Policy packaging can make food system transformation feasible

Abstract

ractitioners and scientists are calling on governments to regulate and incentivize sustainable food consumption and production 1-5. In addition to supply-side measures that foster sustainable production methods, many advocate demand-side policies that target consumption behaviour 3,5-7. Demand-side policies are regarded as paramount for reaching the climate change mitigation target set in the Paris Agreement, reducing the risks of climate tipping points and preventing 'carbon leakage' (that is, avoiding an increase in imports of emission-intensive food products as a substitute for reducing the domestic production of these commodities) 6-9. Researchers also suggest packaging (that is, systematically bundling) policy instruments on both the demand and supply side 3,5,10-12 to combine multiple marginal gains 13 and accelerate the sustainability transformation of the food system 1-5. Arguably, the main hurdle to implementing such measures is not technical but political, with political feasibility challenges stemming from insufficient public acceptance of policy interventions 6,8,11,14,15. Environmental policy analysts usually anticipate trade-offs between problem-solving effectiveness and political feasibility 8,11,15,16. While policy experts consider stringent policies to be more effective at reducing environmental impacts 17-19 , public policy specialists often note that public opposition and political risks are higher when governments deploy policies that citizens perceive to be costly and as interfering with their personal consumption choices 8,11,16,20,21. To identify environmental policies with the potential to be both effective and politically feasible, it is thus important to investigate public support for sustainable food policies that are likely to become publicly salient and contested. To study public support for different policy packages aimed at reducing the consumption of meat and fish products, we carried out a survey-embedded conjoint choice experiment in China, Germany and the United States (total n = 4,874), using quota sampling to ensure representativeness in terms of age, employment status, gender, income and region (see Methods). These countries were selected for their importance in global food production and consumption, as well as their diversity in terms of socioeconomic, cultural and political systems. Specifically, they are among the world's largest producers and consumers of meat and fish products; hence, they exert a major environmental impact 22,23. This experimental approach allowed us to evaluate public support for specific and more complex policy designs in the form of policy packages 11,24. Thus, our study design mimics realistic choice situations 25,26 and generates new insights about policy packaging that go above and beyond those of current research that analyses citizens' preferences for policy measures in isolation. In what follows, we show how policy packaging, in contrast with single policy instruments, can help to mitigate the potential trade-off between political feasibility ...

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“…To date, no single country currently imposes carbon prices on agricultural emissions [ 15 ]. Public opinion research, as well as the unresolved decades-long debates in New Zealand, the only country discussing their introduction, suggest that stringent agricultural climate policies will encounter large socio-political resistance [ 15 , 29 ].…”

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