Making strategic moves towards sustainable food system futures
It’s midmorning on a Wednesday in May, you stroll along the coast, deep in the Stockholm Archipelago in Saltsjöbaden. The breeze is light, the view expansive, and in your ears you hear voices describing alternative future scenarios for the Swedish food system. These narratives, taking place in 2032, describe what a sustainable, healthy and just food system could look, feel, smell, and taste like.
The description above provides a snapshot of how food system actors started the day for the second Rapid Transition Lab workshop on the 11th May 2022 (Figure 1). This workshop follows an earlier Rapid Transition Lab scenario building workshop, which took place in March 2022. About half of the 14 participants were also part of the first workshop. You can read more about the March workshop here. While the first workshop focussed on how “seeds” of positive food futures, including “seeds” that had emerged during the COVID pandemic, could grow and be combined in new ways, the aim of the second workshop was to move beyond ideas and scenario building to the formulation of strategic moves and concrete actions.
The 2032 narratives were based on four strategic areas for change that emerged from the first workshop and were later defined by members of the Rapid Transition Lab team. The strategic areas were (1) ‘increase Sweden’s food self-sufficiency’, (2) ‘create a culture of regenerative farming’, (3) ‘use food for preventative health’, and (4) ‘account for the true cost of food’. You can listen to the narratives in Swedish here. Positive future scenarios have previously been used to assist with transformation in the Seeds of the Good Anthropocene Project. The method is grounded in the idea that envisioning better futures, rather than focussing on dystopian visions, can actually foster the ability to move towards them.
After listening to the narratives, participants self-organised into work groups that aligned with the above strategic areas. The groups were then introduced to visual representations of the ‘change landscape’ for each strategic area (Figure 2, step 1) (find templates here). The ‘change landscape’ mapped out multiple nodes illustrating drivers of change and ongoing trends, highlighting a situation of continuous change and uncertainty, risks and opportunities.
The Rapid Transition Lab team also introduced cards outlining barriers, enabling factors, seed initiatives and strategic moves that had been identified by participants in the first Rapid Transition Lab workshop. These cards could be used to reflect on linkages with nodes in the change landscape (Figure 3). Research has identified the value of making such linkages, and the potential of shifting the current trajectory of a system to another adjacent one, where new possibilities await. This is referred to in research as the ‘adjacent possible.’ Following this step, participants were asked to individually brainstorm potential strategic moves for transformation (step 2), come together and cluster these ideas (step 3), and then collectively identify the key moves with greatest transformative potential (step 4). Finally, participants mapped out these key strategic moves in more detail (Step 5), and filled out individual or collective ‘action cards’ detailing steps they could take to bring about change in the relevant strategic area (step 6).
Participants responded positively to the second Rapid Transition Lab workshop, and expressed that the future narratives and overall process was both inspiring and energizing. This type of approach could be useful to open up conversations where actors tend to be locked in certain positions. Participants were very engaged and interacted fluidly with the visual prompts and materials.
The key task for the Rapid Transition Lab team is to now reflect on the process, as well as visual tools employed for the second workshop, and critically assess how and if we were able to facilitate the collaborative development of concrete strategies for transformative change. An important question to answer is whether our efforts have been effective in forming new conversations and capitalizing on opportunities for change which can arise in the midst of crises or disturbances, or if participants would have had similar conversations anyway. It is clear that the maps themselves were not enough, and that focussing the conversations on possibilities emerging from the crises required active facilitation and guidance by the group facilitators.
Another question for the team to consider is how we can harness the momentum created by the workshops despite the project coming to an end in August. Participants were motivated by the content of the workshops and expressed a desire to continue conversations and collaboration. However, the ‘projectification’ of transformation work was also highlighted as a concern and the team is keen to overcome such barriers with creative solutions. We will arrange a digital follow-up meeting with participants in autumn this year and also produce a report summarizing our methods and results. We hope that the ideas in this report can inspire further action from participants and also action from other food system actors who have not been able to participate in the current Rapid Transition Lab project.
