Sustainability transitions in the context of pandemic: an introduction to the focused issue on social innovation and systemic impact

Abstract

For society to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the agri-food industry needs a substantial sustainability transition toward food systems capable of delivering greater volumes of nutritious food, while simultaneously lowering the environmental footprint. This issue of AHV focuses on the big picture-on mechanisms of sustainability transition, from social innovation, to models of finance and institutional systems, and calls for business and agricultural researchers to transform the sector together. Contributors to this issue embrace a transdisciplinary outlook, including scientific, technical, social and political dimensions of agroecology. This issue is a call to action: to encourage the community of social entrepreneurs, ecosystem players and researchers to contribute analytical methods, experiences and scientific insights on emerging social innovations related to food, agriculture and rural-urban transformation.

Food systems in transition: conceptualizing sustainable food entrepreneurship

“…Our approach helps to see that entrepreneurship entangles the future and the past, the human and the non-human and therefore cannot be confined to the ideology or motivation of entrepreneurs. Furthermore, Desa and Jia (2020) and Schoonhoven-Speijer (2020), that consider institutions as dynamic entities themselves, closely resembles our usage of the term 'emergent artefacts', but also in general our understanding of entrepreneurship as a cyclical process of change. This shows that our framework could be combined with concepts such as 'institutions' in future research.…”

“…Furthermore, when there is already a regional entrepreneurial culture that favours sustainability, it is more likely to spur more sustainable initiatives (Enthoven & Brouwer, 2020). Moreover, the impact of stakeholders such as government and entrepreneurial actors on entrepreneurship are in practice hard to disentangle since they rely on similar networks and often cooperate on different levels to create sustainable food systems (Baldy & Kruse, 2019;Desa & Jia, 2020). Both the SFE literature and the expert interviews place emphasis on the role of nonentrepreneurial actors in a facilitating role, that connect different interests (Hedberg & Lounsbury, 2021) and 'make things happen' (Giambartolomei et al, 2021, p. 2).…”

One CGIAR and the Integrated Agri-food Systems Initiative: From short-termism to transformation of the world’s food systems

“…However, the SDGs will not be achieved simply by promoting individual technologies, practices, or policies targeted to a single objective, nor can they be achieved primarily through digitization or financial inclusion [20]. Agri-food system solutions will require integrated systems approaches that go beyond introducing innovation through unilateral action and, to be inclusive, must embrace collaborative, research-based action by diverse stakeholders through a lens of system thinking [21][22][23]. To meet human needs under climate change and within resource limits, interventions will be needed across all components of food production and distribution value chains.…”

Agri‐food sector and entrepreneurship during the COVID‐19 crisis: A systematic literature review and research agenda

“…Pandemic is not an unknown phenomenon that occurred exclusively in modern societies as pandemics have been recorded since ancient times. Each pandemic causes significant changes in the economy (Elleby, Domínguez, Adenauer, & Genovese, 2020; Tasnim, 2020), in local and global policies (Blay‐Palmer, Carey, Valette, & Sanderson, 2020; Reardon, Lu, & Zilberman, 2019; Rowan & Galanakis, 2020) in social behavior (Di Vaio, Boccia, Landriani, & Palladino, 2020) and citizens' mentalities as well (Altieri & Nicholls, 2020; Desa & Jia, 2020).…”

“…Like any pandemic, COVID‐19 has had direct, collateral, short‐term, and long‐term impacts (Desa & Jia, 2020; Phillipson et al, 2020) on the agri‐food system, locally and globally. Some of the pandemic impacts on agri‐food are likely to become a habit and let this be why the change in tactics and policies applied to date.…”