Steven R. McGreevy

University of Twente | UT · Governance and Technology for Sustainability (CSTM)

Non-technical summary The Anthropocene era demands urgent societal changes as we exceed planetary limits. Addressing key sustainability and governance challenges requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. Future Earth, a global initiative, brings together leading scholars to advance sustainability science by connecting natural and social sci...

This chapter introduces case studies of the backcasting workshop for designing sustainable local food systems in Japan and describes each stage of the co-design process for participants referring to the theoretical frameworks raised by Paul B. Thompson. Backcasting is a method used by participants to envision a sustainable society, support decision...

Non-technical summary We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide r...

The concept of edible landscapes seeks to combine a participatory approach to food production with wider concerns about well-designed, sustainable human-landscape relationships. Despite its decade-long history and seeming potential for holistically addressing multiple intertwined socio-ecological crises, the concept has received much less attention...

Local food systems are complex, and there is no single direct way to address their sustainability transition successfully. Therefore, a system transformation approach called 'co-evolution' is needed. Co-evolution requires continuous cooperation and participation of people from different community sectors and spaces for recursive mutual learning. Th...

Imagining sustainable food futures is key to effectively transforming food systems. Yet even transdisciplinary approaches struggle to open up complex and highly segregated food policy governance for co-production and can fail to critically interrogate assumptions, worldviews, and values. In this Perspective we argue that transdisciplinary processes...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everyday living and social practices, prompting questions of whether more sustainable consumption patterns are emerging and the likelihood of their long-term retention. To examine these questions, we apply a practice-based approach to a quantitative study of COVID-driven practice changes in the domains of food, m...

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency,...

Simulation games are increasingly popular tools for opening up future imaginaries, especially in the arena of sustainability policy-making and decision support. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding the potential power of games in anticipatory governance. We argue that the utility of simulation games in support of anticipatory climate...

Conventional policy approaches emphasize technical solutions and individual behavioral change, but practice-based policy approaches offer an alternative. This paper examines the operationalization of a practice-oriented futures policy development process. The process builds on practice theory to generate alternative sustainable future pathways and...

Games offer unique possibilities for imagining and experimenting with new systems of governance for more sustainable futures – new rules and institutions, new roles, and new dynamic worlds. However, research on sustainability games has mostly investigated games as a type of futures method, largely divorced from its societal contexts. In this paper,...

Highland areas in Thailand suffer from deforestation due to overproduction of maize and more ecologically favorable crops such as coffee are an attractive alternative. Beyond the obvious option to export coffee, policy schemes are being enacted to promote local production for local consumption. Rural development literature has long-lauded policies...

Although evidence continues to indicate an urgent need to transition food systems away from industrialized monocultures and toward agroecological production, there is little sign of significant policy commitment toward food system transformation in global North geographies. The authors, a consortium of researchers studying the land-food nexus in gl...

Individual agroecological farms can act as lighthouses to amplify the uptake of agroecological principles and practices by other farmers. Amplification is critical for the upscaling of agroecological production and socio-political projects emphasizing farmer sovereignty and solidarity. However, territories are contested spaces with historical, soci...

English title: A feast of our making — participatory futures of food and agriculture

The challenge before environmental science is not simply to provide cogent information to spur action, but to stimulate the imagination of society to see possible futures that have been invisible. At the same time, policy development processes can be limited by their inabil- ity to span institutional structures and the needs and views of multiple s...

The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural weaknesses and inequalities embedded in the global industrial agri-food system. While the mainstream narrative continues to emphasise the importance of ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of global supply chains to counter COVID-related disruptions,...

Sustainable management and informed policy making at the sub-national level requires an understanding of regional resource base regeneration and the demand it places on wider geographical areas. Ecological Footprint is one of the most widely used and accepted ecological accounting methodologies and available for calculating multiple consumption cat...

This paper describes using a serious board game jam as training for transdisciplinary collaboration and provides tips for organizing similar events. Entangled socio-environmental problems are considered “wicked problems.” An effective way to tackle these problems is a transdisciplinary approach. The transdisciplinary approach facilitates a systemic...

Non-technical summary The sustainability concept seeks to balance how present and future generations of humans meet their needs. But because nature is viewed only as a resource, sustainability fails to recognize that humans and other living beings depend on each other for their well-being. We therefore argue that true sustainability can only be ach...

Although there are many methodologies available to assess agroecosystem performance (sustainability, resilience, soil quality and plant health, biodiversity levels, etc.), there is still a need to develop a methodology to be used at the field level by researchers and farmers to assess if surveyed farming systems are or not based on agroecological p...

The sustainability concept in its current form suffers from reductionism. The common interpretation of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” fails to explicitly recognize their interdependence with needs of current and future non-human generations. Here we argue that the fo...

Food product labels can provide consumers with rich, specific, expert-certified product information. However, sources of label information differ. How do consumers then evaluate label trustworthiness of expert labels in comparison to other commonly used label types? We present results from a representative online survey (N = 10,000) of consumers in...

The global environmental change that characterizes the Anthropocene poses a threat to food systems. Cities increasingly serve as the spaces where civil society, private actors, and local governments come together to strategize toward more sustainable food futures and experiment with new forms of food governance. However, much of the futures literat...

Japanese agriculture and rural communities are in decline and fewer young people are becoming farmers. Young heritage farmers and a new generation from non-farming families face multiple barriers to pursue farming as their profession or way of life. Using mixed methods, we examine cases of new farmers establishing themselves in Kyoto and Nagano, Ja...

Rural places are continually experiencing socio-economic change and the conceptual frameworks of re-deagrarianisation and re-de-peasantisation were devised to explain agrarian transformations in a broad sense. Following empirical studies from other geographical contexts, this paper revisits the concepts of re-de-agrarianisation and re-de-peasantisa...

Can shrinking cities harness population decline to improve their sustainability by repurposing land use, for example, for localizing food production? Whether such a transition is feasible depends on the pre-shrinkage state of urban agricultural land use, including ongoing trends in local land use change. This study examined agricultural land use fr...

Japan frequently features as a prime example of (involuntary) degrowth. With severe depopulation of about 15% projected for the next 25 years, degrowth seems inevitable rather than utopian, frantic attempts by the Japanese government to boost growth notwithstanding. This trend is strongest in rural areas, but large cities such as Osaka, Kyoto or Sa...

For many consumers serious about sustainability, reconnecting with the backstories that permeate our food involves creating closer relationships with the people, products, and places involved in its provisioning and highlights the importance of trusting relationships. Forming trusting relationships can be a difficult process as personal, social, an...

Upland Japan suffers from extreme depopula- tion, aging, and loss of agricultural, economic, and social viability. In addition, the absence of a successor generation in many marginalized hamlets endangers the continuation of local knowledge associated with upland agricultural livelihoods and severely limits the prospects of rural revi- talization a...

Like rural areas in many countries, Japanese rural society is experiencing decline in all spheres (depopulation, aging, lack of economic opportunity, and so on). Uncertainty in the future viability of agricultural livelihoods coupled with the collapse of the forestry sector has decreased the ecological resilience of the Japanese countryside, increa...