Abstract

The fruit agro-export value chain in northern Chile faces governance and water-related challenges that affect its resilience and long-term sustainability. In the context of sustainable agriculture, these challenges highlight the need for integrated approaches to understand how socio-economic and environmental factors interact. This paper proposes a set of measures to assess resilience using a social simulation model based on the Sociology of Organized Action, implemented through the Social Laboratory (SocLab) platform. The model represents actors, their resources, and their interactions as a system driven by strategic behavior. The proposed measures are applied to analyze both simulation outcomes and the structure of the model. The findings indicate that resilience is constrained by power imbalances among actors and by external pressures related to water scarcity. In particular, simulation results show that the influence of Producers reaches only approximately half that of the Public Sector, revealing a significant power imbalance within the value chain. These imbalances create vulnerabilities that limit the system’s capacity to absorb disturbances and adapt to environmental stressors, which are expected to intensify due to climate change and increasing demand. In addition, the resource associated with coordinating actors around the efficient use of water exhibited the highest relevance among the resources considered, highlighting the central role of water governance in shaping resilience. The study contributes by integrating a simulation-based approach with economic and institutional perspectives, linking the distribution of influence among actors to value allocation along the chain, as conceptualized in marketing margin analysis, and interpreting governance structures through Transaction Cost Economics. This integration provides a more comprehensive understanding of how power distribution, coordination mechanisms, and transaction costs jointly shape resilience and sustainability in agri-food value chains.

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