Food System Transformation: Integrating a Political-Economy and Social-Ecological Approach to Regime Shifts

Abstract

Sustainably achieving the goal of global food security is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The current food system is failing to meet the needs of people, and at the same time, is having far-reaching impacts on the environment and undermining human well-being in other important ways. It is increasingly apparent that a deep transformation in the way we produce and consume food is needed in order to ensure a more just and sustainable future. This paper uses the concept of regime shifts to understand key drivers and innovations underlying past disruptions in the food system and to explore how they may help us think about desirable future changes and how we might leverage them. We combine two perspectives on regime shifts-one derived from natural sciences and the other from social sciences-to propose an interpretation of food regimes that draws on innovation theory. We use this conceptualization to discuss three examples of innovations that we argue helped enable critical regime shifts in the global food system in the past: the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation, the rise of the supermarket, and the call for more transparency in the food system to reconnect consumers with their food. This paper concludes with an exploration of why this combination of conceptual understandings is important across the Global North/ Global South divide, and proposes a new sustainability regime where transformative change is spearheaded by a variety of social-ecological innovations.

Keywords: food systems; global food regimes; innovation; political–economy; regime shifts; resilience; social–ecological systems; transformation.

Figure 1

Regime shifts often result from a combination of slow ongoing gradual changes and an external shock to the system that tips the system into an alternative state (Adapted from [19]).

Figure 2

Three phases whereby innovations can cause a system to undergo a regime shift, or transform from one system state to another. The preparation phase requires innovations and experiments to be developed and over time to bricolage, whilst institutional entrepreneurs ready the system for change by bridging between the niche and the regime. A window of opportunity opens up when a perturbation weakens the incumbent system and this allows the innovations that have previously been marginal to become partly institutionalized during the transition phase. The third phase involves three pathways; a- where the resilience of the new regime is built and it becomes the new status quo; b- where the proto-regime becomes stuck and is isolated in pockets; c- where the dominant regime is so resilient that it adapts to the shock and reconfigures itself by capturing the innovations so that they do not result in transformative change. (Adapted from [65]).