From youth engagement to policy insights: Identifying and testing food systems’ sustainability indicators

Abstract

Understanding how food systems could change and evolve in the future is essential for scientists and decision-makers across sectors to make informed policy decisions. For effective and salient policy, engaging citizens, especially young generations, who will experience those policies firsthand is crucial. This work aims to define and test new food systems sustainability indicators through youth engagement for policy insights to provide policymakers with literature incorporating citizens' needs. Our approach is based on Community Dissonance Theory and the application of a literature review, focus groups and survey. Four future food systems scenarios were obtained through the literature, serving as a baseline for discussion for Generation Z focus groups, whose results were analyzed through NVivo. In this work 31 food system indicators were identified, 20 on social aspects, 9 economic and one environmental. Social indicators proposed were related to capacity development, education, vulnerable groups, income inequality, social awareness, and increased stakeholders' engagement measures. Economic ones are on stakeholders' bargaining power and purchasing power, while environmental ones are on climate change. The combination of these scenarios contributed to identifying top priorities in terms of social, economic, and environmental indicators, which in terms of policy suggestions, could: balance economic, social, and environmental objectives within food systems; address potential impacts of policies beyond specific scenarios since they are inferred from a multitude of scenarios; reconcile short- and long-term priorities as areas of interventions within food supply chains; and engage young stakeholders to inform coherent policymaking.