Understanding complex system change for a sustainable food system

Abstract

This thesis investigates a complex system change for navigating food systems towards sustainability. The thesis employs interdisciplinary theoretical framework, grounded in the dynamics of a complex adaptive system. In particular, the two most prominent research directions, social-ecological-system research and socio-technical-system research, are adopted for the generation of analytic and normative research aims. Four distinct but complimentary research questions are raised in order to gain more comprehensive understanding of sustainability change in the food system. The results highlight the role of food systems in disrupting ecosystem services, namely nutrient cycles, on both global and local scales. Critical planetary thresholds have been transgressed so significantly that they set more stringent limits to future food security than availability of resources and population growth. Radical and simultaneous transformations across the food systems are imperative, for single shifts, such as preventing all food waste and losses and adopting a vegan diet across the globe, alone are not sufficient to bridge the gap and maintain food security for all. Yet tentative and highly controversial, planetary boundaries operationalize ecosystem service based approach to sustainability and the existence of limits to environment’s functions critical to human wellbeing. Including temporal and bottom-up assessment of nutrient boundaries provides important insights about the cross-scale dynamics in social-ecological systems that are dismissed if only global scale is considered. Firstly, the local boundaries in Finland are more stringer than the global boundaries due to the sensitivity of the Baltic Sea. Secondly, historically cumulated nutrient use in Finland and Ethiopia demonstrate the disparity of transgressing nutrient boundaries and the striking inequality in access to nutrients. In Finland nutrient boundaries are transgressed due to high inflow of nutrients, while in Ethiopia they are transgressed due to high outflow of nutrients due to erosion. Thus bridging the current sustainability gap requires a simultaneous reduction of inequality and redistribution of productive assets, not only virgin nutrients but also those that have accumulated in Finnish soils and water bodies. Socio-technical approach to sustainability change highlights that regime transition is often constrained by systemic resistance due to the prevalence of lock-in dynamics. Food system locking into unsustainable nutrient economy emerges through mutually reinforcing increasing returns processes in production, consumption and institutions. This calls for active and deliberate regime destabilisation, not least by means of food system policy, bridging consumption to production, and thus involving those actors and practices that are the most influential at present. Simultaneously though, caution of creating and enabling the situations for new lock-ins is warranted. Furthermore, sustainability transitions can be linked to the broader policy level by analysis of market, structural and transformational failures. Stimulation of system innovation in the food system requires attention foremost at the prevailing structures and practices through reassessing several sectoral policies, at least agriculture, environment, energy and waste policies, and their coherence and directionality. Policies cutting across several sectors are essential, but they require not only changes in institutions but also meaningful interaction and cooperation.