Assessing the Impact of Public Policy on the Resilience of Farming Systems: A Case Study of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and its Implementation in the Netherlands

Farming systems in the European Union (EU) face various economic, social, institutional and environmental challenges that affect their abilities to produce public and private goods. The accumulation of these 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 and resilience outcomes have hardly been conceptualised and researched in-depth. The aim of this research is to address this gap by conceptualising and assessing how EU policy design enhances or constrains the resilience of farming systems. We develop an analytical framework to assess policies in terms of their ability to support the resilience of farming systems: the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT). Subsequently, we apply the ResAT in an analysis of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)’s expected effects on the resilience of two Dutch farming systems: arable farming in de Veenkoloniën and het Oldambt. Our findings show that the current policy goals and instruments are mostly focused on enhancing the robustness of the farming systems, while placing less emphasis on adaptability and almost none on transformability. We, therefore, argue that the current CAP is characterised by a limited understanding of resilience. In addition, we use the findings to discuss to what extent EU agricultural policy design reflects post-exceptionalist features and the usefulness of the ResAT to study post-exceptionalist policy. We recommend policy makers to realise more balance between robustness-, adaptability- and transformability-enhancing interventions in the CAP post-2020 reform to truly enhance the resilience of farming systems.