Global food security depends on agricultural diversity that has coevolved with cultural practices over centuries, creating landscapes rich in biological and cultural diversity. The majority of the world’s food is produced by family farms in rural areas, which also remain some of the poorest regions of the world. Yet interventions to improve well-being often fail to account for the coevolved relationships between social and ecological dynamics that create and sustain biocultural diversity. A major knowledge gap exists in understanding how development interventions are both shaped by, and can harness these coevolved relationships to improve development outcomes. Resilience offers a promising theoretical framework for understanding development, yet the ways in which it can be operationalised to inform interventions remains poorly understood. The project studies the resilience of family farms in the Austrian Alps. By combining these insights from theory and practice, the project ultimately helps inform how interventions can better integrate the conservation of biocultural diversity with development opportunities.

The first research objective is to understand what are the processes that create and maintain the social-ecological relationships that contribute to resilience in family farms. The second research objective is to iteratively build on this empirical understanding and better operationalise resilience theory to understand the coevolution and interdependencies of development processes and outcomes in biocultural landscapes, and the capacity of these landscapes to adapt and transform.