Enacting theories of change for food systems transformation under climate change

Taming the wicked problem of climate change with "virtuous challenges": An integrated management heuristic

Climate change is widely regarded as a "wicked problem" due to its complexity, interconnectedness, and the numerous stakeholders involved in finding a solution. The wickedness of climate change is further compounded by effects which are often nonlinear and uncertain, making it difficult to predict and manage its impacts. This paper builds on the growing body of knowledge on wicked problems by proposing an integrated heuristic that facilitates management in diverse economic and sociopolitical contexts by capturing the origins and dynamics of contemporary global socioenvironmental wicked problems and their potential resolution. The heuristic can also serve as the basis for a holistic wicked problem macro-theory. It is recognised that wicked problems such as climate change amplify into crisis states due to poverty and rigidity traps embedded within a system panarchy, which impede effective action for adaptation and mitigation. The concept of the "virtuous challenge" is embedded within the heuristic as a vital link in governance to enable effective leadership in the management of contemporary wicked problems through focused incremental transformation and a shift to an "agrowth" imperative. It is acknowledged that collaboration between stakeholders in the Global North and Global South is necessary for successful responses to virtuous challenges.

Climate change and marketing: a bibliometric analysis of research from 1992 to 2022

Climate change with adverse impacts on the environment, economy, and society requires marketing to change current attitudes and behaviors towards sustainable production and consumption, and thus climate change is interrelated to marketing. However, no body of literature has comprehensively investigated the connections and relationships between climate change and marketing. This study examined such connections and relationships from a bibliometric approach using Web of Science and Scopus databases from 1992 to 2022. The search strategy utilized topic and title/abstract/keyword search. The search query retrieved 1723 documents. VOSviewer and Biblioshiny were utilized to analyze data on authors, keywords, institutions, countries, sources, citations, and co-citations. The findings showed an upward trend in the annual number of publications with the top three most productive countries being the USA, the UK, and Australia and the most productive institutions in the USA, New Zealand, and the UK. The top three author keywords were climate change, sustainability, and marketing. The Sustainability journal ranked first in terms of productivity while Energy Policy in terms of citations. International collaborations were mostly between developed countries also known as Global North Countries, and collaborations between these countries and developing and developed countries should be encouraged. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of documents increased, and research themes altered. Research on energy, innovation, insect farming, and carbon management is a top priority. The results proved that most studies were conducted outside the field of marketing.

How can climate change and its interaction with other compounding risks be considered in evaluation? Experiences from Vietnam

While evaluations play a critical role in accounting for and learning from context, it is unclear how evaluations can take account of climate change. Our objective was to explore how climate change and its interaction with other contextual factors influenced One Health food safety programs. To do so, we integrated questions about climate change into a qualitative evaluation study of an ongoing, multi-sectoral program aiming to improve pork safety in Vietnam called SafePORK. We conducted remote interviews with program researchers (n = 7) and program participants (n = 23). Based on our analysis, researchers believed climate change had potential impacts on the program but noted evidence was lacking, while program participants (slaughterhouse workers and retailers) shared how they were experiencing and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Climate change also interacted with other contextual factors to introduce additional complexities. Our study underscored the importance of assessing climate factors in evaluation and building adaptive capacity in programming.

Measuring sustainable consumer food purchasing and behavior

Consumer food purchasing and willingness to adopt a sustainable healthy diet (SHD) is a key factor affecting the sustainability of the entire food system. Studies have developed scales to measure consumer preferences for particular consumption patterns, while others have sought to empirically define the multiple dimensions of a sustainable food system (environmental, social, economic, etc.). This paper builds on these literatures by tracking consumers' SHD behaviors using a large-scale, longitudinal survey of adults in the United States and mapping them onto multiple systems-level indicators. We wanted to know whether consumers interact with the sustainability of their food along the same principles developed by experts. Our study defines 18 food purchasing behaviors that support the sustainability goals of leading scientific institutions, uses factor analysis to identify the unobserved drivers behind these behaviors, and creates SHD scores to investigate their correlations with other consumer characteristics and behaviors. Factor analysis results show consumer food purchasing is motivated by three underlying sustainability dimensions-Economic Security, Socio-Environment, and Nutrition-which are fewer constructs than often defined by academic researchers. SHD scores reveal higher adoption of behaviors that fall under Economic Security relative to the other two dimensions. All three sustainability constructs are impacted by socio-economic and demographic characteristics.

Simple solutions for complex problems? What is missing in agriculture for nutrition interventions

Within the nutritionism paradigm, in this article we critically review the marketization and medicalization logics which aim to address the pressing issue of malnutrition in low- and middle-income countries. Drawing from political economy and food system transformation discourses, we are using the popular intervention types of nutrition-sensitive value chains (marketization logic) and biofortification exemplified through orange-fleshed sweet potato (medicalization logic) to assess their outcomes and underlying logics. We demonstrate that there is insufficient evidence of the positive impact of these interventions on nutritional outcomes, and that their underlying theories of change and impact logics do not deal with the inherent complexity of nutritional challenges. We show that nutrition-sensitive value chain approaches are unable to leverage or enhance the functioning of value chains to improve nutritional outcomes, especially in light of the disproportionate power of some food companies. We further demonstrate that orange-fleshed sweet potato interventions and biofortification more broadly adopt a narrow approach to malnutrition, disregarding the interactions between food components and broader value chain and food system dynamics. We argue that both intervention types focus solely on increasing the intake of specific nutrients without incorporating their embeddedness in the wider food systems and the relevant political-economic and social relations that influence the production and consumption of food. We conclude that the systemic nature of malnutrition requires to be understood and addressed as part of the food system transformation challenge in order to move towards solving it. To do so, new evaluation frameworks along with new approaches to solutions are necessary that support multiple and diverse development pathways, which are able to acknowledge the social, political-economic, and environmental factors and drivers of malnutrition and poverty.

The immediate impact of the first waves of the global COVID-19 pandemic on agricultural systems worldwide: Reflections on the COVID-19 special issue for agricultural systems

CONTEXT

In May 2020, approximately four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the journal's editorial team realized there was an opportunity to collect information from a diverse range of agricultural systems on how the pandemic was playing out and affecting the functioning of agricultural systems worldwide.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of the special issue was to rapidly collect information, analysis and perspectives from as many regions as possible on the initial impacts of the pandemic on global agricultural systems, The overall goal for the special issue was to develop a useful repository for this information as well as to use the journal's international reach to share this information with the agricultural systems research community and journal readership.

METHODS

The editorial team put out a call for a special issue to capture the initial effects of the pandemic on the agricultural sector. We also recruited teams from eight global regions to write papers summarizing the impacts of the first waves of the pandemic in their area.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

The work of the regional teams and the broader research community resulted in eight regional summary papers, as well as thirty targeted research articles. In these papers, we find that COVID-19 and global pandemic mitigation measures have had significant and sometimes unexpected impacts on our agricultural systems via shocks to agricultural labour markets, trade and value chains. And, given the high degree of overlap between low income populations and subsistence agricultural production in many regions, we also document significant shocks to food security for these populations, and the high potential for long term losses in terms of human, natural, institutional and economic capital. While we also documented instances of agricultural system resilience capacities, they were not universally accessible. We see particular need to shore up vulnerable agricultural systems and populations most negatively affected by the pandemic and to mitigate pandemic-related losses to preserve other agricultural systems policy objectives, such as improving food security, or addressing climate change.

SIGNIFICANCE

Despite rapid development of vaccines, the pandemic continues to roll on as of the time of writing (early 2022). Only time will tell how the dynamics described in this Special Issue will play out in the coming years. Evidence of agricultural system resilience capacities provides some hopeful perspectives, but also highlights the need to boost these capacities across a wider cross section of agricultural systems and encourage agri-food systems transformation to prepare for more challenges ahead.