family farms play an important role in the European countryside, yet their number is steadily declining. This raises the question of what conveys resilience to family farms, i.e. the ability to persist over the longterm through buffering shocks and adapting to change. Within the current approaches to farm resilience, we distinguish between two perspectives: the first focuses on material structures and highlights the role of farm types and ecological dynamics. The second focuses on actors and highlights that farmer agency and wider social forces also play important roles. We argue that a third perspective, one focusing on relations, has the potential to overcome both the structure/agency and the ecological/social dichotomies. Indeed, a relational approach enables a closer analysis of how ecological and social processes interact to undermine or strengthen resilience. The approach also allows to identify the different relationalities that are enacted within a specific context, foregrounding diversity in farming. Furthermore, it highlights that relations are continuously made and remade, putting the emphasis on change, and on the wider patterns that enable or constrain change. A relational approach would thus contribute to overcoming a one-sided focus on states and stability, shifting attention to the patterns of relations that enable transformational change. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.