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Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses, including the unknown and previously unimaginable, such as the Covid19 crisis. The aim of this paper is to assess responses of farming systems (FS) to this crisis and to assess them from the perspective of resilience thinking. We build on a resilience framework developed in the SURE-Farm project (Meuwissen et al., 2019*) and on ongoing resilience assessments in 11 FS across Europe through which we have an in-depth understanding of the ‘pre-Covid19 situation’ in each FS. This includes insights whether an FS has an enabling (or constraining) environment, who are the relevant system actors beyond farms, and what are the social, economic and ecological functions to be delivered by the system. The analysis allows us to understand which resilience resources and strategies were mobilised indifferent FS and thereby to explain differences in the ability of FS to cope with and respond to the crisis. Furthermore, the approach enables us to put crisis responses in a broader resilience perspective and to assess whether responses might enhance (orconstrain) future resilience. Thus, our analysis allows to draw policy and industry relevant conclusions how to increase resilience of farming systems.

The accumulation of economic, social, institutional and environmental challenges and their potentially complex interconnections have created concerns about the resilience of EU farming systems, as well as the appropriateness of existing policy responses. Simultaneously, the complex interactions between policy output and resilience outcomes have hardly been researched in-depth; it is unclear how policies influence resilience. We, therefore, developed the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT): an analytical framework that conceptualises how policy output influences farming systems’ resilience on three capacities (robustness, adaptability and transformability). Whereas this new framework is a major step in conceptualising the relation between policies and resilience, so far it has not been applied empirically to test the tool’s capability to analyse the influence of policy output on resilience. The aim of this research is to empirically apply the ResAT on a Dutch farming system case (intensive arable farming in De Veenkoloniën) to assess the perceived effects of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the system’s resilience. Simultaneously, the application of the ResAT allowed us to critically explore the use, merits and demerits of the ResAT. Our findings show that the current policy goals and instruments are mostly focused on enabling the robustness of the farming systems, while placing less emphasis on adaptability and almost none on transformability. Overall, the ResAT shows that resilience is a meaningful approach to analyse agricultural-related policies. The tool has potential for the analysis of policy effects on resilience, however, further developments based on given critiques need to be considered.

Since the mid-1990s, discourse analysis has become an increasingly established framework in environmental policy analysis. The field has diversified in terms of conceptual approaches, methods, topics, and geographies. This special issue revisits trends and traditions regarding theoretical and methodological approaches, ‘old’ and ‘new’ discourses, and our knowledge about discursive effects. We contextualize and discuss the twelve contributions to this special issue against the broader trajectory of the field over the past 25 years. Our analysis reveals an abundance of theoretical approaches with limited cross-fertilization, a plethora of rich case studies but few attempts at meta-analysis, and subtle accounts of discursive effects on discourse, policy and practice without an overarching framework. We suggest seven directions for the field’s future evolution: a need for more comparative and multiple-case studies, theoretical cross-fertilization, pro-active integration of non-English-speaking research contexts, development of methodological capabilities to capture discursive developments across larger numbers of publics and policy arenas, a more explicit conceptualization of agency, power and materiality, a stronger collaboration with transdisciplinary approaches, and a reflexive engagement with the ‘critical’ ambition of discourse analysis.

This contribution takes a discourse analytical perspective to discuss long-term change and ideational power in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Initially the CAP replaced national farm support policies, absorbing productivist discourses that treated agriculture as exceptional. Productivism legitimised the CAP as farm income policy and achieved ideational hegemony. From 1980, a neoliberal discourse questioned farmers’ special treatment, focusing on efficiency, performance and effective use of taxpayer money. In response, the emerging multifunctionality discourse emphasised agriculture’s complex functions for rural areas and ecosystems, rallying to spend ‘public money for public goods’. Since the late 1990s, the three discourses have shared persuasive power in ideas. Consequently the Commission adopted a hybrid discourse, which allows member states to strategically select suitable elements for domestic persuasion. While the CAP has become chronically contested in policy fora, policy developments indicate that in decisive policy arenas, agricultural productivism and (post-) exceptionalism are still dominant and deeply entrenched.

The governance of genetic resources for food and agriculture is an essential part of the wider complex of food governance. Access to genetic material for plant and animal breeders and for farmers is a strategic resource in the global food system. Since the mid 1980s, genetic resources have been increasingly constituted as information and hence as the potential object of intellectual property rights (IPR), in particular patents. Mainly driven by case law, the patent regime has been extended to agricultural plants, animals and breeding technology. This development has been fiercely opposed by food, farm and development groups, but also by many traditional agriculture policy-makers. This paper provides a narrative policy analysis of the biopatents controversy, based on document analysis and interviews with experts and stakeholders in several countries. Three narratives are identified: innovation, community and life. These are linked to competing policy ideas about the appropriate IPR regime which claim that genetic resources should be treated as private, club or global common good. The paper demonstrates how the competing narratives are institutionally entrenched, rendering the biopatents controversy a wicked problem. In this context, the final part of the paper pursues my earlier observation that the competing narratives are entrenched in various single-purpose multi-level governance systems (Hooghe & Marks, 2003), such as the WTO, CBD, FAO or the patent system and advanced through allegedly technical and judicial processes of law harmonisation and creation. The paper discusses how the relative autonomy of technical working groups and jurisdictional boards established by multilateral treaties challenges notions of democratic and deliberative legitimacy. This fragmented, pluri-central expertocracy also reproduces partial narratives at the expense of competing perspectives or the development of overarching meta-narratives, reinforcing conflict between formally independent but overlapping regimes.