Agro-food transitions group (AFTG)
Welcome to the STRN thematic group on agro-food transitions (AFTG)
The agro-food transitions group (AFTG) seeks to foster and congregate scholars that are theoretically and practically involved in the studies of ‘transitions in the making’ within agricultural production (food, feed, fibres, fuels) and agro-food provision systems from farm to fork. Agricultural systems are currently presenting major sustainability challenges in terms of climate change, biodiversity loss, water provision and retention, environmental degradation and health. Here, we use the term ‘transitions’ with hesitation, as we cannot know upfront whether the ongoing and planned attempts to change existing systems will indeed contribute to a transition process. Thus, we take an open-ended attitude that leaves open the political, social and inclusive conception of sustainability objectives.
Yet, on-going change processes in agro-food (AF) systems do feature a number of characteristics that are necessary preconditions for transitions. This features a combination of an incumbent system of ‘conventional agriculture’ that becomes increasingly under pressure, and a growing range of niches that tinker with new sustainable farming practices that pay attention to soil fertility, biodiversity, ecological aspects, new agro-food practices and supply chain management from farm to fork. Many such niches also address territorial welfare and new food provision systems, including reconnection and digital settings. These possible transitions in-the-making deviate in a significant way from the incumbent agro-food systems that we have inherited from the post-war modernization regime of agriculture. Key is the exploration of situated attempts to induce sustainability transitions in relation to political action, larger sociotechnical visions and the manufacture of futures, while they also address major challenges like climate change, provision of fresh and clean water, or emerging technological promises such as the digitization of agriculture and systems of food provision.
An important difference between the agro-food systems and other transition arenas like energy and mobility is that AF systems have a very distributed production side in the form of millions of farmers who all make their own choices on how to produce food, feed or fuel products. Hence, changing these practices to make them more sustainable requires tuning possible alternatives to the needs and preferences of each of these farmers. For research, this implies that, more then in other arenas, researchers have to work closely with these farmers to develop alternatives that suit their requirements. For this reason, much of the work of the AFTG is of a transdisciplinary nature, i.e. many of the projects and activities of the group’s members are carried out in close cooperation with stakeholders from AF systems, especially farmers.
The main objective of the AFTG is to foster learning together and from each other on how to work effectively in such transdisciplinary projects and to draw lessons that have wider applicability. One of our main recent activities was the organisation of the 4th international SISA workshop (System Innovation for Sustainable Agriculture) in October 2024 (following 3 earlier workshops in the preceding decade). Participants were mainly researchers but also about half a dozen ‘practitioners’, including farmers’ representatives and farmers. We seek to produce two sets of edited volumes of papers discussed at the workshop, one for a transition journal and one for a more policy and practice-oriented journal.
A major activity for the near feature is to produce a ‘Transdisciplinary Research and Activities Agenda’ for the AFT research community. We emphasise the transdisciplinarity of this agenda for the reasons given above. Furthermore, by also using the term ‘activities’ we acknowledge that this agenda is not only on doing research: for the stakeholders we seek to work with it is about a range of activities that directly affects their livelihood. With a small group we are preparing a draft of this TRA agenda that we will then discuss with the members of the group. This agenda will function as a coordination mechanism to identify various topics on which group members can have fruitful exchange and to identify possible concrete activities (research and other) that the group can carry out to foster its agenda.
Furthermore, we are planning to organise a series of webinars on various issues of interest to group members. We have temporarily put this on hold to give priority to the TRA agenda and we will subsequently use the agenda to identify the most important topics for the seminars. We foresee that we can then start with this seminar series in 2026. We also plan to organise a next SISA workshop in 2026 or 2027 and the TRA agenda will help to specify an agenda for that.
If you would like to be involved in any of these activities, please let us know.
The agro-food thematic group is coordinated by Boelie Elzen and Marc Barbier
Contact: