Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies (RAFE) is seeking papers that contribute to a better understanding of multi-risk in the agricultural sector: what are the new management strategies in front of multi-risk in the agricultural sector? How are they carried out? Are we facing a change of paradigm in the way risks are managed at the farm and institutional level: should we rather speak of multi-risk management or adaptation to permanent shocks? More theoretically, how does a “multi-risk” approach renew the traditional conception of risk? 

Guest editors

Stéphanie Barral, François Dedieu, Alban Thomas, INRAE

Argument

Risk has been a key notion for management and regulation of food systems and ecosystems since the 1990s. Economic sectors such as medicine or pesticide production have evolved accordingly with the integration of risk evaluation in the regulation of production (Demortain, 2020). In the social science literature, the notion of risk has correlatively been addressed through the distinction between “risk” – hazard anticipation through assessment of its frequency of occurrence– and “uncertainty” for which probabilistic assessment can’t be carried out and action is therefore not prepared (Knight 1921). Nowadays, a number of empirical observations question this analytical stance: it appears that risks are more numerous, strong, diversified and oftentimes global. May they be sporadic, chronic, systemic, local or global, risks are permanent threatsthat jeopardize economic development and human societies (Bourg, Joly, Kaufmann,2013). These evolutions question the notion of risk itself. Risk management and theorization have been designed on a single category of hazards (natural, financial, etc.). Yet contemporary crises increasingly highlight that risks are interrelated. The Covid worldwide pandemic emphasized that sanitary, social and economic issues are strongly connected. The same goes also for ordinary activities in the agricultural sector. Chemicals uses in crops protection management involved interrelated agronomic, sanitary and economics risks (Karesh et alii, 2012, Gilbert et alii, 2021). A trend of the social science literature considered that the concept of risk was outdated and favored the concept of resilience (Batabyal, 1988, Kaplan, 1999 notably). Yet the concept of resilience has also been criticized for giving the illusion of a perfect control of hazards (Klein et al., 2003), while current observations such as climaterelated catastrophes seriously contradict this possibility. To grasp these empirical evolutions, a renewed conceptual engagement toward risk issue leads to the notion of multi-risks, defined as a set of various risks and their combined effects. 

The notion of multi-risk seems particularly relevant to address recent trends within the agricultural sector. Some risks are the consequence of increased pressures of human societies on ecosystems, climate and biophysical environment. Consequently, a number of ecological, climatic, sanitary, economic and social risks are at play, interacting at various spatial and temporal scales, creating new interdependencies and stimulating the emergence of new risks. As a reaction to this changing environment, new risk-management instruments have been designed and implemented, complementarily or not with previous risk coping mechanisms. The recent reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy highlight growing reliance, though still timid, on private insurance actors while still offering a number of ex-post and ex-ante public programs.

RAFE is seeking papers that contribute to a better understanding of multi-risk in the agricultural sector: what are the new management strategies in front of multi-risk in the agricultural sector? How are they carried out? Are we facing a change of paradigm in the way risks are managed at the farm and institutional level: should we rather speak of multi-risk management or adaptation to permanent shocks? More theoretically, how does a “multi-risk” approach renew the traditional conception of risk? 

The Call for Papers targets contributions in economics, sociology, political science and geography seeking to provide answers to the following questions:

Definition of multi-risk

What is “multi-risk”? How can we define it? What are empirical expressions of multi-risk? What are the factors that lead to multi-risk Is it different from “domino effects”, “trade-offs”, interdependencies between risks observed in the crisis literature (Quarentelli, 1988, Perrow, 1984, Dedieu, 2013 notably)? 

New actors and tools for multi-risk evaluation and management

How are multi-risk evaluations carried out? Who carries them out? In particular, how do insurance companies adapt (or not) modelling tools to multi risks? What are the related risk management instruments? What are their potential and limits? How do public and private riskmanagement instruments relate to each other? 

New risk management strategies at the farm and agricultural supply chain levels

How do farmers face multi-risk? What type of farms and farming systems do they target? How do they arbitrate among different risks? Among different risk management strategies? How do farmers integrate more routinized risks such as water shortage? How do farmers integrate background risk? Who are the risk management prescribers at the local level? 

Even though focused on risks at the farm level, papers can also address multi-risk issues involving sources of risk at a different level (e.g., agricultural markets, food chain, ecosystems).

Submission guidelines

Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words including references. Further instructions for submissions are available on the RAFE website. Papers in economics should be submitted in English, but papers in political science, geography and sociology can be written in French or English. In the event of the paper being written in French, the translation of the final version will be at the authors’ expense. All papers will be subject to a double-blind evaluation. The review anticipates publishing these papers in 2025. 

Manuscripts can be submitted until September 1^st 2023

to stephanie.barral@inrae.fr , francois.dedieu@inrae.fr , alban.thomas@inrae.fr