Institutional architecture of global food security under systemic crises: multilevel governance and adaptive resilience

<jats:p>The article examines the transformation of the institutional architecture of global food security under the simultaneous pressure of armed conflicts, trade tensions, climate shocks, logistics disruptions and shortages in humanitarian financing. The purpose of the study is to develop scientific and applied principles of multilevel food-security governance and to propose a model of institutional adaptive resilience that links global standards, regional buffer mechanisms and national implementation instruments. The methodological framework combines institutional, systems and structural-functional approaches, comparative analysis of international governance arrangements, content analysis of strategic documents and current official reports, and original structural-logical modeling. The relevance of the research is confirmed by the latest global evidence. According to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026, around 645 million people faced hunger in 2025 and 2.1 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. At the same time, the Global Report on Food Crises 2026 estimates that 266 million people in 47 countries and territories faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025. The study argues that contemporary global food governance should not be interpreted as a rigid vertical hierarchy. It is more appropriately viewed as a coordinated multilevel network in which global institutions perform standard-setting, analytical, trade-regulatory, and humanitarian functions; regional arrangements create buffers, reserves, and context-specific coordination mechanisms; and national systems implement policy, monitor risks, and organize operational responses. Scientific novelty lies in the proposed model of institutional adaptive resilience designed as a closed cycle of five functional contours: diagnostics and early warning; normative and coordination regulation; resource buffering; logistical and operational response; and adaptive feedback. A matrix that maps institutional instruments to major types of systemic shocks is developed, along with a set of qualitative indicators to assess adaptive capacity. The Ukrainian case demonstrates that the current Food Security Strategy until 2027 should link domestic food availability and affordability with external logistics resilience. The substantial constraints on agricultural exports recorded in August 2026 further illustrate the importance of route redundancy, institutional coordination, and rapid policy adjustment under wartime conditions. The practical significance of the proposed framework lies in its potential applications to institutional capacity audits, crisis response planning, evaluation of regional reserve mechanisms, and the alignment of national policies with global and regional food security governance. Further research should quantify the proposed indicators, determine their weights for countries with different risk profiles, and construct an integrated index of institutional adaptive resilience for cross-country comparison. Keywords: food security, institutional architecture, multilevel governance, adaptive resilience, global governance, agrifood systems, crisis response, Ukraine.</jats:p>