Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

19 During the PSP, the author conducted semi-structured interviews to gather stakeholders’ perspectives about the food security resilience of the small-scale maize production system of the region. In the first part of the interviews, the author asked the delegates of the different stakeholder groups about the agendas they have for the local food system. Subsequently, causal loop diagrams (CLDs) were used to capture stakeholders’ broad understanding of the underlying causes of system vulnerability (the extent to which the system will be affected by) climate change. Finally, the delegates were also asked to rank the stakeholders in the system in terms of influence on and interest in the local food system. The elicitation of stakeholders’ agendas for the local food system was done by discussing the following general questions with the delegates of each stakeholder group: What would you like to get from the small-scale maize production system? In this context, what does resilience of food security to climate change mean? What are the critical success factors of policies enhancing food security? After the interviews, the author compiled and summarised the different answers. Similar answers were grouped in the same variable or short statement to simplify further analysis. The resulting statements were discussed in further interviews with each delegate to ensure they reflected their own perspectives. When needed, changes were made and again discussed with the specific delegate requesting the change. Beside the narratives provided by the delegates, this paper uses CLDs as a means for capturing stakeholders’ assumptions. CLDs are diagrams representing, in a simple manner, a possible set of causal relationships between different variables of the systems [24,25]. CLDs are particularly useful for identifying circular relationships known in the systems’ literature as feedback loops. The rigor of diagramming forces the participants to “carefully and consistently” make their assumptions explicit and to “put their problem definition to test” [26] (p. 384). Thus, CLDs are a suitable way to represent and compare different interpretations of the problem and the causal explanations held by the stakeholder groups participating in the PSP. CLDs might be employed in the PSP (also known as the conceptualisation stage of the modelling process) [27,28] to elicit participants’ understanding of the problem. During the conceptualisation, the modeller focuses on “a verbal description of the feedback loops that are assumed to have caused the reference mode” [19] (p. 119). Namely, in this paper, the CLDs were used to diagrammatically represent the causal explanations for the lack of resilience of food security in the region. This elicitation might be done, as it was in the case of this paper, during one to one interviews with experts in the field, in our case an agronomist from the university, and stakeholders of the problem at hand. During the semi-structured interviews, the author drafted CLDs representing what the delegates were describing. The author started by asking the delegates what were the main causes of the decrease and fluctuations of the affordability of maize (as a measure of food security [29]) experienced in the past 10 years in the region of Huehuetenango (see Figure 1). The causes stated by the delegates were summarized by the author in relevant variables while transcribing them to the diagram. Then, the author asked delegates to explain how those variables influenced each other. These causal links between different variables were represented in the diagram by arrows connecting the cause with its effects. When needed, new variables were added to the diagram. Figure 1. Maize affordability in Huehuetenango. At the end of the interview, the delegateswere asked to complete the CLDs drafted by the author by adding variables, causal relationships or any elements missing in the diagram. Later, the author worked on his own by summarising all the CLDs produced by each delegate into a single CLD per stakeholder group. The single CLDs were validated and discussed with the delegates of each stakeholder group in separate interviews to ensure all of their views were appropriately captured in the diagrams. If participants found important issues