Resilience thinking has become an increasingly popular topic in both academic and
policy-making circles due to its normative interpretation, which assumes that resilience
is the opposite of vulnerability. Vulnerable groups, communities, settlements, regions
and nations have a greater likelihood of facing more serious consequences in the event
of unpredictable, negative shocks. Based on this view, in general, rural communities
and regions can be considered more vulnerable and hence less resilient to unknown,
negative events, as the subsistence of these communities is more closely linked to
their environments rather than to people living in urban areas. This is further exacerbated
by the path dependence of having a post-socialist past: the ‘legacy’ of socialism
that, in many cases, includes a relatively disadvantageous position, backwardness
and intensification of peripheralisation processes. While there is no consensus on
the concept of resilience itself, there are several approaches and perspectives related
to possibly detecting signs of its existence in rural communities. Our aim to present
how the notion of resilience can be operationalised at the farm level in post-socialist
contexts based on three different perspectives in order to contribute resilience thinking
related to post-socialist discourses. We illustrate how rural community resilience
may be conceptualised based on the example of the grape- and wine-producing communities
of Soltvadkert, Hungary and the Minis-Maderat wine region, Romania. Based on our qualitative
methodological results, it can be stated that the resilience of a community or group,
its properties reflecting resilience can be interpreted in several ways, which is
partly location-dependent, partly path-dependent, however, it is highly dependent
not only on embedded structures but also on activities that are constantly reproduced
by community members.
