What makes a farm resilient? A processual and relational approach
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Published
06-05-2026
Yentl Deroche
Yuna Chiffoleau
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9774-8693
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic shook the planet in 2020 and raised new questions and debates about food systems, highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of resilience within agricultural contexts. This article revisits the recent literature on farm resilience and proposes a conceptual and methodological framework to enrich the processual and relational approach. We review 72 of the most recent publications on farm resilience, generated primarily by the Covid-19 crisis. We highlight the common foundations of these articles, referring to the notion of resilience developed in ecology and sometimes directly applied to socio-ecological systems. We then group the works into two main approaches: the first is based on the search for determinants at the farm or farmer level, mostly developed in economics and agronomy and often based on statistical analysis; the second, mostly based on the social sciences and qualitative methods, focuses on analysing contexts favourable to farm resilience and opens up a processual and relational approach. Following this second line of research, we propose to enrich it with the contribution of economic and network sociology, using mixed methods to qualify and quantify the resources mobilised through relational chains to deal with disturbances. We discuss our framework in relation to other relational approaches in sociology applied to the resilience of socio-ecological systems, while emphasising the importance of also considering non-relationships in order to understand how the process of resilience reveals and potentially modifies power structures.
How to Cite
Deroche, Y. and Chiffoleau, Y. (2026) “What makes a farm resilient? A processual and relational approach”, The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 32(1), pp. 71–86. doi:10.48416/ijsaf.v31i1.700.
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Keywords
Farm resilience, literature review, economic sociology, relational chains, mixed methods
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Deroche, Y. and Chiffoleau, Y. (2026) “What makes a farm resilient? A processual and relational approach”, The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 32(1), pp. 71–86. doi:10.48416/ijsaf.v31i1.700.
