Food System Resilience, Vulnerability, and Dietary Diversity Among Urban Households During Systemic Shocks: Evidence from South West Nigeria

Food system resilience has emerged as a critical analytical construct for understanding how urban households maintain or recover dietary adequacy during systemic shocks including economic crises, public health emergencies, and climate-related disruptions. In South West Nigeria, the overlapping shocks of the 2016 economic recession, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and recurrent flooding events created a natural experiment context for investigating food system resilience mechanisms. This study developed a theoretical framework for food system resilience at the urban household level incorporating supply chain, livelihood, and social protection dimensions. The framework was empirically tested using a four-round panel dataset of 520 urban and peri-urban households across Lagos, Ogun, and Oyo States collected from 2018 to 2022, spanning pre-shock, shock, and recovery periods. Dietary diversity was measured using the Women's Dietary Diversity Score and household food insecurity access indicators. Generalised method of moments panel estimators and structural break analysis were applied. Results identified social network mobilisation, dietary substitution flexibility, and livelihood portfolio diversity as the primary resilience mechanisms maintaining dietary diversity during shocks. Supply chain localisation was associated with faster dietary recovery after the COVID-19 shock. Households below a critical asset threshold exhibited resilience failure characterised by dietary diversity collapse with slow recovery. The study makes an original theoretical and empirical contribution to food system resilience analysis in Nigerian urban contexts, with policy recommendations for urban food system governance. Keywords: food system resilience, dietary diversity, urban households, South West Nigeria, systemic shocks.