Review Reports - A Scoping Review of Food Systems Governance Frameworks and Models to Develop a Typology for Social Change Movements to Transform Food Systems for People and Planetary Health

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Authors

Results do not highlight any scientific significance around the topic. It is necessary to develop a distance from technical scope and scientific approach around this topic.

The title and the study it is too wide to be analyzed as a review. It is necessary to focus on a specific problem because in the world diversity and heterogeneity cannot be compiled in a simple way of governance.

In my opinion, this paper could be improved if the authors tried a specific region with similar conditions of governance to have relevant information to be applied in the practice.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

No comments

Author Response

Please see the attachment and responses with highlighted manuscript to the comments provided by reviewer 1. The responses are also copied below.

Thank you for your feedback. We revised the title and abstract to more clearly reflect the work completed and described in this paper. We have substantially revised the paper to respond to the reviewer’s concerns. This paper describes a scoping review that included 36 frameworks and models that relate to food systems governance at many levels (global, regional, national and local).

We also revised the introduction to clarify the scientific significance of studying food systems governance related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Agenda (which is the focus of the special issue of Sustainability to which we submitted our paper.

The suggestion that we focus on a specific region of food systems governance overlooks the fact that our scoping review identified that many frameworks and models, and our analysis showed that many models could be applied at multi-levels (global, regional, national and even local).

We noted that a recent paper published in Sustainability focused on regional governance, which we cited in our paper (reference 34):

Thow, A.M.; Ravuvu, A.; Iese, V.; Farmery, A.; Mauli, S.; Wilson, D.; Farrell, P.; Johnson E.; Reeve, E. Regional governance for food system transformations: learning from the Pacific Island region. Sustainability. 2022, 14, 12700. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912700.

We believe that our revisions have addressed the reviewer’s concerns about the scientific significance of the topic that is now clarified in the introduction (please see the revisions in the highlighted yellow text); and the broad nature of the previous title (narrowed to a more specific title).

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper has a worthy goal and meets its objectives. Just a few small suggestions

See in attached PDF

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attached document that has the original comments, our response, and the highlighted revisions to the resubmitted manuscript. Our responses to reviewer 2 comments are copied below.

We clarified in the abstract and also added text and two new citations earlier in the Introduction section to explain why governance is important to achieve the UN SDG 2030 agenda. Please see the highlighted and underlined text for the revisions related to your comment.

Others have conceptualized five distinct food system typologies to help decisionmakers identify effective policies to improve human and planetary health outcomes based on the political economy within low-, middle- and high-income country contexts [75,76].

The five typologies include: food system type 1: rural and traditional; type 2: informal and expanding; type 3: emerging and diversifying; type 4: modernizing and formalizing; and 192 type 5: industrial and consolidated [75,76]. These typologies are complemented by diagnostic tools to enable policymakers to strengthen food systems governance and accountability with the goals of improving food security, nutrition, environmental and health out-195 comes [77].

Some broad examples were added to the Conclusion and also depicted in the bottom of Figure 1.

We included more detail about the analysis on page 8 highlighted in yellow.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The topic is of high relevance, innovative in the approach and the research design seems to be of value. However, concepts and definitions spring out here and there, the discourse is not fluent and theoretical parts are mixed with results. I strongly suggest to re-organise the paragraphs position in theoretical part and results one, offering in the introductory part of the theoretical framework a more clear introduction of the categories adopted in the analysis. Also tables with categories put in relations to articles can help. Some quotation may help to understand how you arrived at the conclusions you presents.

Then, it is not clear how you have selected the topics and how you have defined the relevance of characters you have assumed over other potential one.

All in all, the paper is not easy to be read and methodologically not clear.

Author Response

We made substantial changes based on the feedback from the editor and other external reviewers that are highlighted in yellow text. Table 3 have a clear table of definitions for the constructs of interest analyzed, and used to develop a graphic proof-of-concept food systems governance typology.

We also moved the Supplemental Table 2 into the manuscript as Table 4 onto page 12. This enables the reviewer to see how we conducted the thematic analysis described in the revised Methods section for the constructs of interest in the 36 frameworks and models that were used to develop the typology. We hope that these revisions address the reviewer’s concerns.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper undertakes the potentially useful task of assembling examples of graphic models of food system governance. However, the reader interested to survey these models would be disappointed to find that their reproduction in supplementary figure 1 is of too low a resolution for most of them to be legible.

Beyond this task, the paper contributes little. By their own admission, no critical analysis was undertaken: L 256: “Given the exploratory nature of the research questions, we did not assess the quality of the evidence or risk of bias for studies included.” Instead, we are treated to a bland listing of themes, citing only the number of references that address each theme. The resultant “typology” depicted in Figure 1 expresses an ideological position that is clearly shared by some of the literature reviewed but evidently is a pre-existing position of the authors. It presents a false dichotomy, in which no options exist between, on the one hand, a dystopian, ruthlessly market-based system in which environmental outcomes are disregarded and both producers and consumers have no say, and on the other hand, a utopian vision in which sustainable healthy diets are enabled by all people collaborating selflessly and without disagreement, and regardless of physical limitations to food production and equitable distribution. Both visions seem naïve and ideologically driven.

The mauscript presumes that suboptimal food system governance is largely to blame for negative impacts of the food system, from poor nutrition to environmental harm. It would be more acceptable to ask what features of governance systems contribute to better or worse outcomes, and how they might be changed. To ask such a question, one would need to acknowledge the physical challenges and limitations of the global food system, and the conflicting interests of different stakeholders, resulting in governance decisions and regulatory activities that are inevitably complex and imperfect. In this manuscript, I found no mention of the physical challenges of feeding 8 billion people sustainably from Earth’s limited resources. The presumption, apparently reflecting the authors’ ideology, is that all negative impacts on consumers, producers, production chain workers, the agricultural environment, and the wider natural environment, all result from callous, uncaring, elite-serving governance structures.

The introduction does not discuss the value of graphic system models. Why is it considered a useful exercise to focus only on these graphics, rather than the entire thesis presented in the papers in which they are presented? To collect this literature, but focus only on the graphic element, seems shallow and lazy. Some reference is given to the arguments presented by some of the collected papers, but it is far from a discerning review.

The paper largely reads like an undergraduate assignment. Much of the content seems designed to show that the work was done, rather than to convey any novel finding or insightful synthesis. Sentences are frequently overly long, combining abstract concepts in unnecessarily complex ways, but providing no critical synthesis that draws on the authors’ expertise. Descriptions of methodology are overly repetitive, when the activities dealt with are standard and rudimentary, deserving of minimal mention.

My conclusion is that the paper should be rejected. This ‘scoping review’ might usefully form the groundwork for a critical review, but is insufficient on its own. A critical review would require greater objectivity from the authors, at least grounding their ideological position in academic argument and illustrative examples.

Below are specific notes taken while reading:

L 6: a typo in the institution name.

A lot of the definitions of terms in the text seem arbitrary or overly context-specific. [L 151: vision; L 154: discourse; L 155: narrative (contains a typo); L 163: social justice view; ] Other terms and concepts that are less familiar are not defined at all.

L 210 presents “to clarify concepts and definitions related to food systems governance frameworks and models” as a core goal of the study, making it important that these definitions, when given, are correct and instructive.

L 113: “social of a government” – a word is missing.

L 114: “citizens either directly or indirectly elect leaders to represent their interests through legislation and laws” – “legislation and laws” is tautological, whereas direct government actions in the provision of infrastructure and services, including regulatory services, are not mentioned.

L 115: “An erosion of democratic governance has occurred over decades in countries related to changes in the global and national political contexts that influence food systems” This assertion is made without any illustrative examples of how an erosion of democracy has negatively affected food systems. The inference is that the observed deterioration of food security is at least largely due to such an erosion of democratic governance. I would regard this as a misdiagnosis.

L 135: “Many UN system and gray literature sources described aspirational principles transform food systems …” – This statement has two active verbs and therefore no clear meaning. Presumably the second should be “to transform”.

L 177: “Regenerative food systems support sustainable healthy diets” – There is no guarantee that they do, it is just wishful thinking. Regenerative food systems only aim to improve soil health and biodiversity. They do not ensure increased yields (they often mean lower yields, although probably more sustainable yields) and therefore present a challenge to food sufficiency. The mix of food products enabling a “healthy diet” is not within the scope of “regenerative agriculture”. However, these authors would not be the first to misappropriate the term “regenerative” as a label for an entire utopian ideology embracing social as well as ecological dynamics.

L 182: HLPE – acronym not explained.

L 203: “While these typologies described tools to help stakeholders analyze food system challenges, they do not explicitly examine food systems governance approaches, or advocacy and activism strategies that may drive social movements for political change to support sustainable diets, regenerative food systems and planetary health.” As the final statement of the introduction/lit review, it infers that the current study will do what these did not. This would be to overstate its scope.

L 213: “the five steps of a scoping review steps described by Arksey and O’Malley” the word “steps” is repeated.

L 214: “(1) formulate the research questions; (2) identify relevant evidence; (3) select, organize and analyze evidence; and (4) collate, synthesize and summarize the results.” This reads like a high-school project checklist. We should take it for granted that you do these things as a minimum, and we want to see the progression of doing them, not be told that this is what you are doing.

The three research questions are then stated. These are less questions than steps in the process, which seems to be to justify the presentation of a them

L231: “we chose a scoping review rather than a systematic review process.” Are the limitations of this method adequately acknowledged? Should this not have been a preliminary exercise? Is the paper premature?

L 247. Table 1 merely repeats what has been said in the Methods section. Since all this information is rather banal, so this repetition is unjustified. The table should be removed and any additional information moved to the text, or the descriptions in the text should be removed and replaced with reference to the table.

The Methods section is overly repetitive and treats very basic literature review procedures in too much detail. It reads more like a student assignment, attempting to demonstrate that assessment criteria have been met. The last paragraph of the methods captures all that needs to be said, if combined with Table 1.

L 266: The Results section starts with a restatement of the methods, as if that has not already been stated two or three times.

L 269: If you are going to use both terms, “frameworks and models”, you need to define and differentiate them. I can see no instance where they are differentiated, so it would probably be better to choose one of the words, as they are largely synonymous in the context you are using them – i.e., a graphic model is not an operational, quantitative model capable of using real world data to generate likely outcomes, but merely the framework that might be developed into the latter. However, even the most basic conceptual “framework” can be referred to as a “model”.

Table 2: Is there any value in an alphabetical listing of publications identified? Would it not be more valuable to further group these according to themes, perhaps in a two-way grid, in order to compare and contrast.

Table 3: some definitions, such as “discourse” and “paradigm” are not typical definitions. Others such as “food enterprise”, “food justice” and “food sovereignty” convey an unacknowledged ideological perspective.

L 306: definition repeated from Table 3. Delete. This goes for subsequent repetitions of definitions.

L 343: “seven sources discussed food justice and food sovereignty, respectively.” There is no second number to be “respectively” applied to the second category. I assume that “seven” refers to both these categories collectively (since they are probably broadly overlapping). Delete “respectively” as it is misused.

L 396: “We wanted to understand how current unhealthy and unsustainable food systems are maintained or reformed or to transform food systems to support sustainable diets, ecosystems and planetary health.” No progress has been made on this goal, since the assembled sources are not critically analysed.

L 409: “Distinct tensions exist within the local versus regional and global food system dis-409 courses, which could be addressed using resilience thinking and approaches to inform 410 viable solutions to improve governance at many scales to transform food systems.” A typical example of a sentence that is overly long, while conveying almost nothing. Concepts are thrown together without explanation or analysis. Where is “resilience thinking” explained? Where were the “tensions” discussed? Like much of the paper, this is hollow rhetoric, intended to impress but not to inform.

L 447: “Recent published work has described agroecology as a social movement to support climate change adaptation and mitigation in order to shift from fossil fuel dependency and to strengthen biodiversity, resiliency, nutrition security, democracy and equity for all people.” That definition would constitute an appropriation of the word “agroecology” to mean something utterly different to its conventional scientific use.

In the Conclusion, the final focus on advocacy and activism is not pre-empted in the title or research questions, and therefore seems inappropriate or inadequately developed.

Author Response

We reviewed each comment and made editorial corrections to respond to the comments that identified typographic errors. We appreciate these comments. We also revised the text to address specific comments to reduce repetition.

We reformatted supplemental Figure 1 to place each framework or model on one page (instead of 12 to a page). The enlargement shows that the existing published graphic frameworks and models are very text heavy and do not visually or graphically depict the seven variables of interest that we examined and analyzed in this scoping review.

The typology was grounded in the evidence based on the peer-reviewed literature (n=25 sources) and gray-literature reports (n=11).

We revised the title and abstract to more clearly reflect the work completed and described in this paper. On page 8 under the Methodology section (steps 3 and 4 of the scoping review), we added more detail about the analysis.

We would like the reviewer to understand that the proof-of-concept typology does not represent one specific ideological position, or even our own perspective. We clearly defined the term “political ideology” in Table 3.

We established five categories to describe how political ideology was used by each of the 36 graphic frameworks and models included in the scoping review (i.e., neoliberal, reformist, progressive and radical).

In four places in the revised paper, we added text to describe a proof-of-concept typology. In the conclusion, we suggested that it should be applied in future research. See page 1: abstract; page 8 lines 301-302; page 15 line 491; and page 18: Conclusion at line 581. Based on the reviewer’s viewpoint, the more “acceptable” issue would be to examine the features of how governance systems contribute to better or worse outcomes. While important, that was not the purpose of our study and was not among our three research questions.

On pages 3-4, we synthesized the literature that described food systems governance and mentioned conflicting stakeholder interests.

Corrected.

We defined these terms based on the preliminary search of five reviews of food systems governance. These constructs were identified and used to establish categories that were part of our methodology to search the 36 sources of graphic models and frameworks. These were also included and summarized in the supplemental evidence tables, and used to develop the graphic food systems typology.

We added the term “resilience” to the Table, as suggested by the reviewer below. It is unclear what other specific terms that this reviewer believed should have been defined but were not included in the methodology and review.

Corrected.

The focus of this paper is on social and political change movements associated with the concept of policy inertia that was described in the Lancet Commission Global Syndemic report discussed on page 2.

The purpose of this paper was not to focus in detail on the function of government or regulatory institutions that provide services to the public to ensure that legislation and laws are enforced. However, we mentioned on page 4 that of the more than a dozen different terms used to describe food systems governance, one was regulatory and accountable governance.

Corrected.

We described the major steps followed in the methods section of our scoping review. These were also included in the revised abstract to be transparent about the process followed. We added more detail about the analysis in response to reviewer 2. Please see page 6 starting at line 263 and page 8 starting at line 268.

See our revision on page 6. If the reviewer is aware of any other publication that has reviewed graphic frameworks and models for food systems governance, please share that information.

We disagree that Table 1 is repetitive of the text. It provides details about the search strategy (including the specific inclusion and exclusion criteria), search platforms and search terms that do not appear in the text. Additionally, another reviewer asked us to provide more detail on the methodology, which we did to be responsive.

We revised the last paragraph of the methods section in response to another reviewer who requested more detail about the analysis. Please see page 8, lines 270-303.

We removed the repetitive text from the first paragraph of the results section.

We understand your point. We revised the text in the first paragraph of the Methods on page 6 to address it.

We used the language in the published in the evidence reviewed. We did not change it. We added a new sentence in the first paragraph of the results on page 9 to address this issue.

Table 2 presents the literature included in the scoping review organized alphabetically. The thematic analysis for the constructs examined were previously in Supplemental Table 2. We moved this results table to the manuscript as Table 4. See pages 12-14.

We disagree on this point. Table 4 shows the analysis for how “paradigm” and “discourse” were either implicitly or explicitly described in the 36 records with unique graphic frameworks and models reviewed.

We believe that it is helpful to repeat the definition of a discourse to remind readers of how the construct is defined before discussing the results from the analysis.

The word respectively was removed. Table 4 in the revised manuscript shows that there was some but not entire overlap in the literature that discussed the concepts of food sovereignty and food justice as a discourse. Therefore, there were seven sources that discussed food justice, and seven sources that discussed food sovereignty.

Many researchers distinguish between these terms. That is why our proof-of-concept food systems governance typology differentiates these terms based on the evidence reviewed.

A food justice discourse is aligned with a progressive political ideology and shared governance type to support a food system transition paradigm.

A food sovereignty discourse is aligned with a radical political ideology, and self-governance (often seen in indigenous communities), to support a food system transformation paradigm.

We disagree with the reviewer on this point.

We added a definition for resilience in Table 3. In the results section, several of the sources described resilience as an important underlying principle and discourse. See Rueben et al. 2021 (ref 99) for more detail.

The literature included and reviewed for this paper defined agroecology more broadly than the reviewer’s definition.

We included two graphic sources in Table 2 for agroecology. Please see FAO, 2019 and Wezel et al., 2020.

The FAO (2019) described the Ten elements of agroecology framework.

Wezel et al. 2020 described agroecology as “a science, praxis and social movement,” depicted by the Sustainable food systems transition and agroecology model. This model was adapted from Gliessman (2007) and the HLPE described on page 17 in the revised text.

This model describes five levels linked to the principles. Levels 1 and 2 that define agroecology in conventional scientific terms lead to INCREMENTAL changes to food systems.

Levels 3, 4 and 5 lead to TRANSFORMATIONAL changes to food systems. Researchers adapt and innovate on frameworks and models to present new ways of thinking to guide policies and actions.

With the revised title, discussion and conclusion, we connect the purpose of the paper to these terms that will be explored in a companion paper to apply the proof-of-concept food systems governance typology with a special focus on advocacy and activism strategies.