Sustainable Development Goal Drivers in Food Systems

Sebastian Kretschmer,Johannes Kahl

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2021.536620

Abstract

Interacting driving forces in food systems, resulting in cumulative driver effects and synergies, induce non-linear processes in multiple directions. This paper critically reviews the discourse on driving forces in food systems and argues that mindset is the primary predictor for food system outcomes. In the epoch of sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the Anthropocene, mindset matters more than ever. Transformative narratives are beginning to transcend the dominant social paradigm, which is still driving the food system's overall trajectory. The psychosocial portrayal of the systemic mindset found in organic food systems presented in this paper “flips the script” and hypothesizes that worldview and paradigm have the most causal linkages with unsustainable driver synergies and reversely the biggest leverage on the mitigation thereof. Borrowing from ecological economics discourses, the paper sharpens the driver definition by applying the DPSIR analytical tool as a modified diagnostic framework and modeling approach for food systems. This research sheds new light on the nature of drivers of change, which are often portrayed as almighty and inevitable trends shaping food systems. Instead, it is proposed that drivers emerge from the actors' mindset, affecting food system behavior in a non-linear way. Mindset drives reinforcing feedback loops, resulting in vicious and virtuous cycles. These driver motives manifest in subsystems and continue to drive their interaction across food system elements. Mindset acts as an encapsulated input of food systems, all the while responding to feedback and releasing new drivers. A transformation framework along leverage points of the food system is presented that features the concept of SDG drivers.

Highlights

Food systems are the enabling source for civilization; they are the root and nexus for variables such as climate change, social justice, food nutrition, and security as well as human health and the viability of ecosystems (Caron et al, 2018)
This paper argues that mindset, as composed of paradigms and narratives, may be regarded as the nested input for the food system, representing a concentric feedback mechanism that responds to existing feedback drivers, while releasing new drivers at the same time
It can be noted that the organic mindset and OFS around the globe have long embraced the notion of transformational responses to major trends because of mindset qualities that intuitively converge with global sustainability agendas, long before these were named as such

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Food systems are the enabling source for civilization; they are the root and nexus for variables such as climate change, social justice, food nutrition, and security as well as human health and the viability of ecosystems (Caron et al, 2018). Reinforcing feedback leading to positive outcomes on the other hand may take its starting point from a mindset level through the four principles of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) including health, ecology, fairness, and care (Luttikholt, 2007), which is reflected in pesticide-free stewardship practices committed to building soil fertility through compost and cover cropping, leading to more resilient cropping systems via mycorrhizal fungal networks and other symbiotic processes that foster agrobiodiversity and can have a mitigating effect on environmental degradation and climate change This ecocentric mindset of wanting to emulate natural processes and to work with nature and not against it is reflected on a relational level in OFS through values-based supply chains (Pugliese et al, 2015; Stotten et al, 2018). Integrative levels of organization or new macro-level regimes emerge when the system converges upon a new set of rules or protocols that drive all of the parts to adopt that new pattern (Creative Commons, 2015)

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF DRIVERS IN FOOD SYSTEMS

CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT