Exploring resilience capacities with food innovators: a narrative approach

Non-technical summary We interviewed grassroots food innovators in South Africa to explore the diverse ways in which their narratives expressed different capacities for resilience, such as dealing with surprise and shaping desirable change. We drew on key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view their personal stories and efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. We used narrative and interpretative methods to connect the personal and context-specific experiences of food innovators to the 3Rs, exploring a new approach to uncovering resilience capacities. We suggest that this approach could be usefully employed to understand potential resilience capacities that could help address diverse sustainability challenges around the world. Technical summary As direct accounts of human experience, narratives offer a way of exploring the subjective and contextual dimensions of different capacities that influence resilience – the capacity to deal with surprise and unexpected change. In this study, we analysed the stories of food innovators in South Africa through combined narrative and interpretative methods, and we developed a novel approach to tease out some of the unique and particular aspects of resilience expressed in their stories. Using a combination of narrative enquiry and interpretative phenomenological analysis, we drew on the key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view the personal reflections of food innovators and to identify important capacities that may contribute towards their efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. Amongst the diverse set of narratives, we found that resilience capacities were strongly influenced by an ethos of connectedness and care; attunement to co-creative processes; and experimenting with novelty and diverse narratives. We suggest that this narrative-based methodology could be usefully employed to surface latent rich and multidimensional resilience capacities in relation to various sustainability challenges in diverse contexts around the world. Social media summary A narrative approach to explore resilience capacities that can help reshape the future of South African food innovators.