Constructing relational resilience: Governance, power and the limits of transformation in Aotearoa New Zealand’s hill country farming

This study investigates how resilience is relationally constructed within Aotearoa New Zealand’s hill country farming systems. Drawing on qualitative interviews with hill-country farmers, and applying a social relational resilience perspective together with the Resilience Capacities Framework, the research examines how capacities for persistence, adaptation, and transformation emerge through relationships among farmers, communities, markets, and governance institutions. The findings show that persistence is sustained through long-term trust, reciprocity, stewardship, and intergenerational social ties, while adaptive capacity depends on diverse social networks, collective learning, and the integration of heterogeneous knowledges. However, adaptive opportunities remain uneven and are shaped by unequal access to networks, markets, and institutional support. Transformative capacity was comparatively weak across cases, constrained by fragmented governance relationships, limited institutional trust, and power asymmetries that restricted collaborative problem-solving and cross-scale engagement. The study argues that resilience is not an attribute of individual farmers nor reducible to capital stocks, but an emergent and relational process shaped by everyday interactions, governance dynamics, and socio-political context. By operationalising the Resilience Capacities Framework empirically, the paper contributes to relational resilience scholarship and demonstrates the importance of relational infrastructures, inclusive governance, and co-produced adaptation pathways for rural sustainability transformations.