Bouncing back or moving forward? : Analysing resilience and agricultural policies in the European Union

Abstract

The resilience of European farming systems is increasingly being put under pressure due to social, economic, and environmental challenges. These challenges make it difficult for farming systems to maintain delivering their public and private goods. Scholars and practitioners therefore call for strengthening farming systems' resilience through EU agricultural policy. However, research to understand the link between resilience and public policies has remained scarce. This dissertation aims to expand the scientific knowledge on how EU agricultural policies, especially the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), influence farming systems' resilience, consisting of three capacities: robustness, adaptability, and transformability. The central research question of this dissertation is: How does EU agricultural policy shape the resilience of European farming systems? The research in this dissertation was guided by four sub-questions: (1) how do policy goals and instruments of the CAP 2013 reform, and its implementation in the Netherlands, support or constrain the resilience of a Dutch farming system?; (2) how do actors at the farming-system level experience the influence of policies on the resilience of farming system cases in Flanders, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the UK?; (3) how is the concept of resilience framed in the CAP post-2020 reform process and which policy actors and stakeholders deploy these frames?; and (4) what policy recommendations on how to improve the capability of the CAP to support the resilience of farming systems in the EU are preferred by stakeholders and policymakers? This dissertation concludes that EU agricultural policy, headed by the CAP, largely puts forth a one-sided way to strengthen resilience and, therefore, shapes the resilience of European farming systems with uneven and adverse effects. The policy is focused on ensuring that farming systems can bounce back to a familiar situation after short-term shocks by resorting to familiar and conventional policy interventions, which are often insufficient to support adaptability or