Framework for Assessing Policy Influence on Resilience: A Case Study of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy in De Veenkoloniën, the Netherlands

Complex interactions between policies and farming system’s resilience have hardly been researched. We developed the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT) to conceptualises how policy output influences farming systems’ resilience on three capacities (robustness, adaptability and transformability). We empirically applied the ResAT on the Dutch ‘Veenkoloniën’ to assess the perceived effects of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy on its resilience. Our findings show that current policy goals and instruments focus on enabling the robustness of De Veenkoloniën, while placing less emphasis on adaptability and almost none on transformability. Overall, the ResAT shows that resilience is a meaningful approach to analyse agricultural-related policies.