An operational definition of resilient agrifood systems in the face of multiple risks

This paper contributes to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)’s Programme Priority Area: Better Life 4 on resilient agrifood systems under the FAO Strategic Framework 2022–31. It aims to develop an operational definition of resilience that can support measurement, policy design, implementation and evaluation across FAO’s agrifood systems interventions. The paper combines a review of resilience literature with a participatory stocktaking exercise involving FAO divisions, technical units and decentralized offices through document analysis, an online stakeholders’ survey, and selected stakeholders’ interviews. The analysis highlights that resilience remains conceptually diverse and operationally fragmented, both in the literature and within FAO. Resilience is generally understood as the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to anticipate, prevent, absorb, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stressors while maintaining food security and livelihoods. However, important differences exist across organizational units, reflecting FAO’s decentralized structure and leading to fragmented operational approaches. Stakeholders emphasized the need for an operational definition that accounts for multiple scales of analysis, interacting risks, time horizons, and enabling institutional conditions, while integrating social, economic and environmental dimensions. Although there is broad convergence around key outcomes – including food security, nutrition, income stability and livelihood protection – tensions remain between viewing resilience as a capacity or as an outcome. Current resilience-building efforts mainly focus on ex ante interventions such as early warning systems, anticipatory action, climate-smart agriculture and risk management, while measurement practices continue to face challenges related to data availability, methodological capacity and lack of standardization. Overall, the findings highlight the need for a more coherent and operationally aligned resilience framework across FAO. To address these challenges, the paper proposes an outcome-oriented framework for operationalizing resilience. Resilience is operationally defined in relation to welfare outcomes rather than capacities themselves and the paper introduces context-specific operational definitions linked to different phases of shocks and recovery. To support implementation, the framework identifies complementary indicators of outcomes and capacities across multiple scales – micro, meso, macro and programme level – capturing both welfare dynamics and the mechanisms through which resilience is built. Grounded in principles of flexibility, comprehensiveness, harmonization and knowledge production, the proposed approach seeks to strengthen coherence across FAO interventions and improve resilience measurement, learning, and policy effectiveness in increasingly risk-prone agrifood systems.