A just food system transformation is imperative to meet this century’s goals of environmental sustainability, economic fairness, and equitable social well-being. While considerations of justice are beginning to inform food system transformation debates, there remains a lack of conceptual and practical integration of these two historically separate disciplinary perspectives. This perspective therefore proposes the just transformation matrix (JUSTRA), which integrates justice and transformation concerns using an interrogative approach. Interrogatives probe the historical, present, and future intersections of justice with specific food system elements. If used conscientiously, the JUSTRA can assist a wide spectrum of food system actors in strategizing, implementing, and monitoring just food system transformations. It can also help stakeholders to more thoughtfully engage with power imbalances both among users and in the food system more broadly—if used “in bona fides.” Thus, while further testing is necessary to fully realize the potential of the JUSTRA, the matrix can become a powerful tool in multi-stakeholder dialogues to navigate unpredictable, diverse, and power-laden complexities of just food system transformations.

Non-Technical Summary. Several transnational corporations, investors, international organizations, and philanthropies have formed coalitions to respond to global social and environmental challenges. Do these coalitions, consisting of large-scale actors, have the capacity to contribute to the sustainability transformations that are needed, or do they perpetuate the same systemic dynamics that created the problems in the first place? We investigate this question by comparing publicly available information from five coalitions working on financial and food systems sustainability. Technical Summary. This paper examines whether large-scale actor coalitions (LSACs) may contribute to transformations toward equitable and sustainable futures. We use a ‘rapid assessment’ 20-variable framework to collect and analyze empirical data from five food and finance coalitions to identify their roles and capacities for transformative change. Our results indicate that LSACs implement distinct strategies to reach their goals. More specifically, due to their diverse set-ups, LSACs have the ability to raise awareness of sustainability issues, utilize ties to push forward agendas, engage in institutional policy-shaping processes, experiment with solutions, and showcase promising niche initiatives. We identify ways that LSACs’ actions can enable efforts of other change-makers who aim to change the food and finance systems and contribute to systems with high and diverse capacities for transformative change. We also discuss why the roles and lack of certain capacities of LSACs might hinder the creation of enabling conditions for transformative change within the food and finance sectors. Social Media Summary. Coalitions consisting of powerful actors have a range of transformative capacities that, under certain conditions, can support systemic transformations within their sectors.

Moving from a state of war or violent conflict will require a transformation, but there are no guarantees that transformations automatically lead to peace, sustainability, and justice. This review focuses on the temporary phase when a system is in limbo between the existing, dominant state and a new alternative state. We combine insights from a resilience approach to transformations with peacebuilding and transformative justice studies to focus on three roles that hybrid approaches to transformative and transitional justice may play in this phase, including 1) addressing ‘backlash’ dynamics, 2) strengthening the capacities needed to navigate cross-scale dynamics of conflict, and 3) responding to additional shocks, crises, and disturbances beyond the primary conflicts. Together, these findings advance the theoretical foundations for understanding peacebuilding as a transformative change process.

This chapter focuses on a social-ecological systems (SES) resilience-based approach to critically examine the relationship between tipping points and transformative change. Resilience science provides a framework for understanding the dynamics and interdependencies of complex systems and their ability to persist, adapt, or transform in response to change and uncertainty. Transformation refers to a deliberate and fundamental restructuring of a system or a set of relationships that hold a system in a particular state. We argue that the integration of a resilience-based approach to transformations can enhance the understanding of the link between tipping points and transformations, as well as the agency and capacities required to navigate them. In particular, we focus on how transformations research emphasizes the need to: better understand tipping points as one of many aspects of deeper transformation processes, include consideration of the distributed nature of agency and relationships, and how uncertainties will emerge in relation to shocks and disturbances which will surround tipping points. To achieve this, we drawing on the inter- and transdisciplinary scholarship related to transformations to sustainability including leverage points, social-ecological tipping points, disaster resilience, and case studies. We conclude that social tipping alone is insufficient; instead, there is a need for capacities to navigate the entire tipping process, or the full range of tipping dynamics, toward desired outcomes.

COVID-19 posed threats for health and well-being directly, but it also revealed and exacerbated social–ecological inequalities, worsening hunger and poverty for millions. For those focused on transforming complex and problematic system dynamics, the question was whether such devastation could create a formative moment in which transformative change could become possible. Our study examines the experiences of change agents in six African countries engaged in efforts to create or support transformative change processes. To better understand the relationship between crisis, agency, and transformation, we explored how they navigated their changed conditions and the responses to COVID-19. We document three impacts: economic impacts, hunger, and gender-based violence and we examine how they (re)shaped the opportunity contexts for change. Finally, we identify four kinds of uncertainties that emerged as a result of policy responses, including uncertainty about the: (1) robustness of preparing a system to sustain a transformative trajectory, (2) sequencing and scaling of changes within and across systems, (3) hesitancy and exhaustion effects, and (4) long-term effects of surveillance, and we describe the associated change agent strategies. We suggest these uncertainties represent new theoretical ground for future transformations research.

The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we present results from a participatory mapping. We identify 14 traps and categorize them as either global, technology or structural traps. An assessment reveals that 12 traps (86%) could be in an advanced phase of trapping with high risk of hard-to-reverse lock-ins and growing risks of negative impacts on human well-being. Ten traps (71%) currently see growing trends in their indicators. Revealing the systemic nature of the polycrisis, we assess that Anthropocene traps often interact reinforcingly (45% of pairwise interactions), and rarely in a dampening fashion (3%). We end by discussing capacities that will be important for navigating these systemic challenges in pursuit of global sustainability. Doing so, we introduce evolvability as a unifying concept for such research between the sustainability and evolutionary sciences.

Achieving sustainability in the Anthropocene requires radical changes to how human societies operate. The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes (SOGA) project has identified a diverse set of existing initiatives, called “seeds,” that have the potential to catalyze transformations toward more sustainable pathways. However, the empirical investigation of factors and conditions that enable successful sustainability transformations across multiple cases has been scarce. Building on a review of existing theoretical and empirical research, we developed a theoretical framework for assessing three features identified as important to transformative potential of innovative social-ecological initiatives: (1) learning practices, (2) empowerment, and (3) networking. We applied this framework to a set of African-led and Africa-related initiatives that we selected from the SOGA database that were divided into initiatives with more or less transformative potential. We coded the presence or absence of features relating to the theoretical framework using secondary data, and then compared the initiatives using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This analysis revealed that of the three features tested, Networking emerged as the most important feature for transformative potential when compared amongst cases. By developing and testing a framework for the comparison of cases we provide a basis for future comparative work to further identify and test properties of cases that enable transformation.

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A varied set of local actors have created alternative sustainability initiatives that enact new ways of doing, thinking, and organizing. These actors can increase the transformative impact of their initiatives through multiple actions and a variety of amplification processes. We analyzed the actions adopted by 29 food initiatives active in the Stockholm region using information available online. We conducted 11 interviews to better understand the amplification processes of speeding up (i.e., accelerating impact), scaling up (i.e., influencing higher institutional levels), and scaling deep (i.e., changing values and mind-sets). Our results indicated that the initiatives mainly seek to stabilize and grow their impact while changing the awareness, values, and mind-sets of people concerning the food they consume (scaling deep). However, these approaches raise new questions about whether these actions subvert or reinforce current unsustainable and inequitable system dynamics. We suggest there are distinct steps that local and regional governments could take to support these local actors via collaborations with coordinated forms of initiatives, and fostering changes at the municipality level, but these steps require ongoing, adaptive approaches given the highly complex nature of transformative change and the risks of reinforcing current system dynamics. 

The centrality of food to human flourishing combined with how food is currently a source of many social and environmental problems means that many of the broader sustainability challenges can be addressed by fundamental changes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Such changes are central to what has been referred to as food system transformations. Transformations require significant changes in multiple dimensions of society. History shows us that crises can create openings for transformation. This project aims to learn from the Covid-19 crisis and support the enabling of capacities for transforming Swedish food systems to promote health, equity, sustainability and resilience of people and the planet. We did this through a Rapid Transition Lab. The lab identified risks and opportunities emerging in the Swedish food systems due to the Covid-19 pandemic through a co-creative process with public, private and civil food system actors. Since the war in Ukraine started, the initial focus on the pandemic expanded during the project to encompass multiple crises. The lab has developed understanding and articulated strategic options for Swedish food system actors to engage in a rapid transition, while navigating multiple crises.

Synthetic chemicals and biologically engineered materials are major forces in today's food systems, but they are also major drivers of the global environmental changes and health challenges that characterize the Anthropocene. To address these challenges, we will need to increase assessment activity, promote alternative production practices with less reliance on such technologies, and regulate social campaigns and experiments.