Regenerative food systems and the conservation of change

Abstract

In recent years, interest has increased in regenerative practices as a strategy for transforming food systems and solving major environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change. However, debates persist regarding these practices and how they ought to be defined. This paper presents a framework for exploring the regenerative potential of food systems, focusing on how food systems activities and technologies are organized rather than the specific technologies or practices being employed. The paper begins with a brief review of debates over sustainable food systems and the varying ways that regenerative food systems have been defined and theorized. Then, it provides the theoretical backing of the framework-the conservation of change principle-which is an interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics and theories of adaptive change as relevant to the regenerative capacity of living systems. Next, the paper introduces the framework itself, which comprises two independent but intersecting dimensions of food systems organization: resource diversity and livelihood flexibility. These two dimensions result in four archetypical regimes for food systems: degenerative, regenerative, impoverished, and coerced. The paper defines each and offers real-world examples. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of pathways for transforming food systems and opportunities for additional research.

Keywords: Agroecology; Entropy; Food system transformation; Regenerative agriculture; Social-ecological traps; Socio-technical regimes; Sustainable agriculture.

Fig. 1

A four-quadrant typology of food systems based on the flexibility of livelihoods (X axis) and the diversity of resources available (Y axis). Degenerative regimes focus too rigidly on one or a few resources despite a diversity of options, which causes serial depletion of resources (e.g., fishing down the food web). Regenerative systems conserve change via flexible and diverse livelihood strategies. Livelihoods in impoverished systems are tightly coupled to, but trapped by, the limited resources available in a degraded environment. Coerced systems subsidize and favor a high-value (“gilded”) resource at the expense of the surrounding ecosystem

Fig. 2

Detail on patterns in livelihoods and resources for each of the four regimes. Charts in each of the four quadrants illustrate variability of specific livelihood strategies (Y axes on upper charts) targeting specific resources (Y axes on lower chart) over time (upper and lower X axes). Degenerative systems (a) deplete resources in a serial or simultaneous way, with livelihoods focusing on a single resource, ignoring environmental feedbacks, and only switching to an alternative when the targeted resources are fully depleted. Regenerative systems (b) entail a portfolio of flexible livelihood strategies that allow people to respond rapidly to changes in resource availability in the service of integrating human activities with endemic cycles of variability and change. Impoverished systems (c) are highly degraded and characterized by tight couplings between resource status and livelihoods, because people no choice but to harvest whatever resources are available, which prevents any regeneration. Coerced systems (d) often start from a position of livelihood and ecological diversity, but incentives arise to actively favor and cultivate highly valued resources at the expense of others. In so doing, regenerative capacity is depleted to the point where subsidies are required, and communities and ecosystems are vulnerable

Fig. 3

The interplay between resilience and entropy or negentropy in the four regimes. Regenerative systems generate shared wealth via a give and take of resilience; in some cases, people draw resilience from ecosystems, in other cases they impart it by altering their strategies in response to environmental feedbacks. Degenerative systems extract wealth with little concern for the status of resources and are resilient because they readily exploit alternatives when resources are overharvested. Coerced systems make great investments to impose and sustain structure to enable the continued extraction of wealth from a single highly valued resource but reduce resilience over time. In impoverished systems, wealth has been previously extracted and entropy is high, which also results in high, but maladaptive resilience (i.e., the poverty trap)