Launching the Rapid Transition Lab report
Learning how Swedish food system actors can navigate transformations in times of multiple crises and understanding methods for how to work strategically with transformation processes.
On October 6th we, the project team, launched the Rapid Transition Lab report with a breakfast seminar in Stockholm at Vinnova, the Swedish innovation agency that funded this work. You can access the English version here and the version in Swedish here. Roughly 50 people joined the seminar in person and approximately 120 more watched the seminar online. During the tightly planned one-hour seminar, we presented the main findings of how food actors responded to the Covid crisis and examples from the portfolio of food system strategies for both preparedness and accelerating transformation, as well as the rationale behind our strategic design approach and general reflections on how to work towards transformations in times of crises.
My Sellberg and Linnéa Rönnquist presented highlights from the portfolio of strategies that the project suggests (read more about it in the report, as well as in this previous blog post).
“With the high prices on energy and fertilizers, there is a clear possibility now to accelerate a transition to local and renewable inputs and circular production systems — instead of subsidizing fossil fuels”, My said.
Linnéa explained how shifting to a new pricing system where the unhealthy and unsustainable options are surcharged and sustainable and healthy foods are subsidized, would help ensure affordability while accounting for the true cost of food for people and planet.
We also invited on stage a food actor who was at the center of events during the Covid-crises: Sara Maxence, Innovation manager at ICA Växa (Sweden’s largest food retailer). Sara described how they collaborated with local food businesses and restaurants during the pandemic. Some of those collaborations are still ongoing and Sara aspires to continue enabling local food actors to sell their products in ICA’s stores. In a reflection on the report, Anna-Karin Quetel from the Swedish Food Agency highlighted the strategy on a new pricing system as particularly interesting, whereas she identified issues of justice and food accessibility of different groups as a gap to work more with.
It was not only the results for food system strategies that interested the audience. Linnéa’s pedagogical explanation of how to make sense of complex systems using visuals and system mappings made a big impression.
“It’s not the picture that is important, but the process of developing the pictures and changing them over time”, Linnéa described.
She proposed a set-up where a group of people sits down every Monday and updates their system map with different nodes and interactions (such as the crises landscape we used in Rapid Transition Lab).
Per Olsson reminded us of the broader insights for transformations that can be drawn from this project. Even if Covid-19 was our starting point, it became clear early on that we needed to take multiple, interacting crises into account, such as the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis. Moreover, it is important to simultaneously phase out norms, practices and structures that maintain the old system, while building structures that support the new. Otherwise there is no room for innovations to take off.
“We need to be both midwifes and hospice workers, building the new at the same time as we let the old die with dignity”, Per said.
Dan Hill, who now is the director of Melbourne School of Design, congratulated us on finalizing the project and also urged us to go into action, as the next step on this journey.
One takeaway from the entire project is to work with crises preparedenss and transformation to sustainable food systems together — not in separate silos. When crises hit, it is easy to turn to short-term, reactive responses that strive to go back to normal as soon as possible. This project highlighted the people, organizations and networks who were able to navigate towards long-term goals of healthy, just and sustainable food systems, in the middle of uncertain changes. Building this capacity in systemic networks of entreprenuers is crucial going forward.
With the Rapid Transition Lab one-year project and experiment now coming to an end, we are grateful to all the participants of interviews, the survey and workshops, without whom we had not been able to carry out this project. We are also happy that we succeeded in making this a truly co-creative process between the three main collaborating partners (Stockholm Resilience, Dark Matter Labs and Vinnova). None of us could have come up with the results on our own. A warm thank you to Vinnova for not only funding the Rapid Transition Lab, but also being open to try new ways of working and actively engaging in the project.
We are excited to see if and how this can develop into more concrete experiments and actions together with different partners. Let’s stay in touch.
This blog is written by My Sellberg at Stockholm Resilience Centre, with help from Linnéa Rönnquist and Aleksander Nowak (Dark Matter Labs), Jenny Norrby and Per Olsson (Stockholm Resilience Centre), and Alexander Alvsilver (Vinnova). It is a part of the project Rapid Transition Lab funded by Vinnova and we invite you to read our other blogs here.
