Sustainable Food System Assessment

Lessons from Global Practice

Alison Blay-Palmer, Damien Conaré, Ken Meter, Amanda Di Battista, Carla Johnston, Alison Blay-Palmer, Damien Conaré, Ken Meter, Amanda Di Battista, Carla Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429801389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Sustainable Food System Assessment provides both practical and theoretical insights about the growing interest in and response to measuring food system sustainability. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, this book shares lessons learned, explores intended and actual project outcomes, and highlights points of conceptual and methodological convergence.

Interest in assessing food system sustainability is growing, as evidenced by the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the importance food systems initiatives have taken in serving as a lever for attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This book opens by looking at the conceptual considerations of food systems indicators, including the place-based dimensions of food systems indicators and how measurements are implicated in sense-making and visioning processes. Chapters in the second part cover operationalizing metrics, including the development of food systems indicator frameworks, degrees of indicator complexities, and practical constraints to assessment. The final part focuses on the outcomes of assessment projects, including impacts on food policy and communities involved, highlighting the importance of building connections between sustainable food systems initiatives.

The global coverage and multi-scalar perspectives, including both conceptual and practical aspects, make this a key resource for academics and practitioners across planning, geography, urban studies, food studies, and research methods. It will also be of interest to government officials and those working within NGOs.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Sustainable-Food-System-Assessment-Lessons-from-Global-Practice/Blay-Palmer-Conare-Meter-Battista-Johnston/p/book/9781032083933, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1Sustainable food system assessment

Lessons from global practice

Alison Blay-Palmer, Damien Conaré, Ken Meter, and Amanda Di Battista

Introduction

Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons from Global Practice has its roots in workshops with participants in the Food: Locally Embedded, Globally Engaged (FLEdGE) Partnership as part of the work by the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (LCSFS). The first workshop took place in Toronto, Canada in June 2016 with a follow-up meeting in Waterloo in September 2017. The goal of the gatherings was to share lessons learned and develop collective insights for moving forward with the various projects and the expert participants exploring opportunities for comparative work. These meetings provided a rich starting point, given the broad inclusion of academics and practitioners working on assessment projects developed from the city region to the national scale in both the Global South and North. Central observations, considerations, and questions from these meetings can be grouped as: (1) conceptual considerations including sense-making, vision, and place; (2) operationalization of metrics specifically developing frameworks and representations, determining degrees of complexity, the challenges of working within and across scales, and dealing with practical constraints such as data availability; and (3) outcomes and goals for assessment projects including policy generation, community inclusion and participation, building connections between initiatives, embedding change in communities, and knowledge dissemination. Taken together, these three overlapping themes capture the process of developing sustainable food systems assessment (SFSA) approaches from vision and concept, through operationalization, to ending with outputs (and in some cases, impacts). As such, these themes provide the framework for our book.

We begin with a scan of existing literature to provide context. Following, we provide a review of the workshop conclusions, including references to selected relevant literatures. Finally, this chapter includes a discussion of the chapters in this book. We revisit the core concepts in Chapter 12.

Insights from the sustainable food system assessment literature: terms of reference, context, and assessment considerations

Exploring terms and meaning

Recognizing the tensions around the words ‘sustainability’ and ‘systems’, it is useful to bracket how we use ‘sustainable food systems’ (SFS) in this book. As Prosperi et al. in Chapter 7 explain from their research in trying to understand sustainability, ‘People want a descriptor of a state rather than the prediction of a state’. With this in mind, we provide specific criteria for describing what constitutes an SFS.

While acknowledging that sustainability is a contested term, for our purposes ‘sustainable’ builds on the three-pillar approach from Our Common Future (Brundtland et al., 1986), used by many including the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Its three overlapping considerations are social, environmental, and economic. In a food systems context, social dimensions include the Right to Food, and ensuring food and nutrition security, food democracy, fair labour practices, gender equity, social connectivity, cultural self-determination, and natural resource rights including secure land tenure. Environmental considerations include ecological food production methods that acknowledge the important role of agroecology, biodiversity, renewable energy sources, and protecting the quality of soils, water, and other resources, while working towards regenerative closed loop food systems. Economic dimensions build from the premise of keeping equitable economic activity at the local as much as possible and then moving outward. This fosters supportive, circular commercial networks and infrastructure that include developing mutual trust and equal sharing of value and risk across agro-food networks from local to global. This is an important consideration as localization alone does not guarantee fair economic relations (Born & Purcell, 2006). The goal is to enhance community economic development through short, alternative food networks with models that include co-operatives, community supported agriculture and other forward investments, food sharing, collaborative business networks, and social economy approaches. Finally, inclusive, transparent, participatory, and democratic governance mechanisms are critical to support the three sustainability dimensions and are foundational to their success (Feenstra, 1997; Bricas, 2017; Blay-Palmer et al., 2018).

Given the complex, diverse, and necessarily adaptive demands of working towards sustainability, this book draws upon systems lenses to understand the possibilities for bringing about transformation through food collaborations (Stroink & Nelson, 2013; Knezevic et al., 2017; Chapter 4, this volume¹). While these systems lenses derive from many sources (Hipel et al., 2010; Ingram, 2011; Blay-Palmer et al., 2015; Hinrichs, 2016; Meter, 2007), we build explicitly from Thinking in Systems where Meadows (2008) defines a system as, ‘an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something’ (p. 12). Systems are ‘more than the sum of their parts’ and can be ‘… adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes, evolutionary’ (p. 12). While there is integrity to systems and mechanisms to maintain balance, systems are also able to ‘… be self-organising, and are often self-repairing at least over some range of disruptions’ (p. 12). Considering the myriad implications at the intersection of the definitions for sustainability and systems, it becomes clear that developing assessment tools and processes can be challenging (Stroink & Nelson, 2013; Chapters 4 & 7, this volume). That said, there are many complex and useful approaches to sustainable food systems that inform this book.

Next, we review some of the broader context that has fostered the emergence of assessment as part of the way forward for sustainable food systems. Academic work has increasingly embraced the perspectives and work of hundreds of community-based initiatives, amplifying the efforts of grass-roots projects while codifying lessons that can be applied across contexts.

The emergence of sustainable food system assessments

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) is a key starting point for understanding current approaches to food system sustainability indicators as it helped to frame, both directly and indirectly, how actors consider and work within the existing food system at multiple scales. The IAASTD consultation and subsequent reports resulted from a multi-year (2004–2008) and multi-stakeholder process that included a wide spectrum of experts from research institutions and civil society, including both public and private sectors. The IAASTD process was developed to inform policy formulation around research and knowledge creation for SFS using agriculture as the starting point. It explicitly pushed back against the dominant assumption about high technology, scientific interventions alone and valued the knowledge and experiences of traditional, smallholder farmers and consumers. A primary goal was to present a multi-sectoral and integrated review from multiple world views so that,

the IAASTD does not advocate specific policies or practices … It is policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. It integrates scientific information on a range of topics that are critically interlinked, but often addressed independently, i.e., agriculture, poverty, hunger, human health, natural resources, environment, development and innovation. It will enable decision makers to bring a richer base of knowledge to bear on policy and management decisions on issues previously viewed in isolation … presents different views, acknowledging that there can be more than one interpretation of the same evidence based on different worldviews; and identifies the key scientific uncertainties and areas on which research could be focused to advance development and sustainability goals.

(IAASTD, 2009, pp. vii–viii)

In this way IAASTD was part of a watershed moment in opening-up the consultation process to include smallholder farmers’ knowledge using agroecological and other traditional practices. Other critical and formative events unfolded as the final pages of IAASTD were written: the reform of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2009 in the wake of the 2008–2009 food crisis (Anderson, 2015; McKeon, 2015), as well as the launch by the FAO of a consultation process to develop its Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (published in 2012). There was also a revival of a focus on the Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition (FIAN, 2016), as well as the increasing role of La Via Campesina, and the 2009 People’s Food Sovereignty Now! declaration by the Civil Society Organization (CSO) Forum, which ran parallel to the World Summit on Food Security in Rome. These clarified that civil society needs to be a key contributor in moving the sustainable food systems agenda forward.

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) 2015 report reiterated concerns expressed in IAASTD around power and the political economy of knowledge that result in disjointed and siloed approaches to, and identification of, sustainability solutions. To overcome this challenge and develop more coherent approaches to food system sustainability, the IPES-Food analytical framework called for analysing

Webs of complex interactions and feedback loops in food systems; broad constellations of policies with the capacity to affect food systems; power relations and the political economy of food systems; a multi-scale and holistic understanding of sustainability, as the benchmark of food systems reform.

(IPES-Food, 2015, p. 3)

It also put forward the need to foster a new transdisciplinary science of food systems, one that requires scholars to break down boundaries and silos between disciplines and around knowledge, encouraging the co-creation of knowledge with civil society (IPES-Food, 2015, p. 8).

In addition to recognizing the importance of traditional food system knowledge and the interconnectedness of food systems, ‘measuring’ change emerged as a priority for understanding more about SFS. As a result, indicators gained importance at all scales for policymakers, researchers, and funders, with metrics seen as the way to benchmark, assess, and track food system sustainability from cities to the global scale.

Recent key examples that demonstrate movement in this direction range from the urban–regional-focused Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP) to the globally scaled SDGs. At the municipal and regional scale, the MUFPP uses six categories to understand and foster food system sustainability. These include effective governance, sustainable diets and nutrition, social and economic equity, food production, food supply and distribution, and waste. With more than 200 signatory cities, the MUFPP is enabling food system sustainability at the city–region scale. Since 2017, the MUFPP offers 44 indicators with four to ten indicators per category (Calori et al., 2017).

Assessment tools are also well established at the sub-national and more local contexts, for example the Calgary Food Action Plan – Calgary Eats!, the Vancouver Food System Assessment, and the Toronto Food Strategy. Urban metric-based assessments have also been undertaken for specific parts of an SFS and can enable comparative analysis. For example, work in Cape Town, South Africa, drawing on individual and household food security survey data, reported on the links between household food insecurity, income, and informal food sector markets and informal social safety nets. The analysis identified that the lower a person’s or household’s income, the more likely they were to rely on informal networks to secure their food (Battersby, 2011). Data were gathered through an 11-city project in southern Africa and allowed for some comparisons across cities (e.g. Crush et al., 2012). Another example is the work of the Sustainable Food Cities project in the UK and its report Urban Food Strategies: The Rough Guide to Sustainable Food Systems (Moragues et al., 2013; Chapter 6, this volume) that connects the realities of the local food system to the broader global scale, providing insights into how communities can use food systems initiatives to counter global pressures. By identifying several community well-being factors, including health, environmental impacts, economic performance, injustice, and cultural erosion, the assessment demonstrated that urban food strategies are locally contingent, and that local engagement varies. The research further showed the need for local engagement by key actors (Moragues et al., 2013, p. 6).

The City Region Food Systems (CRFS) project documented place-specific sustainability dimensions of food flows for key local staple foods in both the Global South and North. This work has enabled multi-scaled, multi-actor policy initiatives and networks with a view to improving various dimensions of the food system, including urban–rural linkages, food access (especially for low-income families), waste management and improved incomes for rural and urban producers (Dubbeling et al., 2017; Blay-Palmer et al., 2018; Chapter 9, this volume). At the more micro scale, the UN Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) provides a snapshot of household food insecurity and can act as a rapid assessment tool for practitioners, complementing other tools that encompass the probability of undernourishment and measures of food insecurity determinants. At the farm scale, the Response Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE) relies on interviews and then computer evaluation to score farm-level sustainability (Grenz et al., 2011) while research on Flemish dairy farms (MOTIFS) was designed to measure integrated farm sustainability using ecological, economic, and social themes to identify indicators that could be gathered simply (Meul et al., 2008).

There are several tools that assess dimensions of sustainable food systems within countries. For example, the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture (SAFA) provides guidance for national-level assessment. SAFA was created to apply universal sustainability goals to food value chains. It was developed to be holistic, addressing all dimensions of sustainability (including environmental, social, economic, and governance) and applicable to all operational scales. Food Counts: the pan-Canadian Sustainable Food Systems Report Card, provides existing metrics and identifies information gaps across several food sovereignty pillars, named as: provides food for people, values providers, works with nature, localizes food, puts control locally, and puts food as sacred (Levkoe & Blay-Palmer, 2018).

At the global scale, there are several assessment tools that are either directly or indirectly linked to all or some dimensions of sustainable food systems. Arguably the most high profile in recent years have been the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the SDGs. MDG Goal 1 referred directly to food by calling for the eradication of hunger and poverty while the other seven goals were indirectly linked to improved food system sustainability through education, health, gender equality, environmental health, and building partnerships.

The SDGs build from the MDGs and are founded on 17 goals with associated targets that have been elaborated into 167 targets. SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and the related targets provide countries with the opportunity to report on various dimensions of sustainable food systems, including food security and nutrition, productivity and incomes of small-holder farmers and other small-scale food-getters, land access, wild harvesting, sustainable production, protection of genetic diversity, and the correction and elimination of trade distortions. SDG 2 links to the other 16 SDGs with particular articulation with eradicating poverty (SDG 1), good health and well-being for all (SDG3), gender equality (SDG5), clean water and sanitation (SDG6), decent work and economic growth (SDG8), responsible production and consumption (SDG12), and climate action (SDG13).

The S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1 Sustainable food system assessment: Lessons from global practice
• Part I Conceptual foundations
• Part II Operationalizing sustainable food system assessment
• Part III Impacts and outcomes of sustainable food system assessment
• Index