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Conceptual Framing of the Operationalization of Sustainable Food and Agriculture
C H A P T E R
38
Conceptual Framing of the Operationalization of Sustainable Food and Agriculture
38.1 INTRODUCTION Sustainable agriculture has been on the policy agenda for decades. Nevertheless, we still live in a world where the lack of sustainability in food and agriculture systems is widespread, posing grave threats to human well-being both now and in the future. The way in which different systems are unsustainable is as varied and complex as the concept itself. Environmental damage is perhaps most commonly associated with unsustainable systems, but lack of economic viability or negative social impacts are equally important features of unsustainable systems, given the multiobjective nature of the concept of sustainability. There is a vast amount of literature on the nature of sustainability in agriculture and food systems, which indicates considerable variation in the specific definition of the concept. Nonetheless, there is a common understanding that sustainability requires the balancing of economic, social, and environmental objectives to achieve “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 41). van Kerkhoff and Lebel (2006) define sustainable development as “the process of ensuring all people can achieve their aspirations while maintaining the critical ecological and biophysical conditions that are essential to our collective survival.” Clark et al. (2016) define sustainable development as “the promotion of inclusive human well-being; this is to say, well-being that is shared equitably within and across generations and is built on the enlightened and integrated stewardship of the planet’s environmental, economic, and social assets.” Operationalization is defined as “put into operation or use” (Oxford Dictionary).
Sustainable Food and Agriculture DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-812134-4.00038-8
419
Copyright © 2019 The Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations (FAO) Co Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
420
38. CONCEPTUAL FRAMING OF THE OPERATIONALIZATION
Unsustainable systems then are ones where imbalances between multiple objectives exist and manifest themselves in a great variety of ways. In this section, we aim to identify different typologies of unsustainability in food and agricultural systems—and the actions that can be taken to enhance dynamic processes that underpin sustainability across a range of food and agricultural systems. We should first step back, however, and consider why the lack of sustainability in agricultural systems continues to be an enduring problem for humankind. As Velten et al. (2015) notes. “Since the beginnings of the debate about sustainable agriculture, there has been a great variety of conceptions of the term. It has been claimed that this multitude of different and partially opposing definitions has made the realization of sustainable agriculture a fuzzy affair, and caused confusion by exacerbating differences in the views of different stakeholder groups.” The difficulty of operationalizing sustainability in food and agricultural systems lies in the nature of the problem, as well as our capacity to grapple with it. Sustainability is a “wicked” problem, meaning a “social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems” (Kolko, 2012; Rittel and Webber, 1973). For example, DeFries and Nagendra (2017) point out that the regulation of ecosystem functions has increasingly become a serious problem since mechanisms related to self-regulation have been disrupted by the use of capital and technologies to substitute for ecosystem services. Wicked problems are not solved, but rather involve solutions that are judged better or worse—or good enough over time (Batie, 2008; adapting Kreuter et al., 2004). This fits well with the notion of sustainability as a continuing dynamic and adaptive process rather than an endpoint at which one can arrive. Looking through the vast literature on how and why food and agricultural systems are unsustainable, much of which is covered in earlier sections of this book, we can see that two major issues consistently arise: 1. People lack the knowledge needed to understand the complex dynamics of food and agricultural systems and, consequently, management strategies have frequently led to unintended consequences. 2. There are significant costs, or trade-offs, involved in moving onto sustainable trajectories, which are often not recognized, or relate to imbalances of power among different social groups and are thus not addressed through mechanisms for reducing or resolving them. At a very general level, operationalizing sustainability dynamics in food and agricultural systems requires addressing these issues through a combination of knowledge and awareness creation to inform stakeholders about the complexities of food and agricultural systems and the potential effects of different strategies. In addition, it should empower their actions to enhance the sustainability of the food and agriculture system in which they participate in—whether as a policymaker, farmer, food processor, retailer, or consumer. Ultimately, operationalizing sustainability involves changes in the behavior of actors operating throughout agrifood systems to create the required changes, but also to demand needed changes in social, ecological, and economic performance as central pillars of sustainability.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
38.2 ELEMENTS OF AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK
421
38.2 ELEMENTS OF AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK Using the conceptual framing of sustainable food and agriculture (SFA) presented in Section III, we can think of operationalizing sustainability as a dynamic process of changing the balance between the biophysical and socioeconomic dimensions of food and agricultural systems with multiple entry points, depending on linkages and flows in the systems. This gives us a starting point for identifying actions to stimulate desired change. Generally, given the nature of the problem, we know that injecting actions to stimulate sustainability into the current dynamic trajectories of food and agricultural systems requires a mixture of knowledge, capacity, and incentives to take action, identify, and resolve potential conflicts and adapt them in response to changing circumstances. We can, however, become more context-specific in identifying which entry points make sense under which conditions and how they might be pursued. The FAO (2014) outlined four areas of action to instigate the transition to SFA: (1) building relevant, coconstructed, and accessible evidence; (2) engaging stakeholders in dialogue to build common understanding and joint action; (3) formulating tools and levers to enable and incentivize changes in food and agricultural systems; and (4) realizing practice change through innovative approaches and solutions. In this section, we revisit and expand upon these four action areas to derive guidance on how to approach the wicked problem of operationalizing sustainability across different types of agrifood systems. The definition of agrifood system that we will use for the remainder of this section is: An interconnected web of activities, resources and people that extends across all domains involved in providing human nourishment and sustaining health, including production, processing, packaging, distribution, marketing, consumption and disposal of food. The organization of agri-food systems reflects and responds to social, cultural, political, economic, health and environmental conditions and can be identified at multiple scales, from a household kitchen to a city, county, state or nation Grubinger et al. (2010).
Priority actions for operationalizing sustainability will vary across different types of agrifood systems, depending on the specific characteristics or imbalances that generate unsustainable dynamics. Thus, though we cannot build a blueprint for sustainability action across all food and agriculture systems, we can develop typologies and systems to help identify priority actions to enhance sustainability dynamics. The analysis presented in Section III—as indeed in all the sections of the book and much of the literature on SFA systems—indicates that specific combinations and interactions between biophysical and socioeconomic processes drive the dynamics of sustainability, or lack of thereof. Section III of this book relates the five sustainability principles for agrifood systems laid out by the FAO (2014) to four major action areas, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Manage flows of energy, matter, and information in agrifood systems. Protect and enhance natural resource stocks. Improve human benefits and their distribution. Manage risks.
In the analysis presented, the fifth sustainability principle on governance and institutions is addressed as a cross-cutting issue in each of these four action areas; for example, governance and institutions are needed to realize all of them.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
422
38. CONCEPTUAL FRAMING OF THE OPERATIONALIZATION
This analysis gives us a basis for characterizing the nature of the forces underlying unsustainability in different agrifood systems and identifying priority areas for operationalizing sustainability. The key features and drivers of unsustainability in agrifood systems involving extensive and largely subsistence-oriented pastoralist livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are very different from those of a highly automated United States Midwest monocropping corn system producing for animal feed and high fructose corn to be processed into food products for domestic and international consumer markets. In the pastoralist case, the flows of energy and information are generally low. Natural resource stocks are being drawn down from processes occurring both within and external to the agrifood system, food insecurity is a major problem, and production risks from transboundary diseases and climate are high. Conversely, in the United States Midwest corn case, flows of energy and information are very high, natural resource stocks may be damaged through pollution, human health is at risk from consumption of high fructose corn syrup products, and the system faces major risks from changes in markets and trade patterns that are often higher than production-related risks. In both cases, there is a need for changes in behavior from different participants in the food system: policymakers, producers, traders, consumers, processors, and other value chain participants of the agrifood systems—but the nature of the changes required to enhance the sustainability of the system are radically different. This brief example gives rise to a first principle for operationalizing sustainability: the need to understand the relevant context by identifying the nature of imbalances in the particular agrifood system under consideration. Essentially this requires a process of information gathering, discussion, and consultation to understand the setting and leverage points within a given agrifood system to help identify imbalances and the drivers in the system that are generating these unsustainable processes. Clearly, just understanding the basis of unsustainability is not enough to effectuate changes toward a more sustainable agrifood system. A second operational principle involves generating useful knowledge to identify priority actions and their modes of implementation to support changes toward sustainability. Here, the key is making sure knowledge is useful, and that in itself requires interactions with key stakeholders who have differing levels of capacity and power to effectuate change, necessitating a somewhat different approach to knowledge generation than has generally been applied in the past. The third basic operational principle is facilitating changes in behavior from a wide and very diverse range of actors in the food system: from consumers, processors, regulators, and marketers to farmers, herders, fishers, or foresters who are actively involved in transforming natural resources into agricultural products and services. Though most effective entry points and feasible actions to operationalize sustainability vary, they consistently involve a process of building knowledge among key stakeholders and utilizing a range of approaches to realize change on a meaningful scale. These elements of action can be outlined in a simple framework consisting of three main elements: (1) identifying the relevant context; (2) generating knowledge for action; and (3) facilitating pervasive change in behavior to achieve major shifts in the dynamics of agrifood systems. The components under each element—and the two elements themselves—do not follow a linear progression, but often occur in repeating loops or by
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
38.2 ELEMENTS OF AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK
423
FIGURE 38.1 SFA action framework.
jumping from one component to another. For this reason, the action framework takes the form of a circle with three major interacting components (Fig. 38.1). In operationalizing SFA through agrifood systems, it is important not only to consider the wide scope of agriculture and food-related activities, contexts, and players, but also to recognize that collectively these operate as dynamic, complex systems that operate at farm to societal scales. Operationalizing SFA involves changes in these systems as much as it does changes in component parts. That is to say, it involves changes in values, networks, and behavior as well as technology, market, and policy responses and drivers. The move toward sustainably and locally produced food, for example, reflects a societal change that is mirrored in and supported by policy and market changes, technological responses, and support networks.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
38
Conceptual Framing of the Operationalization of Sustainable Food and Agriculture
38.1 INTRODUCTION Sustainable agriculture has been on the policy agenda for decades. Nevertheless, we still live in a world where the lack of sustainability in food and agriculture systems is widespread, posing grave threats to human well-being both now and in the future. The way in which different systems are unsustainable is as varied and complex as the concept itself. Environmental damage is perhaps most commonly associated with unsustainable systems, but lack of economic viability or negative social impacts are equally important features of unsustainable systems, given the multiobjective nature of the concept of sustainability. There is a vast amount of literature on the nature of sustainability in agriculture and food systems, which indicates considerable variation in the specific definition of the concept. Nonetheless, there is a common understanding that sustainability requires the balancing of economic, social, and environmental objectives to achieve “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 41). van Kerkhoff and Lebel (2006) define sustainable development as “the process of ensuring all people can achieve their aspirations while maintaining the critical ecological and biophysical conditions that are essential to our collective survival.” Clark et al. (2016) define sustainable development as “the promotion of inclusive human well-being; this is to say, well-being that is shared equitably within and across generations and is built on the enlightened and integrated stewardship of the planet’s environmental, economic, and social assets.” Operationalization is defined as “put into operation or use” (Oxford Dictionary).
Sustainable Food and Agriculture DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-812134-4.00038-8
419
Copyright © 2019 The Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations (FAO) Co Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
420
38. CONCEPTUAL FRAMING OF THE OPERATIONALIZATION
Unsustainable systems then are ones where imbalances between multiple objectives exist and manifest themselves in a great variety of ways. In this section, we aim to identify different typologies of unsustainability in food and agricultural systems—and the actions that can be taken to enhance dynamic processes that underpin sustainability across a range of food and agricultural systems. We should first step back, however, and consider why the lack of sustainability in agricultural systems continues to be an enduring problem for humankind. As Velten et al. (2015) notes. “Since the beginnings of the debate about sustainable agriculture, there has been a great variety of conceptions of the term. It has been claimed that this multitude of different and partially opposing definitions has made the realization of sustainable agriculture a fuzzy affair, and caused confusion by exacerbating differences in the views of different stakeholder groups.” The difficulty of operationalizing sustainability in food and agricultural systems lies in the nature of the problem, as well as our capacity to grapple with it. Sustainability is a “wicked” problem, meaning a “social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems” (Kolko, 2012; Rittel and Webber, 1973). For example, DeFries and Nagendra (2017) point out that the regulation of ecosystem functions has increasingly become a serious problem since mechanisms related to self-regulation have been disrupted by the use of capital and technologies to substitute for ecosystem services. Wicked problems are not solved, but rather involve solutions that are judged better or worse—or good enough over time (Batie, 2008; adapting Kreuter et al., 2004). This fits well with the notion of sustainability as a continuing dynamic and adaptive process rather than an endpoint at which one can arrive. Looking through the vast literature on how and why food and agricultural systems are unsustainable, much of which is covered in earlier sections of this book, we can see that two major issues consistently arise: 1. People lack the knowledge needed to understand the complex dynamics of food and agricultural systems and, consequently, management strategies have frequently led to unintended consequences. 2. There are significant costs, or trade-offs, involved in moving onto sustainable trajectories, which are often not recognized, or relate to imbalances of power among different social groups and are thus not addressed through mechanisms for reducing or resolving them. At a very general level, operationalizing sustainability dynamics in food and agricultural systems requires addressing these issues through a combination of knowledge and awareness creation to inform stakeholders about the complexities of food and agricultural systems and the potential effects of different strategies. In addition, it should empower their actions to enhance the sustainability of the food and agriculture system in which they participate in—whether as a policymaker, farmer, food processor, retailer, or consumer. Ultimately, operationalizing sustainability involves changes in the behavior of actors operating throughout agrifood systems to create the required changes, but also to demand needed changes in social, ecological, and economic performance as central pillars of sustainability.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
38.2 ELEMENTS OF AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK
421
38.2 ELEMENTS OF AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK Using the conceptual framing of sustainable food and agriculture (SFA) presented in Section III, we can think of operationalizing sustainability as a dynamic process of changing the balance between the biophysical and socioeconomic dimensions of food and agricultural systems with multiple entry points, depending on linkages and flows in the systems. This gives us a starting point for identifying actions to stimulate desired change. Generally, given the nature of the problem, we know that injecting actions to stimulate sustainability into the current dynamic trajectories of food and agricultural systems requires a mixture of knowledge, capacity, and incentives to take action, identify, and resolve potential conflicts and adapt them in response to changing circumstances. We can, however, become more context-specific in identifying which entry points make sense under which conditions and how they might be pursued. The FAO (2014) outlined four areas of action to instigate the transition to SFA: (1) building relevant, coconstructed, and accessible evidence; (2) engaging stakeholders in dialogue to build common understanding and joint action; (3) formulating tools and levers to enable and incentivize changes in food and agricultural systems; and (4) realizing practice change through innovative approaches and solutions. In this section, we revisit and expand upon these four action areas to derive guidance on how to approach the wicked problem of operationalizing sustainability across different types of agrifood systems. The definition of agrifood system that we will use for the remainder of this section is: An interconnected web of activities, resources and people that extends across all domains involved in providing human nourishment and sustaining health, including production, processing, packaging, distribution, marketing, consumption and disposal of food. The organization of agri-food systems reflects and responds to social, cultural, political, economic, health and environmental conditions and can be identified at multiple scales, from a household kitchen to a city, county, state or nation Grubinger et al. (2010).
Priority actions for operationalizing sustainability will vary across different types of agrifood systems, depending on the specific characteristics or imbalances that generate unsustainable dynamics. Thus, though we cannot build a blueprint for sustainability action across all food and agriculture systems, we can develop typologies and systems to help identify priority actions to enhance sustainability dynamics. The analysis presented in Section III—as indeed in all the sections of the book and much of the literature on SFA systems—indicates that specific combinations and interactions between biophysical and socioeconomic processes drive the dynamics of sustainability, or lack of thereof. Section III of this book relates the five sustainability principles for agrifood systems laid out by the FAO (2014) to four major action areas, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Manage flows of energy, matter, and information in agrifood systems. Protect and enhance natural resource stocks. Improve human benefits and their distribution. Manage risks.
In the analysis presented, the fifth sustainability principle on governance and institutions is addressed as a cross-cutting issue in each of these four action areas; for example, governance and institutions are needed to realize all of them.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
422
38. CONCEPTUAL FRAMING OF THE OPERATIONALIZATION
This analysis gives us a basis for characterizing the nature of the forces underlying unsustainability in different agrifood systems and identifying priority areas for operationalizing sustainability. The key features and drivers of unsustainability in agrifood systems involving extensive and largely subsistence-oriented pastoralist livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are very different from those of a highly automated United States Midwest monocropping corn system producing for animal feed and high fructose corn to be processed into food products for domestic and international consumer markets. In the pastoralist case, the flows of energy and information are generally low. Natural resource stocks are being drawn down from processes occurring both within and external to the agrifood system, food insecurity is a major problem, and production risks from transboundary diseases and climate are high. Conversely, in the United States Midwest corn case, flows of energy and information are very high, natural resource stocks may be damaged through pollution, human health is at risk from consumption of high fructose corn syrup products, and the system faces major risks from changes in markets and trade patterns that are often higher than production-related risks. In both cases, there is a need for changes in behavior from different participants in the food system: policymakers, producers, traders, consumers, processors, and other value chain participants of the agrifood systems—but the nature of the changes required to enhance the sustainability of the system are radically different. This brief example gives rise to a first principle for operationalizing sustainability: the need to understand the relevant context by identifying the nature of imbalances in the particular agrifood system under consideration. Essentially this requires a process of information gathering, discussion, and consultation to understand the setting and leverage points within a given agrifood system to help identify imbalances and the drivers in the system that are generating these unsustainable processes. Clearly, just understanding the basis of unsustainability is not enough to effectuate changes toward a more sustainable agrifood system. A second operational principle involves generating useful knowledge to identify priority actions and their modes of implementation to support changes toward sustainability. Here, the key is making sure knowledge is useful, and that in itself requires interactions with key stakeholders who have differing levels of capacity and power to effectuate change, necessitating a somewhat different approach to knowledge generation than has generally been applied in the past. The third basic operational principle is facilitating changes in behavior from a wide and very diverse range of actors in the food system: from consumers, processors, regulators, and marketers to farmers, herders, fishers, or foresters who are actively involved in transforming natural resources into agricultural products and services. Though most effective entry points and feasible actions to operationalize sustainability vary, they consistently involve a process of building knowledge among key stakeholders and utilizing a range of approaches to realize change on a meaningful scale. These elements of action can be outlined in a simple framework consisting of three main elements: (1) identifying the relevant context; (2) generating knowledge for action; and (3) facilitating pervasive change in behavior to achieve major shifts in the dynamics of agrifood systems. The components under each element—and the two elements themselves—do not follow a linear progression, but often occur in repeating loops or by
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS
38.2 ELEMENTS OF AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK
423
FIGURE 38.1 SFA action framework.
jumping from one component to another. For this reason, the action framework takes the form of a circle with three major interacting components (Fig. 38.1). In operationalizing SFA through agrifood systems, it is important not only to consider the wide scope of agriculture and food-related activities, contexts, and players, but also to recognize that collectively these operate as dynamic, complex systems that operate at farm to societal scales. Operationalizing SFA involves changes in these systems as much as it does changes in component parts. That is to say, it involves changes in values, networks, and behavior as well as technology, market, and policy responses and drivers. The move toward sustainably and locally produced food, for example, reflects a societal change that is mirrored in and supported by policy and market changes, technological responses, and support networks.
IV. OPERATIONALIZING SUSTAINABLE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS