Regional food system resilience and rural realities

Abstract

Food system resilience is increasingly recognized as essential for sustaining food security amid shocks and disruptors such as extreme weather and climate change. Yet resilience planning is often limited in rural regions, where vulnerabilities may be higher and institutional capacity is constrained. This study examines how local governments and regional planning entities engage with food systems resilience across the 13-state Appalachian region. Appalachia provides a valuable case due to its high proportion of rural communities, elevated rates of food insecurity, and documented vulnerability to climate-related disruptions. At the same time, the region’s strong agricultural assets make it well-suited to examine actions related to food systems resilience efforts. While resilience scholarship emphasizes the importance of locally rooted and self-organized food systems, regional approaches are often proposed as a means of connecting these localized efforts to enhance coordination across food systems and increase diversity, redundancy, and interconnectivity. Drawing on 32 group interviews with 113 public officials representing 167 counties, we apply Keegan et al.’s (2024) regional food system resilience concepts as a conceptual framework to analyze regional governance–oriented food system resilience actions. Our findings show that governmental actors primarily engage in facilitative roles, advancing food system efforts through food access initiatives, participation in networks, and support for local and regional supply chains. These efforts often build on locally embedded activities but remain unevenly coordinated across jurisdictions. We also find that local governments rely on nonprofit partnerships to advance food access initiatives in both routine times and in anticipation of or following an acute shock, while explicit attention to longer-term shocks, like climate change, remains limited. Despite evidence that locally organized efforts contribute to resilience, we find limited mechanisms for integrating these efforts at broader regional scales, underscoring gaps in multilevel governance. These findings suggest the need for future research on governance models that support coordination across jurisdictions, as well as practical efforts to strengthen planning capacity, integrate food systems into formal policy processes, and align short-term interventions with longer-term resilience planning.