17 pages, Scholarship within the social sciences of agriculture, food, and natural resources (AFNR) exists, in part, to inform solutions to complex problems. Increasingly, complex problems are found at the nexus of social and ecological systems; therefore, scholarship within the social sciences of AFNR must mirror this social-ecological characteristic. Existing AFNR social science literature on resilience lacks the required social-ecological perspective, conceptualizing resilience as an individual characteristic. The absence of a social-ecological perspective of resilience fails to holistically address the complexity of AFNR systems and the challenge therein. Therefore, the current manuscript seeks to inform social science scholarship within AFNR by foregrounding social-ecological resilience as a necessary approach to addressing the complexity of challenges found throughout AFNR systems. Included in the discussion is a critical review of individual resilience, an introduction to adaptation and transformation, an outline of social-ecological resilience, an in-depth analysis of the seven principles of social-ecological resilience, and a discussion of social-ecological resilience thinking applied to the seven research priority areas described by the American Association for Agricultural Education. In total, the current manuscript paves the way for additional systems-based research in the AFNR social sciences by introducing critical concepts and approaches related to social-ecological resilience.
18 pages, Over the past decades, the modernization of agriculture in the Western world has
contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production but also to environmental and societal concerns over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality
and biodiversity loss. Many of these concerns, for example those related to animal
welfare or labor conditions, are stuck in controversies and apparently deadlocked
debates. As a result we observe a paradox in which a wide range of corporate social
responsibility (CSR) initiatives, originally seeking to reconnect agriculture and society, frequently provoke debate, conlfict, and protests. In order to make sense of this pattern, the present paper contends that Western agriculture is marked by moral complexity, i.e., the tendency of multiple legitimate moral standpoints to proliferate without the realistic prospect of a consensus. This contention is buttressed by a conceptual framework that draws inspiration the contemporary business ethics and systems-theoretic scholarship. From the systems-theoretic point of view, the evolution of moral complexity is traced back to the processes of agricultural modernization, specialization, and diferentiation, each of which suppresses the responsiveness of the economic and legal institutions to the full range of societal and environmental concerns about agriculture. From the business ethics point of view, moral complexity is shown to prevent the transformation of the ethical responsibilities into the legal and economic responsibilities despite the ongoing institutionalization of CSR. Navigating moral complexity is shown to require moral judgments which are necessarily personal and contestable. These judgments are implicated in those CSR initiatives that require dealing with trade-ofs among the different sustainability issues.
