Assessing the sustainability of agri-food chains is challenging for several reasons. It should account for the impacts on environmental, social, and economic wellbeing simultaneously, considering both the individual links in the chain and the chain as a whole. The primary aim of this study is to assess the conditions for meeting the sustainability criteria of a legume-based agri-food chain in Slovenia. Therefore, a quantitative sustainability assessment methodology was developed, using a multi-stakeholder approach, which upgraded the traditional SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. Our approach, called ‘Multi-SWOT’, aggregates the SWOT table inputs identified by stakeholders into factors, themes and focus areas, according to their importance for the agri-food chain, for each sustainability pillar, and links in the chain. By accounting for the relative number of incentives (beneficial factors) and barriers (constraint factors) we identified those factors that enhance the sustainability of the Slovenian legume-based agri-food chain and the factors jeopardising it. The incorporation of multi-stakeholder perspectives presents an innovative approach that adds value to a standard SWOT analysis. The study serves as a guide to help decision-makers better understand the multidimensionality of sustainability and identify effective activities to support and strengthen the current legume agri-food chain in Slovenia.

Sustainability is becoming a core concept in every area (scientific, social, environmental and economic) of human life. Sustainability acknowledges that human civilization takes resources to sustain our modern way of life and strives towards balancing between our competing needs -our need to continue developing technologically and economically, and the need to protect the environment in which we live. However, sustainability is a very complex concept that incorporates social, environmental and economic aspects and interactions between them and can be described by a number of different sustainability indicators. Therefore, assessing the sustainability of a system is a demanding task and requires gathering and structuring of knowledge from experts, literature surveys and other sources. In this paper, we present the use of taxonomies to represent the complex concept of sustainability of European food systems. Structuring the knowledge on sustainable food systems in Europe is a first step in assessing their level of sustainability. The goal of this study is to use the developed taxonomies as basis for the development of a complex DSS system for assessment of the sustainability of legume food systems across the whole quality chain.

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