Governing Sustainability Transitions in Agribusinesses and Food-Systems: A Behavioral Foundations View

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Background

Today, we face fundamental sustainability challenges in several domains that are affected by strong inter-dependencies of agriculture and food-systems. Consolidated technologies are vastly knotted with user practices and lifestyles, complementary technologies, business models, value chains, organizational structures, regulations, institutional structures, and political structures. Innovative digital technologies add complexity to this picture, as they require institutional changes, new standards of production and new business models. Also, an ecosystemic perspective should encompass all aspects related to all agri-food value chain actors and shareholders, such as citizens, consumers and businesses. Therefore, existing socio-technical systems must undertake radical changes to address the challenges. Behavioral paths shall be detected that either encourage or undermine such changes. In the same vein, new learning challenges emerge from the interaction between human actors and complex digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence. Against this backdrop, the question of how to encourage sustainable modes of production and consumption is garnering more attention in the policy arena and substantiates empirical and conceptional research in sustainability transitions.

The identification of relevant stakeholders in transition processes and their unique behavioral features is crucial for understanding how to stimulate transitions. Sustainability transitions practices and policies must take into account controversial issues, such as the approach towards change, path-dependency for conventional firms, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation behaviors, technological lock-in effects and organizational inertia effects, changing roles for newcomers and startups in this business model transformation, the interplay between existing and new innovation ecosystems. In this call for papers, we would like to investigate opportunities to integrate various theories and disciplinary views on behavior into thinking about sustainability transitions with the aim to arrive at recommendations for more effective policies. For this purpose, we would like to combine insights from the literatures on agency in sustainability transitions, on environmental policy under bounded rationality and social interactions, and on behavioral foundations of learning and innovation. This call for papers reaches beyond existing approaches as we identify scholarly communities, such as management studies, sociology that are working on related issues but remain somewhat disconnected from the main body of the sustainability transitions literature until now. Our ambition is to stimulate discussion on the novel concepts and lines of thought to both enrich and challenge the existing theoretical basis of sustainability transitions research in agriculture and food systems. We also would like to facilitate a dialogue of established scholarly communities and raise awareness for sustainability transitions in communities that have not yet addressed these topics and the underlying challenges.

Keywords: Sustainability transitions; Learning and innovation; Agribusiness ecosystem; transitions policies

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