## @vanderlee.etal_2022 > Five key choices in design of resilience assessment The comparison of lenses in this paper highlights the opportunities to complement their respective strengths. Their relative contribution depends on the objectives of a particular resilience assessment. This review identified the following key decisions to be considered in operationalizing a resilience assessment strategy, which at the same time may direct research on resilience assessment: > 1. Choice of system traits—system type, system functions, and system scale—Clarification of these choices is important to make an assessment feasible, to allow for better replicability of studies, and to disentangle interscale resilience dynamics, i.e., improvements to the resilience of one system scale, such as a value chain, may have negative repercussions for resilience of another scale, such as smallholder farming. Fit of assessment approaches with specific system traits requires more study. > 2. Identification of perturbation(s) to be consideredAssessment of resilience against multiple perturbations—or against the most important onerequires evaluation of the likelihood of those perturbations occurring. This requires detailed knowledge of the context under study and its stakeholder interests (R-C05, Carpenter et al. 2012) and implies a risk evaluation step before resilience assessment is conducted (Urruty et al. 2016). However, only a few of the reviewed papers give evidence of such identification and evaluation of perturbations (C09, Jacobi et al. 2015; C10, Jacobi et al. 2018). Stakeholder interviews by the first author of this paper indicate that exposure to shocks and stressors differs between and within regions (between farmers). Moreover, shocks and stressors that rank high in exposure may not necessarily rank as most threatening. Reasons may include that differences between farms expose particular farms more to particular shocks and stressors (such as market fluctuations for more commercial farms) and that a strong enabling environment reduces the sensitivity to certain shocks and stressors, e.g., good public veterinary services reducing the risk of epidemic diseases. > 3. General or specific resilience—Moving beyond assessment of one or multiple known perturbations, assessment of general resilience against unexpected and unspecified perturbation appears to be an underdeveloped area, with only three papers in this review paying cursory attention to it (R-C05, Carpenter et al. 2012; R-T03, Quinlan et al. 2016; and T34, Tittonell 2014). Strengthening of general resilience may be essential for smallholder farmers in areas with unpredictable or unmanageable risks, considering their resource limitations for risk analysis and risk management (Darnhofer 2021). Such farmers understandably prioritize the reduction of variation in system performance over maximizing output, even if that results in low performance levels (Urruty et al. 2016). Development of an assessment approach for general resilience against unexpected and unspecified perturbations may warrant further research. > 4. Selection of contributing factors—The factors to be considered are capacities, resources, practices, or, preferably, a combination of these. This review showed how this choice depends heavily on the lens used, that it has significant repercussions for the assessment approach used and influences the desirability of resilience. > 5. Selection of resilience outcomes—As discussed above, reduction of vulnerability is a justifiable short-term objective, for which the V-lens offers the most established assessment approaches when it comes to climate change. Stability of system performance adds a longer term perspective, assessment of which will benefit from elements of multiple lenses. The third outcome, system transformation—needed to deal with prolonged stress, high risk probability, or dissatisfaction with system performance—has an even longer time horizon and actually underlies many agricultural development interventions. While the C-lens intends to address this outcome through its focus on multiple capacities including transformative capacity (R-C02, Béné et al. 2014), adequate assessment approaches are not yet developed by any of the lenses.