Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VISIONARY (Food Provision through Sustainable Farming Systems and Value Chains)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29
The importance of reconsidering European food systems in a global context has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic; it has made evident that the global food supply chain is vulnerable to disruptions. Climate change and the resulting transformation pressures are an additional key challenge for agriculture. Our current food system also suffers from the overuse of chemicals in food production, monoculture cropping systems, adverse environmental impacts of intensive animal farming on land and at sea, resulting in soil degradation and negative impact on water and biodiversity. The Green Deal, notably the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies, climate action, zero pollution ambition and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are policy responses to tackle these challenges. There is an urgent need for a substantial shift in the food system to make agriculture more sustainable in economic, environmental and social terms.
Addressing this shift requires a better understanding of the barriers preventing food actors from adopting more sustainable practices and decision-making. Furthermore, we need a whole agri-food system approach, that allows us to consider the way food production, manufacturing, processing, retail, transport and consumption all influence each other. Regarding food production, the project aims to improve the sustainability of agriculture by promoting those practices in food production systems that are more environmentally friendly, economically viable and socio-culturally appropriate, and helping to remove the barriers to their adoption.
The project VISIONARY wants to make a difference in food system transitions by identifying why it is so difficult to change food systems. We investigate what factors underlie the path dependencies and ‘lock-ins’ in current unsustainable food systems, and show how these can be overcome. The project will learn from existing initiatives -in different countries and value chains- that are still niche and small-scale, and it will investigate the barriers to scaling up and out. For selected and promising food system transitions, VISIONARY will tackle both policy and business shifts that are necessary to make a change.
Addressing this shift requires a better understanding of the barriers preventing food actors from adopting more sustainable practices and decision-making. Furthermore, we need a whole agri-food system approach, that allows us to consider the way food production, manufacturing, processing, retail, transport and consumption all influence each other. Regarding food production, the project aims to improve the sustainability of agriculture by promoting those practices in food production systems that are more environmentally friendly, economically viable and socio-culturally appropriate, and helping to remove the barriers to their adoption.
The project VISIONARY wants to make a difference in food system transitions by identifying why it is so difficult to change food systems. We investigate what factors underlie the path dependencies and ‘lock-ins’ in current unsustainable food systems, and show how these can be overcome. The project will learn from existing initiatives -in different countries and value chains- that are still niche and small-scale, and it will investigate the barriers to scaling up and out. For selected and promising food system transitions, VISIONARY will tackle both policy and business shifts that are necessary to make a change.
VISIONARY works with a system level understanding of change. This includes understanding of the interlinkages between (i) institutional and legal context, (ii) the business-related and policy-related drivers of change, (iii) the behavioural responses of actors in the food systems and (iv) the sustainability outcomes. The project works with a wide range of case studies that inform its systemic approach. First, case studies are clustered around a diversity of environmental transitions (biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, water management) that reflect the main challenges of European food systems. Second, case studies focus on both a diversity of food actors (from producers to consumers) and their interactions along the value chain.
In this regard, VISIONARY pursues a novel methodological approach to create synergies from combining two substantially different approaches: (i) quantitative -experimental and behavioural economics, and (ii) qualitative -comprehensive systems thinking approaches. Experiments have shown their potential to contribute to evaluating and shaping the CAP, as well as other agri-food policies and entrepreneurial initiatives to improve the sustainability of value chains. However, to become effective, experimental insights need to be integrated with policy cycles, and contextualised with in-depth insights generated from qualitative methods and systems approaches.
The research is interwoven with the establishment of 16 Science Policy Interfaces (SPI). SPI are multi-stakeholder platforms in which scientists, policy-makers and other stakeholders (sectoral organisations, NGOs, consumer groups) analyse key issues linked to the case studies, propose and assess steps to address them. Insights from these platforms inform the research on policy and business shifts that are necessary to boost the transition towards more sustainable food systems.
In this regard, VISIONARY pursues a novel methodological approach to create synergies from combining two substantially different approaches: (i) quantitative -experimental and behavioural economics, and (ii) qualitative -comprehensive systems thinking approaches. Experiments have shown their potential to contribute to evaluating and shaping the CAP, as well as other agri-food policies and entrepreneurial initiatives to improve the sustainability of value chains. However, to become effective, experimental insights need to be integrated with policy cycles, and contextualised with in-depth insights generated from qualitative methods and systems approaches.
The research is interwoven with the establishment of 16 Science Policy Interfaces (SPI). SPI are multi-stakeholder platforms in which scientists, policy-makers and other stakeholders (sectoral organisations, NGOs, consumer groups) analyse key issues linked to the case studies, propose and assess steps to address them. Insights from these platforms inform the research on policy and business shifts that are necessary to boost the transition towards more sustainable food systems.
The potential impacts of VISIONARY’s main results belong to three domains. First, within the academic realm, the project will contribute to a better understanding of the potential connections between experimental research, system thinking and policy science, an innovative approach that aims to cross academic and non-academic boundaries. Second, in the policy realm, the project will provide new insights regarding the design of the policy mix aiming to mainstream the adoption of sustainable farming and food practices. This means, among others, an enhanced understanding of farmers’ behavioural factors to develop more tailored and effective agri-environmental policies at several levels, a greater collective uptake of policy tools, and better use of policy cooperation measures. Third, VISIONARY tackles the exploration of new business models and institutional arrangements to support a more sustainable value chain. This will contribute to building new arrangements to coordinate value chain initiatives to accelerate the transition towards sustainable food systems, more effective sustainable food marketing initiatives, better design of advisory services to foster new business models, and the alignment between agricultural and environmental organisations.