Resilience and transformation: Lessons from the UK local food sector in the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

How to ensure resilience of food systems is a key concern in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, there is a renewed interest in the role of local food systems from policy, academic, and third-sector actors, who see those systems as a source of “bounce-back” resilience, supporting existing structures, but also as sources of “bounce-forward” transformative resilience. Both perspectives move debates around local food systems beyond the dominant focus on social exclusion (defensive localism). The capacity of the local food sector to provide either form of resilience depends on the resilience of the local food actors themselves, which has been little investigated to date. This paper addresses this important gap in scholarship through an investigation of the “bounce-back” and the “bounce-forward” resilience of local food actors in the UK during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We advance resilience scholarship by developing an analytical framework which combines attention to resilience characteristics (“what is there”) and to the systemic forces that enable and constrain their development (“how things work”). Attention to social capital, we argue, is crucial to understanding transformative resilience. We present rich qualitative data to illustrate the multi-faceted impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on local food system actors in the UK. This is complemented with a review of relevant policy and third-sector publications which contextualise local food system efforts. We conclude that while strong bonding and bridging capitals support the local food sector's persistence and adaptability, a lack of linking social capital, most visible as a “middle-class image problem,” is preventing it from achieving a transformative role. We argue that the local food sector needs to form alliances which would move it beyond a single-issue topic, and articulate local food as part of place-centred community resilience strategies that foster social capacities.