Space to tinker: from faux resilience to productive novelty in agricultural policy

Farmers' resilience is routinely named as an agricultural policy objective in Australia and internationally. However, uncritical use of the resilience concept, as well as the disparity observed between policy intentions and outcomes, invites careful analysis of resilience in agricultural policy. Public policy development processes vary internationally; in Australia, governments issue White Papers to articulate public policy. In this paper we examine the resilience language in the Australian government's 2015 Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper and an associated funding initiative, the Managing Farm Risk Program (MFRP). One underpinning assumption in these policy documents is that grain farmers' access to crop insurance for climate-implicated production risks, including drought, would enhance grain farmers' resilience. We argue that the engagement of the White Paper and MFRP documents with resilience is superficial and substitutes a flawed faux resilience through: (i) articulating particular 'uncontrollable' threats to which farmers must be resilient; (ii) unburdening government from any substantive responsibility to mitigate these same threats, and; (iii) specifying normative prescriptions for how farmers should enact resilience. Rather than discarding the resilience concept entirely, we look again to foundational theoretical scholarship and bring attention anew to the critical role productive novelty plays in resilience. We suggest that in agricultural contexts, productive novelty is analogous to on-farm tinkering; we further argue that policy frameworks which support farmers' own generative capacity for productive novelty, i.e. creating space for farmers to tinker, may prove a more promising way to foster farmers' resilience.