Challenges for Improving Agricultural Resilience in the Context of Sustainability and Rural Development

Research on economic resilience in agriculture is quite complicated due to the interdisciplinary nature of the notion. In agricultural, climate change, sustainability and food security research it appears as an endogenous phenomenon rather as the main one. This study aims to contribute to conceptualization of economic resilience in agriculture, revealing current and identifying future research directions. Bibliometric analysis supplemented with a literature overview serve this purpose. Results confirm the ambiguity and immaturity of economic resilience concept and its secondary position within overall agricultural resilience research framework.


Introduction
The high exposure of agricultural production to various types of risks in connection with the particularities of agricultural markets requires dedicated support policy measures on a wider scale. Recently, the global pandemic of COVID-19 showed a number of undesirable outcomes that once again stressed the need for reconsidering the resilience of food systems (Kumar et al., 2021).
Research on agricultural economic resilience, however, is scarce and fragmented. To systematize the existing knowledge and usage in the area a bibliometric analysis would be an important step forward to operationalizing the concept and applying resilience framework to agriculture. To the best of our knowledge, despite the fuzziness no such kind of analysis has been carried out on the concept of agricultural economic resilience. Therefore, our aim is to perform a bibliometric analysis, systematize the body of knowledge in the area and identify gaps for future research. This paper extends the discussion on agricultural resilience that has become especially important amid the global interruptions of the supply chains due to the pandemic. An earlier paper (Žičkienė et al., 2020) looked into the role of farmer's behavior in the context of agricultural resilience and, thus, was confined to a narrower issue. The present paper applies the scientometric approach and furthers the discussion on agricultural resilience by taking a much wider approach and exploring the whole body of literature on the topic and its relationships with the other disciplines. Thus, this paper provides the overview of the state-of-the-art research in agricultural resilience and draws recommendations for further analysis. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses the theoretical background of the agricultural resilience research. Section 3 presents the analytical approach taken. Section 4 presents the main findings. Finally, Section 5 concludes and identifies future research directions.

Theoretical preliminaries
The concept of resilience The resilience concept in the articles reviewed is used quite loosely. Many researchers (Pearson, 2010; Lin, 2011; Altieri et al., 2015) ground their resilience concept on the definition of Holling (1973) and Folke et al. (2010), which refers to resilience as the propensity of a system to retain its organizational structure, feedbacks and functions following a perturbation. Pretty (2008) defines resilience quite similarlyas the capacity of a system to buffer shocks and stresses. Bernues et al. (2011) refer to resilience as a narrower concept defining it as the short-term capacity to return to a state of equilibrium and maintain functionality when the system is confronted with a strong punctual perturbation and opposes it to adaptive capacity which reflects system's flexibility to face long-term modifications. Some researchers do not provide a clear definition of resilience concept used in the papers and its meaning may only be inferred from the context. Many of them (Challinor, 2007; Darnhofer, Fairweather and Moller, 2010) link resilience to system's adaptive capacities, which is defined as the capacity to reduce potentially negative effects of various perturbations either withstanding or recovering from them. Altieri and Nicholls (2013) refer to adaptive capacity as the set of social and agro-ecological preconditions that enable individuals or groups and their farms to respond to a perturbation in a resilient manner. Reidsma et al. (2010) do not explicitly use resilience concept, but similarly use the notion of adaptive capacity. In their work the adaptive capacity concept is expanded to include not only moderation of potential damages and coping with its consequences, but also taking advantage of emerging opportunities. Thompson and Scoones (2009) and Waage and Mumford (2008) differentiate between resilience and robustness (resistance) however does not provide a clear definition of neither of them. Giannakis and Brugemann (2015) present a review of resilience definitions used in regional resilience academic area (based on Martin and Sunley (2015), where there are three distinct approaches used: engineering, ecological and evolutionary. The engineering based concept of resilience focuses on the resistance of a system to perturbations and its ability to bounce-back to the pre-shock equilibrium. The ecological concept refers to resilience as a system's ability to keep its structure and feedbacks before moving into a new equilibrium state in the face of a shock. The evolutionary approach treats resilience as a capacity of a system to withstand the perturbation, recover from it or even bounce-forward, that is, to respond to shocks by adaptation, adaptability and transformation (Pike et al. 2010 cited from Giannakis et al. (2015). These three approaches encompass all of the above mentioned definitions of resilience.

Relationships between resilience, vulnerability and sustainability
In the literature analyzed the concepts of resilience, vulnerability and sustainability are very much interwoven and sometimes not easily distinguished. Researchers treat these phenomena either as complementary, or as opposite, or as part of each other. For example, Pretty (2008) refers to resilience as a part of sustainability, which also incorporates persistence (the capacity of systems to continue over long periods). Darnhofer, Fairweather and Moller (2010) propose that resilience offers a vision of sustainability, Altieri and Nicholls (2013) state that resilience is a necessary but not sufficient condition of sustainability. Tendall et al. (2015) refers to resilience and sustainability as complementary concepts. Giannakis and Bruggeman (2015), who analyze resilience of regions and represent resilience approaches coming from economic geography, treat resilience as a separate construct without discussing the linkages between resilience and sustainability. In some studies resilience concept is closely related to vulnerability. Altieri et al. (2015) argue that resilience (referred to as a response capacity) together with vulnerability and threat determine the risk of negative impact. Schilling

Determinants of resilience
The question of what increases (or inhibits) resilience is one of the most relevant issues prevailing in academic discussion in the resilience framework. In almost every article under our scope this question is being analyzed, albeit the depth and width of its scrutiny differs significantly. A variety of ways and methods have been proposed to increase resilience by different authors, comprising a wide range of forms (managerial, technical and financial), scales (local, regional and global) and actors (farmers, industries and governments) (Reidsma et al., 2010). However, the most important factors nurturing resilience surprisingly overlap in a majority of studies. Darnhofer, Fairweather and Moller , presenting a specialized study of insecticides' usage and ecosystems, argue that diversity is of key importance on ecosystem functioning. Lin (2011) and Altieri et al. (2015) propose that crop diversification is an effective method to improve resilience of agroecosystems. According to Lin (2011), crop diversification can improve resilience in a number of ways: by strengthening abilities to suppress pest outbreaks, dampening pathogen transmission, and by buffering crop production from the effects of negative meteorological events. Diversity creates conditions for redundancy. And redundancy is of paramount importance when some sort of changes occur, since it enables the continuance of the system functioning and provision of its key services. In the other study Altieri and Nicholls (2013) also add that social capital and social organization strategies used collectively by farmers in order to cope with the difficult circumstances are core elements of resilience. Giannakis (2015) basis his research on theoretical and practical findings that at a macro level (regional economy) the resilience is determined by several factors, such as the sectoral composition of the economy (especially its diversity), the skills of the workforce, the innovation rate, the connectivity and the institutional arrangements within regions.
Summarizing, the main determinants of resilience, as cited by the majority of researchers and confirmed by a number of theoretical and practical research findings, can be grouped into these categories: 1. Encouraging learning and acquisition of skills and granting access to relevant information and knowledge. 2. Combining different types of knowledge and stimulating innovations. 3. Nurturing diversity in its various forms at various spatial and temporal levels. 4. Creating opportunities for self-organization, intra and inter-scale linkages.

Types of resilience
In the literature there are two types of resilience researched: specified and general resilience. Specified resilience refers to the resilience of what, to what (e.g., the resilience of pig farming to classical swine fever) (Biggs et al., 2012). Whereas general resilience does not deal with any particular shock or particular aspect of the system that might be affected by that shock, but rather considers general system characteristics and capabilities that allow better reaction to various kinds of shocks and perturbations (Martin and Sunley, 2015). Resilience to a specific disturbance or event involves identifying a particular threshold effect such that the system will not recover to the same levels of performance or its earlier pattern of behavior if this threshold is crossed (Resilience Alliance, 2010). It is very important to make a distinction between these two kinds of resilience, because increasing resilience to some particular kind(s) of perturbations may lead to declining resilience to other types of disturbances. For example, if system redundancy is traded off to build resilience to one specific type of disturbance, then the system's capacity to cope with unexpected or completely novel challenges may be diminished (Resilience Alliance, 2010). Most of the articles analyzed in this paper focus on specified resilience with a frequent focus on namely resilience to climate change and the disturbances re-  (2015), although focusing their analysis on a meso-macro level, also research general resilience, investigating the processes through which the impacts of the recessionary shocks can be diffused to local economies through the linkages and interdependences between economic sectors with an example of Greece. All these studies show that COVID-19 crisis has boosted a large interest in the resilience of agri-food systems. A lot of empirical studies has been performed on the issue, however theoretical discussion on namely resilience phenomenon in agricultural sector at various levels is still lacking.

Methods
The data was retrieved on 30 th of November 2020. The Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core collection was chosen for the data mining. It guarantees the high standards of scientific integrity, as journals indexed in CA WoS are considered to apply one of the most formidable standards for a peer review process (Da Silva & Marmon, 2017). The time period for the data analysis covered years 1990-2020. The selected keywords were economic AND resilience AND agriculture. The search provided 668 documents. The initial set inclusion and exclusion criteria are presented in Table 1. The rationale for setting the inclusion and exclusion criteria is the following. Authors are usually not familiar with other than English and their native languages, so they would not be capable to critically assess and evaluate papers prepared in other languages. Bibliometric clustering techniques use abstract and keywords for the analysis. Papers without keywords cannot be properly processed, so must be excluded. The selection of document type is important due to the fact, that typically communication or technical reports are not obliged to follow rigorous peer-review procedures (van Raan, 1996). In order to avoid compromising research integrity we decided to avoid such types of papers. Despite the above-mentioned standards, we found all extracted documents satisfying the criteria to be included into the analysis. The data was processed using VOSviewer 1. aspects and can be attributed to various disciplines. For this purpose, we apply four techniques of bibliometric clustering: 1) a bibliographic clustering of publications in economic resilience in agriculture; 2) a co-citation analysis of scientific documents and publication sources in a researched field; 3) co-occurrence of keywords and 4) co-authorship analysis on institutional and country levels. . This year may serve as a threshold for researchers conducting literature review, as it is noted, that after 2004 research on economic resilience in agriculture started gaining momentum and was extrapolated to other disciplines, such as sustainability (Perrings, 2006), water management (2004), assessment of institutional quality (Jayararnan, 2004), adaptive management practices (Lin, 2011), environmental risk and natural resources management (Deshingkar, 2012) or even to a political context (Meitzner, 2010). In order to reveal the most influential publications on economic resilience in agriculture, we arranged them according to the number of citations (Table 2). Analyzing most cited publications on economic resilience in agriculture we noticed a few interconnected theoretical sprouts. Economic resilience in agriculture has been often researched through the lens of sustainability concept (Pretty, 2008    In order to better assess the geographical dispersion of research on economic resilience in agriculture, the countries were ranked according to the number of publications on economic resilience in agriculture  (Table 4). The analysis revealed an unprecedented concentration of scientific publications of economic resilience in agriculture within 10 most productive countries, which account for more than 92% of all publications in the field. Such accumulation of knowledge in a small number of states creates unfavorable conditions for further knowledge acquisition and dissemination. It also may play a role in hindering increase in competition in production of agricultural goods, since even in the primary sector knowledge-based management practices tend to grant competitive advantage (Vasiljević & Savić, 2013), thus making the achievement of convergence in agriculture even more complicated (Volkov et al., 2019). The journal engaged into dissemination of research on economic resilience in agriculture are presented in Table 5. Among them, Sustainability is followed by Agricultural Systems with the number of relevant publications differing more than 3 times. Such disparity may be explained by the fact, that Sustainability is more interdisciplinary, in addition, resilience based studies are very often interconnected with sustainability framework, making an above mentioned publication source an ideal vehicle for the dissemination of research in a particular field. It is worth noticing, that only Agricultural Systems is a truly agricultural journal among the most productive publication sources in economic resilience in agricultural domain. Others journals focus on environmental issues (Environmental Research Letters, Regional Environmental Change, Environmental Science & Policy, Ecology & Society), policy (Land Use Policy, Journal of Rural Studies), or publish sustainability related issues (Sustainability, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, Agroecology and Sustainable Foods Systems). This fact once again confirms the interdisciplinary nature of economic resilience and reveals the shortage of its research in agricultural economics' domain. A bibliographic analysis of research on economic resilience in agriculture In order to reveal interconnectedness of scientific research in economic resilience in the field of agriculture, we conducted a bibliographic analysis. This method allows to identify the existing layers of the concept under investigation (Brandao et al., 2017) and enables to predict the future research directions of the scientific notion more precisely (Youngblood & Lahti, 2018). To investigate the reference relationships between different scientific documents researching economic resilience in the domain agriculture we employed a bibliographic coupling technique, which is a common tool in a bibliographic research (Habib & Afzal, 2019). The preselected threshold for the document to be included into the analysisno less than 25 citations.

Results and discussion
Analyzing the results of bibliographic coupling, 8 distinct clusters can be identified (Fig. 2). The biggest and most influential network is dominated by Pretty's (2008)  It is worth noticing, that although the green network shows higher number of citations, its total link strength is lower indicating red cluster's higher thematic relatedness and interconnectedness, which presuppose a narrower and more specific research area compared to the green cluster. This is confirmed by a heat map analysis, showing more intense yellow color around red cluster publications. The sixth network (the light blue) is led by Schilling (2012)  In order to reveal publication sources, most engaged in dissemination of knowledge of economic resilience in agriculture, we conducted a co-citation analysis of scientific journals (Fig. 4). The threshold to be included into analysisno less than 5 published publications on economic resilience in agriculture.   Keywords are considered to reveal the nature of the study and provide the initial and essential information about the research (Baker, 2004). The analysis of co-occurrence of keywords provide insights about the prevailing research directions of the investigated field (van Eck and Waltman, 2014). In order to better understand the development of the research directions on economic resilience in agriculture, we conducted a keyword co-occurrence analysis (Fig.  5). The keyword has to occur at least 5 times in scientific documents to be included into analysis. Analyzing co-occurrence of keywords, one distinct cluster (violet color) containing such keywords as adaptation, vulnerability, climate change and vulnerability emerges. It means that these keywords appear together very frequently and indicate studies aimed at evaluating vulnerability and adaptive capacity of agriculture to climate change. Another distinct cluster, represented by the red color is centered around keywords occurring in research aimed at evaluating sustainability of agriculture or resilience under sustainability framework. A smaller cluster centered on biodiversity, systems and sustainable agriculture keywords can be distinguished. These studies are focused on maintaining the biodiversity of agriculture under the climate change conditions. All other clusters are too densely interconnected to allow drawing their borders and thus hinder a possibility of further analysis. It should be noted, that although the economic resilience in agriculture appears as a focal point of our research and the corresponding keywords were used, no clear cluster representing economic facet of resilience in agriculture was identified. This outcome not only indicates an obvious underrepresentation of economic resilience in agricultural research context, but also specifies a research area for the future investigations, as this scientific vacuum should be covered.

Conclusions
The study revealed that economic resilience in agriculture is a promising research area, since it is quite scarcely researched: both theoretically and empirically. Such a scientific vacuum impedes development of the overall agricultural resilience research, as economic resilience is considered to be an inseparable part of agricultural resilience concept (Chonabayashi, Jithitikulchai & Qu, 2020) and is focal in a development of more sophisticated variations of agricultural resilience, such as climate-smart agriculture (Taylor, 2018). It was found, that typically, researchers do not concentrate on the economic resilience of agriculture as on the focal research object, but do investigate it under the frameworks related to sustainability, climate change, soil or water management, institutional quality, food security or environmental management. Although these studies provide some additional scientific knowledge on economic resilience in agriculture, it lacks a holistic overarching approach which would be possible if economic resilience in agriculture would be considered as the main research object.
The sidelined position of the economic resilience within the overall agricultural resilience research framework, which is confirmed by a very high geographical concentration of related research, led to a situation, that although introduced quite a long time ago, this notion is still in a state of flux and differences in its definitions may lead to a misconception in research objectives in the area. Although there have already been some attempts to conceptualize resilience into an operational and measurable framework, the general consensus on what exactly economic resilience of agriculture means and what it encompasses has not been achieved yet. Quite a low interconnectedness of a research conducted by various separate research institutions hinders the knowledge transfer and slows down the progress in the development of research in economic resilience in agricultural domain. The main suggestion for the future research directions is to put economic resilience of agriculture at the forefront of the research. Clear delineation of resilience and its differentiation from sustainability and vulnerability concepts are necessary. Going further, the relationships among different dimensions of resilience -absorption of a shock, adaptation to it and transformation after italso need attention. Conceptualization of resilience into a measurable construct could boost its empirical research. Studies, directed to indication of factors increasing or hindering eco-nomic resilience in agriculture, could be especially fruitful. Progress in this area would help to speed up research in other related fields, such as climate-smart agriculture or vulnerability of rural populations in less developed countries as well.