Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENFASYS (ENcouraging Farmers towards sustainable farming SYstems through policy and business Strategies)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29
ENFASYS aims to stimulate a just and robust transition to sustainable, productive, climate-neutral, biodiversity friendly and resilient farming systems (SFS) by improved policies and business strategies that encourage farmers to change their production systems. In current food systems, farmers are challenged by multiple lock-ins that prevent them to move to SFS. To overcome this and thus to support the Green Deal and in particular the Farm to Fork ambitions, strengthening public strategies (policies) should go hand in hand with strengthening private strategies (business models, social innovations). To reach this aim, ENFASYS goals are (1) an improved understanding of lock-ins and levers in farming and food systems;(2) an improved understanding of behavioural factors of farmers, consumers and other food chain actors;(3) more and better evidence on the potential effectiveness of interventions;(4) a more structured approach to link knowledge to action. To do so, ENFASYS will frame current transitions to SFS and screen 160 cases for current interventions. Through systems analysis, behavioural and experimental studies, ENFASYS will uncover lockins from a systemic and behavioural point of view. The potential of policy and business interventions will be tested in 12-15 countries across Europe through experimental studies (discrete choice experiments, framed field experiments and randomized trials) and system dynamic modelling. To link systemic and behavioural insights to action and to understand the impact of the interventions on systems level, results of these studies will be combined into system and behavioural based theories of change. Together with stakeholders and enriched by the research results, ENFASYS will co-design policy mixes, business strategies and social innovations and stimulate their implementation. Strategic communication, dissemination, exploitation and tailored capacity building towards all our target groups, will maximize ENFASYS’ impact.
The project has been able to perform the work succesfully that was planned in the first reporting period, reaching all milestones and deliverable deadlines. Key achievements in the project were the completion of the Light Touch Review of Sustainability Initiatives; the participatory development of the conceptual and the methodological framework setting us up for implementing the different research and innovation activities of this very transdisciplinary project in a coherent and consistent way; and the succesful completion of data collection activities in the 10 case studies. Although, the project encountered some stakeholder engagement issues leading to deviation from the planned data collection targets e.g. Light Touch Review was decreased to 101 cases, limited expected impact is foreseen on the overall outcomes of the project.
The project completed multiple state-of-the art reviews of scientific literature on which basis a guiding conceptual framework was developed, putting partners in a better position to progress beyond the state of the art, but also exploring the possibility of linking behavioral and systemic research conceptually. The project developed an innovative systems mapping-based methodological framework for the project, that already advances scientific and practical understanding of how systems mapping can assist in the transformation of food systems, even if it is still in the process of being implemented in practice. The majority of the project results that are to progress the state of the art, are expected to be reached in the following reporting periods.