An instrumental‐reflexive approach to assessing and building food system resilience

Abstract For several decades resilience thinking has served as a major theoretical lens for social‐ecological research, with geographers playing important roles in both advancing the theory and offering meaningful critique. In recent years resilience thinking has also emerged as a promising tool for the assessment of food systems, yet there is significant disagreement among scholars as to the best way to apply resilience thinking to food systems. At the heart of these disagreements lie a set of conceptual tensions that have long existed in the resilience community regarding best practices for operationalizing resilience and the extent to which resilience thinking can (or should) engage with issues of social justice and power dynamics. Geographers, particularly those working in the fields of political ecology and critical physical geography, are well positioned to navigate these tensions and contribute to the growing scholarship on food system resilience through what I call an instrumental‐reflexive approach to resilience thinking. Drawing on scholarship on the role of environmental science in political ecology and critical physical geography, I develop an approach to resilience that deploys empirical assessments to provide instrumental knowledge of food systems, but also engages reflexively with empirical findings to consider how they interact with entrenched power relations across multiple scales—practices that have a long tradition in geographic scholarship. In so doing, I chart an approach to resilience that, provides significant utility for farmers and food system workers, and gives support (though not the ultimate justification) for dismantling unjust and exploitative structures in our current food systems.