Keywords

Introduction: Clarifying the Policy Language

The concept of food security is decades-old, its initial definition established in the 1974 FAO World Food Conference and further refined in the 1996 World Food Summit (Shaw, 2007). Its plasticity has been much remarked (see chapters “Food security from a food system perspective” by Jess Fanzo, and “Towards an integrated model of food security and resilience” by Mark Constas), with questions about whether a term which means all things to all people can retain policy and research value (Candel et al., 2013; Carolan, 2013). Yet the term has not disappeared, and instead, Maye and Kirwan argue, a ‘fractured consensus’ has arisen around food security—highlighting that, while each interested party may agree that the outcome of food security, the absence of hunger, is a goal worth pursuing, how to actually achieve that state is far more contentious (Maye & Kirwan, 2013). There may be consensus on the broad objective of achieving food security without agreement on how to do so.

The notion of food resilience is a more recent arrival into this policy milieu (Tendall et al., 2015) and is explored in more depth in Mark Constas’ chapter in this volume. In the present chapter, food resilience is utilised as a catch-all term to capture the broad range of definitions and narratives exhibited by development agencies (see also the De Pinto, Islam and Katic chapter). Some adopt ‘climate change resilience’ as part of the wider food security narrative; others see ‘resilience’ as implicit within a food systems approach; and others are interested in ‘agricultural resilience’ as part of the climate change discourse.

The notion of resilience derives from material science—before it was applied to natural ecology—to convey the capacity of materials to be elastic and to return to form after external pressure. The notion was borrowed and incorporated into modern (post-mid-twentieth century) environmental sciences (Béné et al., 2018; Moser et al., 2010). Its usefulness for environmental analysis was its intellectual flexibility. It could capture processes as varied as slow ecosystems adaptation or recovery from sudden shocks and external stress (Bahadur et al., 2010). While its initial appearance was limited to natural sciences, its use spread to the social sciences (Berkes & Folke, 1998) and today has become common across disciplines and policy. In this spread, resilience is perhaps following the path taken by ecosystems and sustainability, being picked up by business analysts and economists who now speak of resilience in financialised terms completely divorced from the complexity and nuances of its original material or even ecological meaning. In this sense, the tight approach of Tendall and colleagues (2015) is clear; they see food resilience as a two-dimensional concept: the capacity to bounce back from shock, plus durability over time. While those two core features remain central to our present conceptualisation, it has been argued elsewhere that a social dimension is also needed for the term to be of comprehensive value to policy-makers (Lang, 2020). Unless people, habits and cultures are included, the term has a hole at its heart. How can a food system be resilient unless it is also part of how people live and eat?

The risk of an unreflective use of ‘resilience’ is real; meaning and value lessen if used loosely by institutions. Already academics fear its potential is being dissipated (Bahadur et al., 2010; Béné et al., 2016; Leach, 2008). Optimistically, however, the research reported here still sees its value as a ‘code’ for key challenges widely agreed to be facing humanity, backed by hard data, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, natural disasters and human conflict. Furthermore, the notion of resilience has a critical edge in discussions that encompass access to justice, women’s empowerment, economic issues such as livelihoods, as well as to political processes and governance. The concept of resilience has value for development policy if institutions and agencies, such as those appraised here, retain this ‘edge’ (Béné et al., 2018; Chelleri, 2012; Twigg, 2007). The term’s applicability across diverse discourses means we need to ask if its utility is being blunted as it becomes an interdisciplinary ‘pluralistic’ term with many definitions and meanings (Pearson, 2013; Béné et al., 2018). Its core meaning, the capacity to bounce back after shock, remains central to the narratives of agencies despite, as Béné and colleagues have said, the lack of a rigorous framework that marries the theoretical and the practical (Béné et al., 2014, 2018).

In this chapter, we report on our exploration of how food security and food resilience, these two rich yet stretched concepts, are being used by international development agencies. The motivation for the study was simple and pragmatic. How, we ask, are both terms presented—not in speeches by political leaders or in protestations of civil society or in erudite academic studies, but by a sample of key policy actors in the relevant policy zone? How, in other words, do development agencies, who have considerable financial reach and influence, utilise or present these two policy concepts? Do they mean the same thing? What are their variations, if any, in the policy narrative to which the agencies contribute?

These are deceptively simple questions. In practice, the meaning of policy terms can and do change over time, and resilience is no exception (Béné et al., 2018). While we initially decided to focus on a narrow slice of time, setting the cut-off at the emergence of resilience in the 2017 State of Food Security report titled “Building Resilience for Peace and Food Security” (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2017), many of the formative reports that still influence the various agencies predated this cut-off, so we instead focused on identifying the significant reports of each agency around the keywords of food security and resilience. The goal was not to collate what we think they mean, but what the agencies themselves say they mean. The aim of this study was not to provide a historical perspective, such as the one provided by Mark Constas in this book, nor to track the evolution of the usage of ‘resilience’ within food security, such as done by de Pinto, Islam and Katic, also in this book, but instead to provide a snapshot view of a wide range of international development agencies’ own interpretations of, and narratives on, resilience. The appraisal was concluded before the UN Food Systems Summit, the COP15 conference on biodiversity and COP26 on climate change events held in late 2021, all of which add to international debate on both food security and food resilience.

Aims, Methods and Approach

The study reported here is an attempt to understand the meaning of two key concepts situated within particular narratives and a contribution to how policy language can be used to justify or legitimise particular decisions or policy orientations (Béné et al., 2016, 2018; Goldstein et al., 2012). Our approach drew upon experience of earlier work by one of us (Tim Lang) for the World Health Organisation, which reviewed major food companies for how seriously they took diet-related health matters and whether they followed the WHO’s agreed approach to diet and health (Lang et al., 2006; Nestle, 2006). This, in turn, drew on established methods by bodies such as the US Government Accountability Office and the UK National Audit Office that specifically ask agency programmes what their goals and processes are in relation to outcomes.

In the present study, we report only the first step. We explore what development agencies say they mean when referring to food security and resilience, particularly in relation to economic, environmental, societal, political and public health issues. We then contrast three types of international development agency—bilateral, regional and multilateral—to derive trends, commonalities and differences from their narratives. Our study thus only considers agencies’ meanings and intentions, not their delivery.

16 international development agencies and regional banks were chosen to represent three different types of agencies: (i) bilateral development agencies; (ii) multilateral or regional development banks; and (iii) UN-based international development agencies. Of our sample, six national donor agencies were selected as illustrations of bilateral development agencies. Of these six, it should be noted that five are from countries whose main policy and operational language is English (Australia, Canada, Ireland, UK, US), and one whose English-language website was their secondary one (Sweden). A further five regional agencies were selected to highlight the narratives of regional, multilateral development banks: Asian Development Bank (ADB), African Development Bank (AfDB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), to cover five regions of the world engaged in the development community. A further three UN agencies (Food and Agricultural Organisation [FAO], United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF] and the World Food Programme [WFP]) and two Bretton-Woods finance institutions—the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—were also appraised.

It should be noted that the UK’s DfiD—long criticised by elements of UK Conservatism for being too liberal, globalist and independent, and insufficiently linking aid to perceived national economic self-interest (Mitchell, 2020)—was dissolved in September 2020 and its responsibilities were merged with the Foreign Office, creating the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). The present study does not report on this new hybrid body. This restructuring of the UK development agency echoes changes made elsewhere. The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) had been an independent-standing government body until 2013, when it was merged with the Department of Foreign Affairs, rebranded in 2015 to Global Affairs Canada (GAC). AusAID was similarly an autonomous government-funded development agency until 2014, when merged with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). The FCDO, GAC and DFAT thus share similarities, not least the reframing of humanitarian development support under national trade policy. These agencies are thus different to Irish Aid, SIDA and USAID, for example, who retain singular mandates on development work, rather than a merging of development with trade.

The websites of the 16 agencies, their yearly reports, policy documents, white papers, and prominent research programmes were searched for information on resilience, food security, and food security and resilience (as a paired concept). With large organisations, one can often find deep and thoughtful documents which go against the main grain of the organisation, so by searching within the agencies’ main documents and their formal self-presentations, we tried to capture where their focus lies. We searched for relevant keywords, including ‘food security’, ‘resilience’, ‘food resilience’, ‘food security resilience’, ‘food systems resilience’, ‘agriculture resilience’ and ‘resilient’. This form of narrative analysis assumes that language doesn’t mirror the world, but actively reflects and shapes it (Fischer & Forester, 1993; Roe, 1994). By establishing a scoping template set in a broad framework, each agency was put through the same ‘snapshot’ case study method. This process could be endless, as extensive and deep as each organisation’s administrative structure and connections; we therefore limited the task by focusing on how ‘accessible’ and ‘prominent’ the concept appears in the agencies’ own literature and on their website, being able to be accessed by searching on their websites or through search engines. This qualitative process allows for a relatively rapid appraisal of how agencies present their narratives, even if it may well be that other more nuanced or divergent internal positions also exist within those agencies. What we report here is a mirror of what they say they do at a certain point in time. We concur with Béné et al. (2018) that a ‘snapshot’ analysis has limitations due to the malleability and evolution of narratives but, given the policy influence wielded by the agencies we report on here, there is value in capturing, comparing and contrasting what they say they do and want to do.

Findings: ‘Fractured Consensus’ in What the Agencies Say They Mean

Our findings reinforce the thinking that development agencies frequently invoke resilience as an umbrella term when addressing many different sectors and ways of thinking, using different frameworks of development (Bahadur et al., 2010; Béné et al., 2012, 2018; Chelleri, 2012; Leach, 2008; Twigg, 2007). Our study suggests that there is a ‘fractured consensus’ not only within food security, as noted earlier, but also within the concept of resilience. We detect a similar disagreement around food security and resilience as a paired concept. A fractured consensus arises when there is the agreement that food security, resilience or food resilience might be important objectives, but disagreement on how these objectives should be achieved, or even what those objectives entail. The narrative-creation and framing around these concepts thus produce differentiated interpretations and meanings to related issues, with previous underlying ideological narratives and policy commitments by agencies, governments and expert bodies leading to specific ‘policy solutions’ that may well exacerbate the issues identified through data and contribute to the obfuscation of the underlying issues (Lang & Barling, 2012).

Several agencies, particularly the multilateral agencies such as World Bank and UN agencies, have placed ‘resilience’ as a central direction for many development sectors. ‘Resilience’ is a scaffolding in their frameworks (Béné et al., 2016), becoming ‘Resilience Development’ (FAO, 2019a; World Bank, 2020). Resilience has thus become a core concept that permeates every other aspect of their agendas, utilised in many different contexts and with a broad range of implications. Table 4.1 gives examples. Although far from exhaustive, the list illustrates broad usage.

Table 4.1 Types of resilience and examples of agencies who address it
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Notions of food resilience vary greatly: from in-depth, complex frameworks, such as FAO’s landmark document Food and Nutrition Security Resilience Framework (FAO, 2015), as well as related institutions, such as in USAID’s rebranding in 2019 of their core food security institution to the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (USAID, 2020), to the bare minimum of linking agriculture with climate resilience, such as IDB’s Climate Resilience Sustainability Report (IDB, 2020a) or even complete omission of the term, such as DFAT’s lack of discourse around food resilience, focusing instead on ‘food and trade’ as an interlinked core concept (DFAT, 2020). The scaffolding approach many agencies take to resilience means that even when it is not explicitly mentioned, the intent implies that the concept is still there in some fashion. In regional development bank reports, for example, resilience in relation to food security was mainly used in terms of a broader framework (ADB, 2015; AfDB, 2016; IDB, 2020a; IsDB, 2020b). Previous analysts have highlighted how this systematic discourse on resilience, in lieu of a rigorous, unified framework, may be misleading (Béné et al., 2016; Leach, 2008). A gradient of use ranges from broad application of the concepts (‘Resilience as a Central Paradigm’; Béné et al., 2016) to specific focus, such as institutions that exist to solely address food security and resilience. This variability can be shown in, for example, how resilience is used in relation to climate change, where resilience is attempted to be quantified and addressed, to the term being thrown in to a longer text on food systems, where there are no quantifiable or concrete goals in relation to resilience specifically. In this respect, resilience seems to be exhibiting some of the plasticity used for ‘sustainability’ in relation to agriculture (ADB, 2009; DfiD, 2016; IDB, 2019, 2021; SIDA, 2017; World Bank, 2020). A more detailed exploration of the utilisation of resilience within a climate change context can be found in de Pinto, Islam and Katic’s chapter in this book.

Our initial analysis of the narratives around food security and resilience suggested some themes. These were grouped into five: Environment, Economy, Society, Politics and Public Health (see Table 4.2). In each of them, there was substantial complexity. Under Environment, for example, concerns such as agriculture, climate change, and water are frequently invoked, while others such as ecosystems, soil or biodiversity were less frequently cited. Some agencies such as the FAO attempt to capture as many themes as possible, while others focus narrowly on specific aspects. The EBRD focused almost exclusively on economic aspects of resilience in food security (EBRD, 2018). In complex terrain such as this, lending itself to interdisciplinary analysis, it is not surprising that the food resilience discourse should cross-reference to matters such as nutrition security, water security and so on. In this sense, resilience is a new lens to address old issues.

Table 4.2 Emerging themes and sub-themes around food resilience
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The following sections take a closer look at the three categories of development agencies appraised and compare them, going from bilateral development agencies, regional development banks, to the multilateral development agencies.

Bilateral Development Agencies

Six bilateral development agencies were selected for appraisal. Table 4.3 lays out the broad narratives on food security and resilience, either as specific definitions or how these agencies broadly engage with the terms.

Table 4.3 Bilateral agencies—narratives on food security & resilience
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Food Security and Food Resilience Narratives

Four out of the six agencies had explicit definitions on food security, though none overlapping, leaving the GAC and Irish Aid without any official definitions of those specific concepts. Irish Aid and GAC instead framed their discourse around hunger. Each bilateral agency also utilised its own interpretation of resilience, albeit often heavily borrowed from or influenced by existing frameworks. Despite DfID, GAC, SIDA and USAID all being members of the Global Resilience Partnership (GRC), a network of public and private organisations established in 2014 (Global Resilience Partnership, 2018) ostensibly to collate and share knowledge and policy on resilience, there is little overlap in their definitions. Appendices 1 and 2 give additional detail on the key aspects of the food security and resilience narratives among bilateral development agencies—including elements around focal points, policy objectives, delivery mechanisms, target groups, budget and policy scale.

As mentioned, Irish Aid utilised the concept of hunger as the underpinning of their aid work, which is perhaps unsurprising considering Ireland’s history with the 1845–1849 Great Famine, having had a lasting impact on the Irish political psyche (Jordon, 1998; Kinealy, 2002; Mokyr & Ó Gráda, 2002).

Ireland’s history and experience of famine echoes through the generations and influences our approach to helping those with whom we share our humanity in the fight against poverty and hunger. — Brian Cowen, Irish Aid Hunger Task Force Report (2008, p. 4).

This quote from the former Prime Minister of Ireland illustrates how context can define what is meant by food security. The deep impact of the Irish Great Famine permeates Irish Aid’s humanitarian policy language and goals. The urgency of hunger prevention is a seam running through its approach to maternal and child malnutrition and smallholder agriculture improvement, with twenty per cent of Irish Aid’s budget in 2019 allocated to ‘hunger-related activities’ (Irish Aid, 2020). Similarly, Ireland’s resilience discourse is around ‘empowering’ communities.

In direct contrast, Australia’s DFAT had an extensive definition of food security centred on trade and economic opportunities, with the goal of further opening of markets a central component, along with increasing agricultural production and access to food (DFAT, 2020). Australia has positioned itself as a regional economic powerhouse with long-standing neoliberal policies focused on ‘improving trade’ and ‘opening markets’. Sixty per cent of the Australian agricultural market is export-oriented (Lawrence et al., 2013). Its resilience discourse, similarly, highlights how shocks ‘undermine growth’.

SIDA’s definition on food security leans heavily on food being a right that is central to a ‘decent’ life (SIDA, 2017). SIDA cites the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as shaping its approach to development. Furthermore, its definition of resilience holds a particular emphasis on neutrality and impartiality, which have been Sweden’s guiding principles since at least World War II.

Resilience should, wherever possible, be mainstreamed in activities to ensure that humanitarian aid helps to strengthen the resilience, recovery and adaptation capacity of populations affected by natural disasters, conflicts or health threats, such as epidemics, without compromising on the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality— Strategy for SIDA (2017–2020 [2017])

USAID, in contrast, utilises the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) definition of food security, expanding it to include language of economic prosperity. USAID also utilises the UN definition of resilience at its core, expanding upon it to facilitate economic growth.

For USAID, resilience is the ability of people, households, communities, countries, and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerability and facilitates inclusive growth—USAID website (2020 [emphasis ours])

These examples help illustrate how both food security and resilience take on their parent countries’ political and ideological traditions, both historically and contemporaneously.

Utilising a gradient scale, from a ‘simple’ to a ‘complex’ engagement with food resilience, the findings suggest that USAID leads the field, followed by the now-defunct DfID, with GAC, SIDA and Irish Aid relying more on partnership programmes with multilateral agencies, and DFAT, due to its isolated location, focusing on its own partnerships with regional NGOs and interest groups.

Through its Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, USAID works with a host of partners to advance inclusive agriculture-led growth, resilience, nutrition, and water security, sanitation and hygiene in priority countries to help them accelerate and protect development progress—USAID website (2020)

USAID has promulgated the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS) in 2019, driven by its agenda of ‘self-reliance’ and strengthening resilience in the nations that it targets. Other agencies vary greatly to the degree that they consider food resilience, if at all. Our finding is that food resilience was mainly invoked through narratives around agriculture and climate change, with DFAT, DfiD and SIDA lacking substantial narratives around resilience as a paired concept with food security beyond agriculture and climate change (DFAT, 2017; DfID, 2016; SIDA, 2017). Irish Aid was more occupied with livelihood resilience in its ‘hunger’ discourse (Irish Aid, 2016). These disparities highlight how a humanitarian framework, such as Irish Aid’s, changes the foci of how resilience is applied, in contrast to development frameworks that utilise more technocratic approaches. SIDA’s discourse, for example, is still centred around sustainable agriculture as a core policy goal in food security (SIDA, 2017). ‘Resilience in food systems’ is ‘Principle 4’ of its five principles for attaining ‘sustainable agriculture’; resilience is utilised within a sustainable agriculture discourse rather than as an overarching, standalone, component.

Enhanced resilience of people, communities and ecosystems is key to sustainable agriculture. In the context of sustainable food and agriculture, resilience is the capacity of agro-ecosystems, farming communities, households or individuals to maintain or enhance system productivity by preventing, mitigating or coping with risks, adapting to change, and recovering from shocks—SIDA (2017)

The GAC, who are core funders of the Global Resilience Partnership alongside USAID and SIDA, utilise a partnership approach when addressing their programmes—as such, their website lacks a clear definition or discourse on resilience, as well as a lack of transparency of the breakdown of their budget towards these goals (Brown, 2021). The Canadian government contributed US$38 million to a joint FAO, WFP and IFAD project, the ‘Rome-based Agencies Resilience Initiative’. This was focused on DRC, Niger and Somalia and applied the UN’s resilience framework for development work (FAO, 2019b). It reflects a novel approach among bilateral agencies, where Canada’s own bilateral agency has taken a backseat to the Canadian government’s direct contributions to the UN on resilience and food security (FAO, 2019b). Another example is the Canadian government, rather than the GAC, being a core funder of the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP, 2018). This may lie behind GAC’s light website attention to food resilience; there is more attention to climate resilience and economic resilience, particularly in the Caribbean (GAC, 2018, 2020b). The FAO report on the Rome-based Agencies Resilience Initiative clearly outlines that this is a pilot for the Canadian government, who may be interested in pursuing this approach to development in the future. However, despite the disparate way food resilience was addressed on the GAC website, it was the only agency appraised that utilised ‘resilience’ on its website when discussing ‘hunger and malnutrition’.

Broad target groups could be indicated without much specificity as to whose resilience was being addressed. Bilateral agencies, by and large, kept it vague—with USAID mentioning ‘vulnerable communities’, DfID considering ‘rural families’, and DFAT and SIDA highlighting farmers and fishermen. Irish Aid was one agency that actively considered ‘whose’ resilience, without reaching a conclusion, raising the question in a 2016 document without ultimately specifying a target group (Irish Aid, 2016). Consequently, the current engagement on target groups by bilateral agencies in general seems superficial and rhetorical.

USAID has by far the largest budget, as well as the most developed policy goals and discourse on food resilience, of all the bilateral agencies. USAID is the only bilateral agency that has developed ways of measuring resilience (excepting the now-defunct DfiD), with a fully-fledged discourse around food security and resilience (USAID, 2017). USAID’s Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS) is focused on the ‘Feed the Future Initiative’. The goal of GFSS, like RFS’s remit, is to promote “global food security, resilience and nutrition” (USAID, 2020). Due to the vast resources that USAID has at its disposal, we interpret its relative influence as being more comparable to multilateral agencies, being able to operate globally, formulate clear definitions and measurement indices, as well as operationalise programmes independently. Due to more limited budgets, other bilateral agencies rely on partnerships or otherwise take a targeted approach to where their money goes, tending to choose a ‘topic’ to focus on, such as GAC focusing on nutrition security, SIDA on sustainable agriculture and DFAT aiming its funding towards facilitating trade, or a region, such as Irish Aid predominantly active in Africa, while DFAT’s sphere of influence is South-East Asia and the Pacific.

Regional Development Banks

Food Security and Food Resilience Narratives

The regional development banks, in contrast to the bilateral and multilateral development agencies, are broad funders, not having specific mandates in the same way UN agencies might have. The ability to command greater economic influence lends itself to be influential in shaping policy in their respective regions, making their narratives around food resilience important to highlight. The regional banks appraised in our study showed more consistent narratives and definitions (among themselves) than the wide-ranging definitions seen with bilateral agencies. Table 4.4 lays out the food security and resilience narratives fostered by the regional development banks. The ADB, AfDB, IDB and EBRD have fairly strict geographical remits—ADB covering Asia (with particular focus on South and South-East Asia), AfDB covering Africa, IDB covering Central and South America, and EBRD covering Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In contrast, the IsDB cover Islamic nations regardless of geographic location, and while most of their work is centred on MENA (Middle East and North Africa), IsDB also find themselves in South-East Asia and South Asia.

Table 4.4 Regional development banks—narratives of food security & resilience
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The general focal points of the regional development banks can be simplified as three main themes—economic development, agricultural production and climate resilience. These ‘big ideas’ have dominated the narrative on food security for decades and are in line with the larger multilateral agencies’ development agendas, who are seen as ‘influential’ (Shaw, 2007). Development banks place a central emphasis on economic development, particularly in terms of ‘developing markets’, with strong focus on economic and technical solutions (ADB, 2015; AfDB, 2016; EBRD, 2018; IDB, 2015; IsDB, 2020b).

Yet even among the development banks, this discourse varies. Akin to the bilateral agencies, the interpretation of resilience through the specific historical, political/ideological or other lens of each regional development bank provides space for disparities in narratives to emerge. The ADB, for instance, looks at resilience from the perspective of natural disasters and climate change (ADB, 2016)—with many areas of Asia having a recent history of being severely impacted by natural disasters, this focus on disaster management resilience is perfectly in line with the priorities of the region. With the increasing impact of climate change becoming apparent across Africa, it stands to reason that the AfDB places climate change resilience at the heart of its ‘Feed Africa Strategy’ (AfDB, 2016), with some acknowledgments of ‘resilience in livelihoods’ and ‘socio-economic shocks’ (AfDB, 2016). In contrast, the EBRD’s resilience narrative is exclusively focused on market resilience (EBRD, 2019a, b), which is in line with the European region mainly consisting of high-income countries with highly developed agribusinesses, while the IsDB’s broader resilience narrative is centred around conflict resolution and ‘fragility’ of nation-states, reflecting the history of political instability and conflict in MENA, IsDB’s priority region (IsDB, 2019a, 2019b). These narratives around food security and food resilience are reflected in the overall strategic goals of the regional development banks. Four of the five regional development banks have extensive discourses on food security and resilience, showing a more elaborated approach than the bilateral agencies.

Despite the greater consistency in definitions, this shows there is still variation, even in its food security definitions, from the IDB utilising the 1996 WFS definition and the IsDB utilising the World Bank’s definition (also derived from the 1996 WFS definition, albeit with some changes), with the ADB and the EBRD utilising their own definitions. AfDB, surprisingly, lack any concrete definition of food security on their website, instead frequently referencing the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs (AfDB, 2020).

The divergences in discourse, budgeting and policy priorities, as laid out in Appendices 3 and 4, reflect the diverging aims and goals of the respective development banks, such as the EBRD’s entire focus on the economic aspects of food security, while the ADB focuses heavily on climate change resilience and agricultural productivity. It should be noted that ADB was the only agency appraised, from any category, where ‘resilience’ was utilised in their working definition of food security.

Food security is the state achieved when sufficient food of adequate quality is consistently available to meet consumer demand at affordable prices—EBRD website (2021b)

ADB's efforts and strategy to achieve food security in the region emphasizes the integration of agricultural productivity, market connectivity, and resilience against shocks and climate change impacts as the three pillars to achieve sustainable food security—ADB website (2020)

As one example, the ADB places resilience against shocks and climate change impacts as one of its core emphases, alongside agricultural productivity and market connectivity, in its resilience development framework (ADB, 2015, 2019). Further, the ADB has an extensive discourse on sustainable food security, called the ‘Operational Plan for Sustainable Food Security in Asia and the Pacific’ (OPSFS) (ADB, 2009, 2015). This highlights the centrality of resilience to the ADB’s overall strategy.

In contrast, for the AfDB, ‘Climate Resilience Funding’ is one of seven different initiatives laid out, among increasing productivity, infrastructure investment, agricultural financing and agribusiness (AfDB, 2016). While the AfDB sets ‘Food Security and Agriculture’ as a core part (along with ‘Gender’ and ‘Fragile States’) of their ‘areas of special emphasis’, resilience is not a specific focal point and lacks a concrete definition. The term, however, is still used throughout AfDB reports, such as in AfDB’s ‘Strategy for 2013–2022’ report (AfDB, 2013).

For the IDB, ‘resilience’ and ‘food security’ are conceptualised separately, with the Food Security and COVID-19 Report in 2020 having only two mentions of resilience (IDB, 2020b) and the IDB’s own internal 2015 Review of the IDB’s food security strategy critical of the lack of clear conceptualisation of food security; we can also note that food security is grouped together with environment and climate change, but with no clear explanation of the relationships between these concepts (IDB, 2015, p. 6), and with no clear reference to resilience. As such, the IDB kept the concepts separate. The 2019 Sustainability Report, for example, does not have a single mention of food security, despite plenty of attention towards climate resilience (IDB, 2020a). While the IDB’s Climate Change Action Plan makes passing references to food security and agriculture, it is secondary to its discourse on climate resilience (IDB, 2021).

The IsDB, in turn, leans heavily on existing narratives around food security (IsDB, 2018), while the EBRD exclusively emphasises market forces in a purely economic discourse (EBRD, 2021a, 2021b). For them, food resilience means resilience of agribusiness and markets, with attention given to access to finance and ‘improving’ trade:

Resilience in food security is improved by making agriculture more productive and more resilient to external shocks including climate change. Making value chains more efficient, reducing losses and improving trade both increase food availability and reduce price volatility. Resilience is also strengthened through improving access to finance and private sector investment—EBRD website (2021a, 2021b)

The actual delivery mechanism of these broad policy goals can also differ substantially, with the IsDB as an example of innovative approaches to micro-financing and focusing on water infrastructure (IsDB, 2018), to the EBRD, whose focus is more on funding and developing agribusinesses (EBRD, 2018). These different delivery mechanisms are thus tailored to needs of the regions that these development banks target.

In terms of target groups, the regional development banks by and large focus their food resilience discourse on providing for ‘smallholder’ farmers. The usage of the term ‘smallholder’ was not apparent when looking at bilateral agencies, yet incredibly common among regional development banks, being used by ADB, AfDB and IDB. IsDB and EBRD focus their resilience narrative on agribusiness, although IsDB also acknowledges the need for resilience among ‘rural communities’.

In its totality, resilience has become a ‘core belief’ for regional development banks, on the same level as market connectivity (economic growth) and agricultural productivity (productivism). However, ‘climate resilience’ remains the key concept in their resilience narratives, with much of the discourse around climate change and natural disasters, and in the IDB’s case, exclusively so (IDB, 2021). In 2019, many of the large international development banks, led by the IDB and including the World Bank Group, EBRD, AfDB, ADB, IsDB, among others, published a joint report titled ‘A Framework and Principles for Climate Resilience Metrics in Financing Operations’, signalling a broad cooperative approach to measuring resilience, at least in the context of climate and finance (IDB, 2019). However, their quantitative approaches to measuring resilience as of writing (2021) remain separate. The ADB has the largest food security budget of the regional development banks assessed, followed by the IsDB (ADB, 2019; IsDB, 2020b). The AfDB has the smallest food security budget, despite being such a core component of their narrative. The EBRD has no specific budget for food security, instead rolling their food security initiatives into their finance investment budget.

Multilateral Development Agencies

Food Security and Food Resilience Narratives

Multilateral agencies are arguably the most influential agencies appraised here, as they can solidify definitions, expand terminologies and offer narratives that set global agendas (Shaw, 2007). While many nation-states have their own bilateral agencies, with varying degrees of economic and political influence, the parent countries of the agencies appraised also provide additional funding to multilateral agencies. Furthermore, while regional development banks may have international stakeholders (particularly the United States and Japan), their scope is limited to the regions that they represent. Multilateral agencies such as those in the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank do not have these limitations, being central institutions influencing global policy formation since the late 1940s (Shaw, 2007). The UN agencies all have specific mandates, while the World Bank, not operating on any specific mandate, has been highly involved with food security discourse since the 1980s (Shaw, 2007).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these multilateral agencies have complex, exhaustive definitions of food security and resilience, as well as extensive discourses around these topics (see Table 4.5, and Appendices 5 and 6). Apart from the IMF, the multilateral agencies appraised shared the 1996 WFS definition of food security, with a slight modification in the World Bank definition, dropping ‘social’ from its definition and focusing on ‘economic’ and ‘physical’ access. Of note, each agency has a slightly different definition of resilience, showing the malleability and lack of strong consensus on how to concretely define resilience in the same way that the 1996 WFS set a core definition for food security (one that bilateral agencies have by and large not utilised, barring USAID). It should be noted here that, while the ADB utilises ‘resilience’ in their working definition of food security, none of the multilateral agencies do. While this may be a vestigial result of utilising a now-antiquated definition of food security, the lack of a more contemporary definition of food security problematises the current paradigm shift to a resilience discourse as central and systematic to every framework and agenda (Béné et al., 2016).

Table 4.5 Multilateral agencies—narratives of food security & resilience
Full size table

As is to be expected, the UN agencies’ narratives (as well as targeting) focus on their own respective mandates—UNICEF with ensuring child and maternal nutrition, and thus highly focused on targeting women and children; FAO with agriculture and food security research, with its resilience discourse focused on rural communities and rural livelihoods; and the WFP with emergency food assistance and ‘Zero Hunger’, the mission to ‘end global hunger’ through a broad range of programmes as well as providing technical expertise and policy advice, invoking food resilience when focusing on the role of governments to develop ‘resilient institutions and systems’ (WFP, 2021b). The World Bank set forth wide-ranging, ambitious, policy goals with an international scope that invokes each of the environmental, social, economic and public health themes, with their targeting most similar to the regional development banks, highlighting the necessity of resilience for ‘vulnerable households’. Interestingly, a central aspect of the World Bank’s food resilience discourse is specifically on resilient food systems, one of the few agencies that explicitly focuses on a food systems discourse, reflecting a different set of conceptualisations and terminology (World Bank, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d).

The IMF has no set definition of food security on its website, despite having multiple papers on food affordability and pricing, as well infographics, blog posts and podcasts for their Finance & Development Magazine on food security—indicating that IMF research is both familiar with and conversant in the discourse around food security (IMF, 2020a, 2020b). One such example is a podcast available on the IMF website where two IMF economists discuss food security in sub-Saharan Africa, mentioning ‘raising climate change resilience’ as a major factor in addressing food security (IMF, 2020c). Otherwise, discourse around food security available on the IMF website is sporadic and linked with shocks, such as several articles in the wake of the 2007–2008 World Food Price Crisis (IMF, 2008).

The UN agencies all utilise the Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA-II) for resilience measurement and analysis within food security, an index developed for practical application (FAO, 2016). RIMA has been around in some form since 2008, pioneering the utilisation of resilience in a food security context (FAO, 2016). With resilience seen as fundamental to the FAO’s and WFP’s work and given particular emphasis through RIMA-II (FAO, 2016), the lack of a clear engagement with resilience within the existing food security definition might indicate either that the term ‘food security’ has become unhelpful and outdated, or that ‘food resilience’ may replace it, or it might signal that resilience is not seen as a critical element of food security. Whichever emerges, there seems to be delay in integrating the concept of resilience wholly into food security.

The World Bank’s resilience definition, in contrast, is derived wholly from the 2012 (IPCC) definition, heavily focused on climate change and agriculture (World Bank, 2013, 2016). The World Bank, in turn, has its own measure of resilience called the Resilience Rating System. This system is focused on rating World Bank projects, with its criteria based on tracking the effects of climate change (FAO, 2016; World Bank, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d). The Resilience Rating System Report, however, does mention food security repeatedly (eight times). The World Bank’s Resilience Rating System was first introduced in February 2021.

The World Bank and the WFP have much larger budgets than the FAO, while half of UNICEF’s proposed programme budget will go towards child and maternal nutrition (UNICEF, 2021). Of note, almost half of FAO’s budget in 2020–21, that is US$930 million of its US$2.8 billion total, went towards livelihood resilience, being a cornerstone in the FAO’s strategic framework (FAO, 2019a, 2019b). This reflects how the FAO has prioritised a food resilience approach as a core component of its food security strategies. While the World Bank has a significantly larger budget, its role in broad funding means that funds go to many different considerations. Their narrative on resilience within food systems highlights their funding efforts towards agricultural production and mitigating climate change, which remains the key consideration in the World Bank’s resilience discourse.

COVID-19, Food Resilience and Agency Responses

Due to the scale and speed of the COVID-19 pandemic as the present study was being conducted, we decided to consider early narratives on food resilience that emerged related to the pandemic. We, let alone the development agencies, were aware of the need to distinguish between initial short-term policy reactions to the pandemic and any long-term legacy and responses. With the initial responses being reactive rather than planned, the main observation has been that the notion of resilience became again widely used, with both growing concern and data on the impact of climate change on agri-food systems and the impact of the pandemic likely encouraging its increased usage. The chapter by Joanna Upton et al. in this book looks more closely at the impact of COVID-19 on household resilience.

The UN agency leading the response to COVID-19, the World Health Organisation (WHO), was not appraised for the purposes of this chapter. The most prominent frontline agencies of those appraised were the multilateral agencies. The influence of the UN agencies was visible in several ways. First, they set the narrative of the impact of the pandemic on food security for the bilateral agencies, regional development banks and the global community to respond to. They particularly highlighted the need for financial support and for humanitarian relief to mitigate effects of the pandemic (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2021; WFP, 2021b). The WFP, for example, headlined the ‘Hunger Pandemic’ when introducing the 2021 SOFI (WFP, 2021b). David Beasley, WFP Executive-Director, firmly stated that:

The path to zero hunger is being stopped dead in its tracks by conflict, climate and COVID-19—David Beasley, WFP (2021b)

Concerns were expressed at the UN level as the pandemic took grip at the prospect of food insecurity being exacerbated by the pandemic. The FAO was concerned about existing conflicts being worsened (FAO, 2020; UN, 2020). A year later, still lacking solid statistical analysis as to whether millions were plunged into hunger because of the pandemic, the agencies readily admitted that the early fears might not fully have been met (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2021; WFP, 2021b). Two years on, however, a more sober assessment was being voiced—that inequalities of access to resources (not least vaccines) might exacerbate food and health-related economic inequalities within and between countries. In this sense, the initial, sometimes emotional, concerns might turn out to have been justified (Béné et al., 2021).

Multilateral agencies were characteristically practical in launching new programmes and operations in response to the pandemic, particularly the WFP, while UNICEF and FAO have published reports and analyses of pandemic impacts on food security and food resilience (UNICEF, 2020c; UNICEF, 2020d; FAO, 2021; WFP, 2021a, 2021b). UNICEF, for example, published an extensive report on child food security and nutrition in June 2020 (UNICEF, 2020c). WFP recast training and insurance schemes for smallholder farms, with the long-term goal of “build[ing] resilience” and “adapt[ation] to better link to food systems” (WFP, 2021b). The World Bank has pushed for a ‘Resilient and Inclusive Recovery’, and echoing the calls from world leaders articulated the recovery as a ‘rebuilding better’ (World Bank, 2021b), adapting ‘Building Back Better’ (Harley & Acheampong, 2021). The World Bank has emphasised the importance of ‘resilient recovery’, and although world food prices remained fairly stable in the first two years, 2022 saw concerns regarding global food inflation and potential shortages come to fruition with the added shock to the global system with the war in Ukraine (World Bank, 2021b; World Bank, 2022).

The regional development banks shared the same overall narrative as the multilateral agencies, though they took different approaches. For example, the ADB had a 16-page brief on the impact of COVID-19 on food security by June 2020, while the AfDB issued a report on the changes they would undertake in their ‘Feed Africa’ initiative to help tackle COVID-19 and food insecurity in July 2020, with a heavy emphasis on resilience. The IDB issued a slew of reports and research on the impact of COVID-19 and food security in Central and South America (IDB, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d), while the IsDB formed a working group to explore the impact of COVID-19 on ‘Islamic Finance’ (IsDB, 2020c), as well as a press release in April 2021 outlining a US$500 million commitment to addressing climate change and food security, putting a heavy emphasis on resilience, to respond to the challenges they saw arising in the ‘post-COVID-19 world’.

The partnership we are signing today will allow us to co-create financing and investment programs that will address these challenges, but also help our Member Countries tap into emerging global value chain opportunities to build resilience and create wealth in a post COVID-19 world—IsDB Press Release (2021)

The bilateral agencies were slower to respond than the regional development banks and multilateral agencies. While they all recognised the impact of the pandemic on food security, they followed the same narrative path laid out by the UN agencies. Some minor examples include Australia’s DFAT providing US$5.5 million to WFP towards its food security work in the Pacific region and USAID launching multiple projects that seek to address food insecurity arising from the pandemic, with the US government reorienting its food security strategy to centre around COVID-19 recovery and climate change, highlighting how the pandemic has “had an unprecedented impact on food security” (USAID, 2021a, 2021c), with Samantha Power, the USAID Administrator, calling it a “pivotal moment for global food security” (USAID, 2021c).

Discussion

In this final section, we offer four reflections on how the concepts studied here are being articulated and addressed by development agencies.

The first reflection is on our own methodology and approach. Reviewing existing literature and data for this chapter, it was decided a rapid appraisal of what agencies mean by the key terms of this book would be useful, building on the definition of food systems resilience by Tendall et al. (2015). Rapid research snapshots are often conducted in policy analysis and other scientific endeavours, not least in emergencies. While the methodology can be varied, many interventions in public health, rural planning and social, environmental and humanitarian emergencies have to be based on rapid appraisals of evolving situations (Crawford, 1997; Kumar, 1993; McNall & Foster-Fishman, 2007). Despite limitations, having a reasoned overview can help policy formation of, and for, a situation. The findings from such rapid appraisals may be altered or questioned later, but their value lies in capturing the moment. It is better to have some pinpoints of light than to justify inaction as waiting for floodlights from lengthier research, and a rapid appraisal can also contribute to critical review of policy positions held by powerful, influential agencies.

The second point is that while agencies could, and probably will, head in divergent policy directions, the terms food security and resilience will lead a life of their own in international food policy. Given the importance of agri-food systems for employment, health, environmental and social well-being, these two terms have considerable symbolic significance locally, nationally and globally. National and global agri-food systems are already under considerable pressure in relation to public health, environmental and socio-economic divisions (Searchinger et al., 2018; UNEP, 2020; Willett et al., 2019). Analysts within as well as outside development agencies know paradigm shifts are highly likely. In that context, our finding that both food security and food resilience are subject to significant difference of interpretation is important. We have used the notion of fractured consensus to capture those tensions. Resilience and security might be invoked to convey a shared vision of the future, when the reality is that divergent paths are being pursued by, and shaped by, lobbies and sectoral interests. The terms are thus ‘codes’ for what can subsequently be taken in different directions. A world that took feeding everyone seriously, or that had already ensured that humanity would genuinely tame the drivers of ecosystem destruction and reduce the severity of future shocks, would already be building food system capacities for change. Judging by the brevity of the UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021—given just one day—and with food consumption barely featuring at the UN Climate Change COP26 in October 2021, that centrality of purpose cannot yet be assumed, even though it is sorely needed.

To press the point further, the practicalities of building food resilience are having to compete for support in already contested and crowded policy space. If food resilience becomes more fractured, the auguries for achieving effective food system change might not be good. The critics of development—particularly of Western foreign policy from the 1970s to the 1990s—created a narrative that development was excessively framed by conventional politics and dominated by US-based agencies such as the World Bank, IMF and USAID (Shaw, 2007). These agencies, characterised as ideologically right-of-centre and tacitly supporting neoliberal, market-oriented solutions, were contrasted with European agencies such as Irish Aid or SIDA, pitched as being left-of-centre and reflecting the expressed values of European social democracies, oriented around a discourse of human rights and dignity. The UK’s DfID, in this narrative, fell in between, initially aligned with the Europeans, but more recently shifting its alignment, particularly in its subsuming into the FCDO, becoming more mercantilist, overtly yoked to UK post-Brexit economic aspirations. In fact, the present appraisal has suggested that this may be an overtly simplistic over-politicised reading of how agencies approach food security. True, there are ‘hard’ neoliberal approaches, such as Australia’s DFAT and the EBRD’s relentlessly economic language. Yet the ingraining of concepts such as sustainability and resilience, finding itself on par with economic and productivist goals such as market access and improved agricultural productivity, signals that these concepts, even when co-opted, provide a useful contrast to more simplistic narratives. The politics of food resilience might in fact be becoming more subtle, particularly with the arrival on the global development terrain of China’s state capitalist investment in infrastructure across low and middle-income nations through the Belt and Road Initiative (Chatzky & McBride, 2020; Jie & Wallace, 2021). With China’s assertion of ‘softer’ humanitarian and social support in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through vaccine diplomacy (Lee, 2021; Su et al., 2021), this may further challenge these agencies on how they act and present themselves. For example, the World Bank, a financial body that in recent years has worked hard to counter decades of criticisms that it imposed a narrow, neoliberal model of economic progress (George, 1976, 1988; Holman, 1984; McMichael, 2012), has built tackling climate change, climate change resilience, and environmental degradation into its core narrative on global policy and governance, and thus into its criteria for investments in food resilience, particularly through their food systems approach, which in turn has influenced the regional development banks.

The coupling of ‘food security’ and ‘resilience’ belies different foci and different starting points. As such, bilateral agencies, regional development banks and multilateral agencies may share similarities in the overall narrative on food resilience, yet their policy objectives can differ greatly. Resilience can be pitched as a return to normalcy, or as a new direction altogether, with the findings presenting a mixed picture of, on the one hand, a broad consensus on the importance of food resilience and, on the other hand, differing overt policy objectives. Agencies differ even on whose resilience is being addressed, from as broad as ‘food insecure’ to as specific as ‘smallholder farmers’. Barely a decade from resilience entering common policy terminology, divergent meanings have emerged. Governments may have collectively signed up to the 2015 SDGs, but what the agencies mean by food resilience cuts across this. The SDGs are often invoked as the new global framework (from SIDA, to IDB, to AfDB), but our findings suggest these invocations can be light on details. Resilience as a term is being re-interpreted to fit wider historical contexts and disparate priorities, depending on the region, country, culture, origin and issues the agencies have historically focused on. The risk is that the terms are being pulled into ubiquitous vagueness, a fate long noted for sustainability (Lang & Barling, 2012). There is an expanding literature concerned about how adequately, concretely and quantitatively to measure food security and resilience (Ansah et al., 2019; Barrett & Constas, 2014; Cissé & Barrett, 2018; d’Errico & Di Giuseppe, 2018; Knippenberg et al., 2017; Maxwell et al., 2003; Serfilippi & Ramnath, 2018; Upton et al., 2016). Perhaps this is inevitable at the global or UN level, where compromise is the whole purpose of institutional decision-making. The post-war reconstruction did not envisage an era of climate change or ecosystem destruction reshaping humanity’s planetary role. The focus was on human rights and to build agreement where self-interests crossed borders. This certainly happened for public health institutional structures from the 1930’s International Health Organisation to the World Health Organisation of today (Rayner & Lang, 2012). We should not be surprised if there are difficulties in the face of contemporary threats, but this is why common purpose and clarity of meaning matter.

A third consideration thus arises—the legitimacy of public understanding. The funds disbursed by these agencies are mostly taxpayer-derived; democratic accountability is thus implicit. To many citizens and taxpayers, the existence of development agencies is probably as far as their knowledge goes, with only some among them knowing, or even being interested, in more. The appraisal here in many ways explores the outward-facing nature of these agencies, and what they present to their citizens and other interested parties. If, as happened in some agencies discussed here, that humanitarian internationalism is reined back, this suggests a failure of pro-development movements to win sufficient public support to stop ‘aid’ becoming financialised. While the present study did not explore agencies’ website layout, search functions, usability or access policies, we did note how some agencies such as Irish Aid utilised accessible language to allow for a broader audience to be engaged, while other agencies were tailored towards their own niche and specific interest groups. As Watkins noted decades ago, neither aid nor development are truly neutral (Watkins, 2001). The long-standing historical tensions of debate in the 1970s and 1980s—aid as an extension of colonialisation, etc. (Hayter, 1971; Raikes, 1988; Tudge, 1977)—might be returning considering China’s well-funded push into development in the name of South-South cooperation (Cohen, 2020).

A fourth point concerns the purpose of the types of agencies we have reported on. These agencies have substantially different budgets, reach and remit, which influences their narratives, policy approaches and internal capacity to quantify food resilience. The UN agencies and the World Bank have a global focus and broader, holistic policy goals—the WFP, for example, aims for ‘Zero Hunger’, while the World Bank has goals covering political, economic, environmental, social and public health themes. The bilateral agencies, apart from USAID, tend to focus on one policy objective, while the regional development banks have broader policy goals but a limited geographical reach. The field of development agency practice covers, on the one hand, the World Bank’s complex, detailed and multifaceted policy objectives, while, on the other hand, Sweden’s SIDA, one of the smallest agencies appraised, has chosen to champion sustainable agriculture as its focal point within its food security narrative. USAID’s budget is incomparably large when placed next to other bilateral agencies, having an influence and presence more akin to the multilateral agencies. As such, the way USAID defines food resilience, and their approach to food resilience, may have a more noticeable impact on how NGOs and countries who work with USAID, and who depend on USAID funding, shape their own food resilience narratives. Perhaps part of the fluidity of food resilience is that they are framed by the scale of whoever is applying them.

A recurring theme in the resilience literature is the problem of data. On the one hand, there are well-known methodological difficulties in quantifying and analysing resilience. On the other hand, everyone agrees on the importance of accurate data in measuring resilience (Ansah et al., 2019; Barrett & Constas, 2014; Béné et al., 2016; Cissé & Barrett, 2018; d’Errico et al., 2018; Knippenberg et al., 2017; Serfilippi & Ramnath, 2018; Upton et al., 2016). Compounding these methodological difficulties, USAID, DfiD, the regional development banks, the UN agencies and the World Bank all have (or had) different ways of measuring resilience, utilising their own frameworks and approaches. This is a reflection, a microcosm, of the broader fractured consensus we found in the resilience discourse. While the UN Agencies offer a concrete, quantitative methodology to specifically measure food resilience (RIMA-II), agencies with enough economic and political reach choose to go their own way. USAID established the Resilience Evaluation, Analysis and Learning (REAL) Award, formulating the USAID/REAL Resilience Measurement and Analysis Framework (REAL, 2018), while the IDB, in collaboration with other regional development banks, have formulated a framework to specifically measure and quantify climate resilience, with less attention given to food resilience (IDB, 2019). Lastly, the World Bank utilises its own framework and methodology to measure climate and disaster resilience (World Bank, 2017). The battle over which measurement methodology is to dominate reflects the tensions embedded in the terminology. The operationalisation and conceptualisation are fractured by related fissures, with as many approaches and tools as there are sectors and focal points (Béné et al., 2016). The diverse interpretations of food resilience, and the diversity in measurement, reflect how what each agency means by resilience frames, how they measure it, undermining any eventual formulation of a unified framework and common understanding of what is needed in measuring resilience (Barrett & Constas, 2014; Béné et al., 2016).

Conclusion

Our conclusion reflects on the value of food resilience, as explored, in its current usage among agencies. Food security has become a term that, when used at its face value, is more about its apparent meaning than its content and depth (Carolan, 2013). The value of the newer term of food resilience is that it offers an opportunity to move away from the fluidity of the ‘food security’ term in public policy (Lang & Barling, 2012), transcending it in its role as a ‘mobilizing metaphor’, capturing the necessity for a more systematic, comprehensive and complex direction and approach (Béné et al., 2016). One that can address both short-term and long-term interventions, and one more suited for the complexities and challenges posed by inevitable consequences of climate change (Upton et al., 2016) and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is, however, the risk that it could be rendered meaningless, yet another buzzword that falls in and out of vogue, particularly if subsumed by pre-existing motivations, rather than reflecting a fundamental rethink in each agency remit. This appraisal has shown that development agencies can be placed on a type of gradient, reflecting the depth and complexity that food resilience is addressed with—from a facile, surface-level engagement, light on details with only nascent arguments, heavily leaning on terms and definitions from other agencies, to a more complex, multifaceted approach, one that contains or implies qualitative arguments, quantitative analysis and institutional restructure. For the Australians and the EBRD, aid is to lever business growth, utilising the language of food resilience to prise open trade and forge economic partnerships, while for Irish Aid, the motivations seem on the surface more altruistic, built around the concept of ‘combating hunger’, reflecting Ireland’s lasting and dreadful legacy of famine (Jordon, 1998; Kinealy, 2002; Mokyr & Ó Gráda, 2002).

There may be many factors that determine where agencies lie on such a gradient: budget limitations, existing ideological approaches, lack of policy focus or sector engagement, or simply because institutions take time to react to and integrate new approaches (the ‘trickle-down’ effect of policy discourse). While discourse around climate change resilience and sustainable agriculture can be found on every one of the agencies’ websites reviewed, food resilience had a high degree of variability—with the USAID’s Bureau of Resilience and Food Security and the UN agencies’ highly detailed food resilience development framework leading the scene, fully engaged with food resilience as a paired concept. Most of the regional development banks reflected a simpler ‘institutional discourse’ (early adopters of ‘trickle-down’ food resilience?). The ADB is noteworthy, as it utilises the concept of resilience in its definition of food security, being the only agency appraised to do so. Some agencies had continued focus on earlier terms (the SDGs, sustainable agriculture, climate change resilience) such as the IDB or SIDA. One can speculate that the crisis event of the pandemic will lead to a rapid adoption in the coming years of a broader food resilience discourse than currently found, a further entrenchment of resilience as a core term and a widely adopted definition akin to the 1996 WFS settling the definition of food security (which, in turn, now seems lacking). The pandemic has highlighted the importance of a food resilience narrative, almost certainly helping shape the perception of the necessity of these agencies for future funding (Béné et al., 2021).

Finally, we stress again that the snapshot we have conducted was at a time of disruption not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the changing nature of development agencies—illustrated by Canada, Australia and the UK integrating development more closely into foreign and trade policy—it is yet unclear if the prime narrative of international humanitarianism will remain. Even USAID, which has extensive discourse and funding favouring food resilience, bluntly emphasises that its central goal is to help countries help themselves, viewing resilience as a form of self-sufficiency, leaving it unclear whether ‘donor’ governments will rise to the enormity of the looming challenges on the horizon. The disruption and retreat to self-interest illustrated in the early responses to the pandemic cannot be ignored. Self-interest triumphed on vaccine and equipment procurement (Lancet, 2021; Torres et al., 2021). In that respect, the initial years of the pandemic echoed the inequalities and distortions of the global food system, with the pressures of looming economic instability, rising geopolitical tensions, the unrelenting consequences of climate change and an unresolved public health crisis, all highlight how the narratives around food security and food resilience, in this sense, are both a test and reflection of what sort of societies influential, high-income countries envisage ahead.