Operationalising the Transition to Sustainable Food Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Never before has there been such a widespread awareness of the need to redesign our food systems to meet the social and environmental challenges we are and will be facing. The recent experience of the coronavirus pandemic has called on us to reflect on the unsustainability of our lifestyles and production–consumption patterns, and urged us to look at alternative models, including in relation to food. Events like these bring to light conditions that however come from afar.

Looking at the characteristics of the dominant agri-food system, an awareness has long been developing of how much this system has lost its contact with nature and society, losing capacity to stay in balance and, even more, to co-evolve with the environment and meet the needs for food quality and social justice. In recent decades, food movements and alternative food networks have denounced these shortcomings and created alternative pathways, prefiguring important innovations aimed at radical change. Indeed, to tackle the above-mentioned challenges, systemic deep changes in structure, practices, and culture are required, involving both business and society, the private and the public sphere.

This Special Issue aims at developing a debate on this transformation process by exploring the potential of a radical change of the food system. We aim to look beyond what has already been said and analysed many times, opening up to innovative views and discussing how the innovative experiences can scale out of their niches. Contributions from many diverse perspectives will be welcome, coming from scholars and from all other researchers engaged in alternative pathways around food. We invite researchers to adopt a holistic approach: complex problems cannot be solved through partial views, but require comprehensive approaches that are able to take into consideration all the different components, interdependencies, and processes involved.

We thus seek papers addressing—but not limited to—the following issues in dealing with a transition to socially and environmentally sustainable food systems:

• Re-designing food systems according to agroecological and social justice principles;
• Definition of new food policies as a public framework for private activities;
• Power relationships at play in agri-food systems and their re-balancing;
• Development of new food governance systems enabling transformation and distributive justice;
• Urban–rural interactions and their role in supporting sustainable food systems;
• Deliberate interventions, everyday practices, and policies to meet everyone’s right to high-quality food;
• Ways to overcome path dependency and lock-ins that characterize the dominant agri-food socio-technical system;
• Changes in the value chains: new food business models aiming to create shared value with society;
• Changes in the culture of food: new ways to conceive food and tackle food-related practices;
• Changes in the global discourse of food, food security, and food sovereignty.

Prof. Dr. Adanella Rossi
Dr. Giaime Berti
Guest Editors

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