LiveLihoods strategies and househoLd resiLience to Food insecurity ...

LIVELIHOODS STRATEGIES AND HOUSEHOLD RESILIENCE TO FOOD INSECURITY: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS TO
KENYA
2 Theoretical Framework
2.1 Food Systems as Complex Systems
A very general definition of the term “food system” might be that of a system made up
by all the interacting social and ecological components that affect the food security of a
given group of people. Therefore, a food system involves all the various phases from the
production to the consumption of food, through distribution and processing. Such a
definition of the term “food system” is quite general and conceptually very broad since it
entails many dimensions – economic, social, institutional, technological, cultural – and
different scales – global, national or local depending on the purpose of the analysis. The
multi-dimensionality of the food system concept derives from the fact that, whatever the
chosen scale of analysis, a food system is always made up of at least two components:
the resource base that ensures the food supply, and the socio-economic component that
depends on this resource base.
Notwithstanding the multi-dimensionality of food systems, different disciplines
have traditionally analysed these systems adopting merely sectoral approaches that
reflect principles, categories and methods of analysis that are discipline-specific. This is
true in general, and it is especially true for each of the two above-mentioned
components of food systems that were usually analysed separately in the fields of
ecology and economics, respectively. However, one of the more significant recent
achievements in the study of ecological and economic systems is that the economy and
its environment are jointly-determined systems and the economic activity scale is such
that it matters. 1 In other words they “co-evolve” (Norgaard, 1994) and cannot be
analysed separately by each other. This applies specifically to food systems that are
genuinely jointly-determined “socio-economic-ecological systems”.
The consequences of this acknowledgement are important both from the
viewpoint of the contents of the analysis (which is the subject under scrutiny) and from
the methodological point of view (how we should analyse it), since they imply that food
systems should be thought of as “complex adaptive systems” which must be analysed by
adopting a non-reductionist, systemic approach. More precisely, the recent research on
jointly-determined socio-economic-ecological systems has reached the conclusion that
they are stochastic evolutionary systems (Perrings, 1998) characterised by the following
features:
• path-dependency: history matters and the current status of a system is largely
determined by the sequence of the states that the systems went through in the past;
• discontinuous changes: observed changes tend not to be continuous or gradual, but
involve more or less sudden alterations around critical threshold values;
• multiple equilibria: the functionally-different states of a system involve different
equilibria, i.e., systems tend to evolve by switching between system equilibria;
• non-linearity: the system dynamics and stability tend to vary non-linearly with the
scale of the systems.
An implication of this characterisation is that the stability of the jointlydetermined
system depends less on the stability of the individual components of the
system, than on the ability of the system to maintain its self-organisation in the face of
stress and shock, that is to say, on its “resilience”. This essentially means that the focus
1 Different scales of analysis imply different emphasis on specific dimensions that characterize a
food system. For instance, if the scale of analysis is the household or community level (for
example, a village or a tribe), we expect that the implications of actors’ actions on the system’s
natural resource base should be analytically more relevant than in the case of a national scale
analysis.
4