From Resilience Diagnosis to Investment Prioritization: An Integrated Composite-Indicator Framework for Place-Based Agricultural Policy Across Romania’s NUTS-2 Regions

The agricultural sector is increasingly exposed to a complex set of climatic, economic, and institutional pressures, indicating that resilience assessment alone is insufficient; investments must also be strategically directed toward strengthening resilience. In response, this study proposes an integrated framework for assessing the resilience of crop farms and supporting the strategic screening and relative prioritization of investments at the regional level. The framework is applied to Romania, which is administratively organized into eight NUTS-2 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) development regions. The framework combines a Farm Resilience Composite Index (ICRF)—structured around five interconnected pillars (productive, economic, technological, ecological, and organizational)—with a Strategic Resilience Investment Score (SRIS), designed to translate resilience diagnostic outcomes into strategic screening and relative investment priorities. The methodology integrates normalized regional sub-indicators, expert-based weighting, and catch-up gap measures relative to the observed regional benchmark. It further incorporates complementarity and substitution relationships among sub-indicators, thereby capturing the systemic nature of resilience. Robustness is ensured through sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, and a leave-one-region-out jackknife procedure. The results indicate that investment priorities are not driven solely by the magnitude of regional deficits. Instead, they emerge at the intersection of catch-up needs, systemic relevance, and the stability of outcomes under uncertainty. Across all regions, production stability, access to the agricultural knowledge and innovation system (AKIS), and farm-level digitalization consistently emerge as cross-regional priorities. Moreover, at least two of the three initial priorities are retained in 55 of the 56 leave-one-region-out comparisons, indicating a high degree of robustness. In contrast, ecological, economic, and organizational indicators exhibit greater territorial specificity. Overall, the ICRF–SRIS framework provides a transparent and analytically grounded tool for supporting place-based agricultural policy and guiding investment allocation in the context of post-2027 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).