Silvana Juri, Naomi Terry and Laura Pereira from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, recently published an excellent paper reviewing the state of the emerging field of food systems transformation.
The paper offers a clear definition of food systems transformation that’s helpful for policymaking and further research on the topic:
“Food system transformations refer to significant re-configurations of the assemblage of food system activities, actors, outcomes, and relationships (dynamics) to move away from the current globalized industrial model and ensure sustainable, resilient, and just models of production and consumption.”
They go onto specify the definition more precisely:
“These transformative processes demand the collective and inclusive re-designing (from re-imagining to re-governing) of food system components through platforms where governance, practices, power, and value-change can be debated and enacted at multiple scales. Food system re-design should therefore be seen as an ethico-political process that needs to be collectively stewarded and nurtured in an adaptive, engaged, and creative way. This also means that strategies (pathways) and tools need to respond to and resonate with current contextual needs and features, while also being future-proof and proactive (anticipatory).”
This definition outlines elements that need to change, and the scale of this change. But what does this type of transformation look like, in practice?