Perspectives on Mountain Farming Resilience

Details

Full Title
WS 3.129: Perspectives on Mountain Farming Resilience
Scheduled
Talks & Session - Part I:
2025-09-18, 08:30 - 10:00 (LT), SOWI – FS
Talks & Session - Part II:
2025-09-18, 10:30 - 12:00 (LT), SOWI – FS
Convener
Rike Stotten
Co-Conveners
Jamila Haider, Maria Lee Kernecker, Alessandra Piccoli,
Assigned to Synthesis Workshop
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Thematic Focus
Adaptation, Agriculture
Keywords
Mountain Farming, Farming Resilience, Adaptability

Description

This workshop explores social, economic, and environmental challenges facing mountain farming, particularly under climate change. Mountain regions are vulnerable to climate impacts, market volatility, regulatory constraints, and demographic shifts, disrupting traditional practices and threatening livelihoods. However, mountain farming demonstrates resilience through local knowledge, sustainable land management, and social networks. A process-relational view of resilience highlights continuous reconfiguration within a system, enabling persistence, adaptation, or transformation through ongoing adjustments of social, ecological, and economic interactions. Mountain farming requires flexible, interconnected strategies to navigate changes and ensure long-term viability. Drawing on global case studies, this workshop invites researchers to examine how mountain farming, including high pasture farming, persists, adapts, or transforms amid rapid and gradual changes. It explores how resilience can be enhanced through sustainable agriculture, community-led governance, tourism interactions, and knowledge sharing.

Key questions include:

How can policies support resilience in mountain regions?
What role does broader societal interaction play, such as tourism or high-quality products?
How can gaps between conflicting policies and the realities of mountain farmers be bridged?

This session fosters interdisciplinary discussions, highlights best practices, and identifies pathways to strengthen mountain farming resilience against global challenges.

Registered Abstracts

ID: 3.16838

The relational resilience of hill and high country farming in Aotearoa / New Zealand

Rike Stotten

Abstract/Description

Mountain farming in New Zealand’s hill and high country faces increasing pressures from climate change, market volatility, and regulatory constraints. While these challenges threaten traditional practices, resilience emerges through strong social networks, adaptive land management, and diversified income strategies. This study applies a process-relational perspective to resilience, emphasizing the continuous reconfiguration of social, ecological, and economic interactions that enable persistence, adaptation, or transformation. Findings highlight that farmers leveraging cooperative networks, knowledge-sharing, and diversification—such as agri-tourism, viticulture, and regenerative agriculture—exhibit greater resilience. However, regulatory constraints and financial barriers limit their capacity to scale adaptive strategies. Values-based supply chains, while promoting sustainability, remain vulnerable due to labor intensity and economic precarity. Moreover, conservation policies often conflict with farming realities, challenging the identity of farmers as land stewards.

ID: 3.17954

… Because it’s enough: Sufficiency in high alpine dairy farming

Jamila Haider
Präa, Sepp

Abstract/Description

Routine and rhythm characterise farming. But everyday is also different, because food producers are entangled with the living world. Even more so in mountain farming, the only constant here is change. Through a multi-year collaborative ethnography and narrative inquiry four main themes emerge as central to resilience (capacity to change) as a mountain farmer. 1) Creativity in the face of crisis; 2) Sufficiency as an underlying principle in farming practices; 3) Freedom and autonomy over time and resources, and 4) Liveliness: the capacity to become differently in relation to policy, landscape and climate. Part of a larger philosophical and creative work, this paper contribution focuses specifically on the farming practices that enable these capacities and problematizes policies that enable or constrain co-author and mountain farmer Sepp’s farming resilience. We will specifically focus on sufficiency as resilience capacity, value and principle in mountain farming, working with examples of milking technology and alpine cheese-making, meadow management and barn construction. Through narrative inquiry we elicit how these practices interact with subsidies for mountain farming, critically investigating how policy support mechanisms enable or constrain sufficiency in mountain farming.