Rethinking resilience: a study in Australian grain farming

This thesis critically examines resilience in the context of agriculture. The research focus is primarily at farm level, and positions the Australian grain farm as a heterogenous complex adaptive system and a socio-material location for emergence of resilience. Farm visits and semi-structured interviews with farmers and key grains industry informants form the basis of the qualitative research approach. The analysis reveals problematic discursive contradictions on the one hand, but on the other, enriched and extended imaginaries of farming futures. By anchoring the concept of resilience in place and in the everyday practices of farming as a generative relational conversation between farmer and farm, evidence for an emergent farm-and-farmer co-resilience is uncovered. I argue that this ongoing conversation inspires farm level experimentation and social learning in a visible process of productive novelty that might signal or precede farm-and-farmer co-resilience. The resilience framework, developed in ecosystem science, has met lively debate on its advance into social science literature. In its current state, the framework is ambiguous in its disposition to power relations and to human intentionality. However, in the face of escalating calls for resilience as a policy outcome, as a key condition for funding programs, and in public discourse, there is an urgent need to sharpen the critical edge of the resilience framework. This thesis contributes to exposing the scalar politics of resilience through analysis of resilience rhetoric in the Australian government’s policy document, the White Paper on Agricultural Competitiveness (2015). I use the term faux resilience to describe policy output in which the resilience of the individual is made to conform with the policy’s embedded ideological assumptions; in this case, leaving productive novelty at farm level unsupported. Finally, the thesis anticipates an alternative farming ontology that might carry us beyond settler-colonial agri-cultures. To recognize co-resilience as place-resilience acknowledges the farmscape’s temporal integrity with Country such that both exist at once and each is context for the other. Ontological reframing of land tenure in which responsibilities of belonging, or custodianship, transcend human temporalities and are shared among many, opens a possible path towards restorative justice for First Nations peoples.