About this Research Topic

Background

The imperative of ‘transformation’ in agriculture and food systems is highlighted in the UN Food Systems Summit, the Sustainable Development Goals, and a growing number of global agendas, in response to multifaceted and societal and environmental challenges.

Within mainstream, and largely international donor-driven agendas, the upscaling of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) technologies and practices is heralded as one pathway to achieving transformative change. The focus here is on identifying and promoting the wide scale adoption of technologies and practices that simultaneously improve productivity, build climate resilience and contribute to reduced emissions. Arguably the kind of transformation that upscaling CSA represents is quite different to, but not necessarily incompatible with, the more radical change that is being campaigned for within political and social movements that draw attention to issues of corporate control over food systems, social inequalities in the distribution of food and access to land, animal rights and more.
Although there is a broadly agreed on imperative for transformation, this is understood and pursued in quite different ways.

There is a danger that the transformation imperative acts to mask trade-offs and inequalities, rather than addresses them. In this Research Topic we begin from a recognition that transformation can be, and has been historically, brought about through exclusionary processes and with inequitable outcomes. This inequality can come about because there are trade-offs inherent in transformative agricultural technologies and practices themselves. Even those practices that are heralded for being associated with multiple co-benefits (e.g. productivity, adaptation and mitigation), may not be optimal across these objectives or may be associated with different contextual trade-offs, associated with labor burdens, resource opportunity costs, and more. Furthermore, trade-offs may be associated with the ways in which transformation is envisioned, governed, monitored and evaluated; the knowledge politics that shapes whose priorities and agendas are being promoted, and that sheds light on persistent inequalities in agriculture and food systems governance.

This Research Topic critically interrogates the global transformation imperative in agriculture and food, and asks:

• How is agriculture and food system transformation being differently conceived of, and by whom, and what narratives of transformation are being told in support of different visions?
• How are the trade-offs, associated with different agriculture and food transformations, experienced across societies and across time and space?
• What does equitable and just agriculture and food systems transformation look like, and how can it be brought about?
• How can we monitor and evaluate just transformation in agriculture and food systems in just and equitable ways?
We would welcome submissions of papers that address one or more of these questions, either theoretically or empirically, and from diverse disciplinary perspectives.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to:

• Studies that describe and trace alternative narratives of agriculture and food system transformation
• Studies of the social and ecological experiences, impacts and trade-offs associated with agriculture and food system interventions
• Studies that present different perspectives and voices on agriculture and food system transformation
• Studies that critically evaluate evidence bases behind agriculture and food system transformation pathways, and the ways in which that evidence is used, interpreted and communicated to further particular transformation agendas
• Studies of participation, representation and power in agriculture and food system governance at different scales
• Studies that offer novel and inclusive approaches to governance, or that offer tools and metrics for evaluating just and equitable transformation in agriculture and food systems

Keywords: equity, transformation, justice, knowledge politics, governance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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