The Role of Technological Innovation in Agri-food Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review

The agri-food sector is increasingly exposed to multiple internal and external drivers of change, ranging from sudden shocks to long-term stressors, increasing its vulnerability over time. In a world of increasing complexity and future uncertainty, it has become imperative to include contingency as a critical element in sustainable development research. Change, uncertainty, and the adaptive capacity of systems invoke the concept of resilience. There is a growing recognition of how digitalization and so-called 4.0 disruptive technologies can contribute to agri-food resilience. This work aims to carry out a systematic literature review combining technological development in the agri-food sector with the concept of resilience. The main objective is to highlight the state of the art on the role of technological innovation and how it sustains the sector by presenting results of a descriptive conceptual nature. The results show that the contribution of technological innovations to agri-food resilience has become a topic of considerable interest, especially in the last 5 years (2018–2022) as a response, above all, to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Among the main contributions, digital technologies promote new approaches to production efficiency and decision-making in a logic of increased competitiveness, stability, and sustainability of the agri-food sector in the long term.