Improving the resilience-enabling capacity of the Common Agricultural Policy: Policy recommendations for more resilient EU farming systems

One of the aims of the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is improving the resilience of Europe’s farming systems. The CAP of the budget period 2014-2020, however, has insufficiently supported the resilience of farming systems. The ongoing CAP reform process offers an appropriate opportunity to integrate a broader perspective on resilience in the CAP. We therefore propose a set of policy recommendations on how to improve the capability of the CAP to support more fully the resilience (i.e. robustness, adaptability, and transformability) of farming systems in the EU. The policy recommendations are based on a comparative analysis of six national co-design workshops with stakeholders and a final EU workshop in Brussels with Brussels-based experts. We concluded three key lessons about the CAP’s influence on resilience: (1) resilience challenges, needs and policy effects are context-specific; (2) resilience capacities are complementary, but trade-offs between robustness, adaptability, and transformability occur at the level of policies and due to budget competition; (3) there is a need for a coordinated long-term vision for Europe’s agriculture, which is difficult to achieve through the bargaining processes associated with a CAP reform. We propose specific policy recommendations that could contribute to a better balance between policies that support robustness, adaptability and transformability of Europe’s farming systems.