Context: Many plans and strategies from individual CGIAR centers and challenge programmes are claiming that their research will enhance "resilience". However in almost all cases the claims are not supported by clear research hypotheses. It is not clear whether resilience will be enhanced through the way research products are packaged, combined or delivered or whether scientists believe that they can develop new technologies or management approaches that will lead to greater resilience. Resilience per se is not a necessarily a "good" thing. Agricultural systems caught in poverty traps need to have their resilience reduced in order to undergo transformative changes.

The overall aim of this parallel session will be to reach agreement on what science can contribute to enhancing the resilience of agricultural and natural resource systems. This necessarily involves considering these systems as coupled social-ecological systems (SES), emphasizing not only the dynamics in each domain but the nature and dynamics of their linkages. The session will address the issue of bringing greater resilience to the livelihoods of the rural poor who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the CGIAR research or to the natural resource systems upon which they depend. The key question is whether we will achieve this by deploying frontier science in support of the CGIAR mission that has not yet been used by the CGIAR or whether we believe that further scientific advances are possible that could contribute to resilience.

Development pathways: Another way of approaching this challenge is by considering whether there are some development pathways that will lead to greater resilience than others. For instance one might argue that the MEA "Adapting Mosaic" scenario would be more resilient than the "Global Orchestration" scenario – and that, if so, the CGIAR should give more attention to research that would favour this scenario. Similarly the IAASTD provides analysis that supports agricultural development pathways that are locally adapted and less reliant on outside inputs of technology or agro-chemicals (the latter derived from declining fossil fuels). Does resilience science suggest that CGIAR research should be deployed to favour these multiple precision agricultural models rather than conventional specialized models focussing on a very small number of crops and valuing economies of scale, standardization and specialization? Assessments of resilience lead to identifying points of intervention for avoiding or initiating threshold changes in trajectories. Can CGIAR research on resilience of agricultural systems help the people involved identify where, when and how to make such changes?

International public goods and resilience: Will science be able to supply breakthrough, International Public Goods (IPG)-type products (silver bullets) that will enhance the resilience of small scale agriculture or is this more likely to be achieved by adaptive research at the local level.

Tools for resilience: Are there areas of frontier science that could be drawn upon to support our efforts to enhance resilience of small scale agriculture and natural resource management. For instance could state of the art remote sensing allow us to have real time, large scale assessments of change processes that could provide a basis for adaptation – for instance to climate change. Could state of the art Information and Communications Technology be deployed to enhance resilience? What other tools are "out there"?

Genetically modified organisms – bio-informatics etc: Advanced plant breeding is so high tech that only a tiny number of labs are at the cutting edge. Does this present a threat to resilience – in that everyone will be using the same genotypes - or is it an opportunity because we will be able to produce precision crops to deal with every unique situation. Is advanced plant breeding leading us towards the MEA "Techno-garden" scenario or will the dependency on advance labs and on narrow genetic bases drive us towards "Global orchestration" and reduce resilience.

Governance: Governance and institutional rules have a major influence on the resilience of SES. What options are there for social research into adaptive governance in small scale agricultural systems, including the cross-scale effects of institutions at higher scales?

For further information contact Jeff Sayer at jeff.sayer@iucn.org