Sustainability-driven regime shifts in Complex Adaptive Systems: The case of animal production and food system

Abstract

The role of animal production in sustainability transitions has become the subject of a heated societal debate, and a variety of discourses delineating the role that animal production should take in the future prevail. Such discourses can act as attractors that configure the organisation of Complex Adaptive Systems, such as food systems. The evolution of food systems seems to follow a cyclical pattern with occasional regime shifts, which can be driven by the system swapping attractors. In this study, alternative regimes and regime shift dynamics were illustrated for the Finnish food system facing pressures for sustainability transition. Two questions were asked. First, what could be the attractors capable for facilitating a regime shift and from where could they emerge? Second, how the regime shift could happen and what would be the role of animal production in the alternative regimes? Discourse analysis and systems science methodology were used in a participatory foresight process. Five prominent new basins of attraction were identified: ethics, environment, health, national food security and global market. All these manifested a specific conceptualisation of sustainability and resulted in radically different roles for animal production in the food system. Each of the new regimes was accompanied by some new landscape level pressures for change, emphasising the importance of holistic system analysis to avoid unintended or unexpected outcomes of sustainability transitions. Insights for the difficulty of planned regime shifts, use of Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) as an empirical mapping tool, and the utilisation of societal discourses as a source for new attractors were novel elements in the approach of this study.