Five mechanisms blocking the transition towards ‘nature-inclusive’ agriculture: A systemic analysis of Dutch dairy farming

Why are European food systems stuck in a pattern of producing large quantities of food while greatly contributing to today’s environmental and social problems? And what can farmers, businesses, and governments do to get these systems “unstuck” and onto a more sustainable path? These questions lie at the heart of this thesis, which analyzes the potential transformation of the Dutch agricultural sector. The Netherlands is emblematic of Northwestern Europe’s farming sectors: the country produces large volumes of agricultural commodities, but per hectare of farmland it has the highest environmental pressure in the EU. By analyzing the context in which farmers work and transform their operations towards sustainability, we identify knowledge-related, sociocultural, economic, and regulatory types of lock-in that prevent a system-wide transformation. To overcome these types of lock-in, society must turn away from the persistent underlying paradigm of growth, resource extraction, and control over nature. The seeds of such a reorientation can be seen in the bottom-up transformations of individual farmers and regional initiatives. At the farm level, personal characteristics like risk appetite, open-mindedness, reflective ability, and sociability with peers are instrumental in overcoming structural barriers. At the regional level, we observed some signs of bottom-up reorientation through the facilitated redesign of a farm in collaboration with the farm’s stakeholders. On the national level, a clear and unambiguous vision, structural policies to level the playing field for farmers, and transition funds are needed to support the transformation. 

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Getting unstuck: transformation to sustainable agriculture in the Netherlands

This chapter highlights various challenges and developments related to our current global food production and consumption systems, followed by a number of research and innovation activities that actively support a transition to a sustainable, healthy, and just agri-food system. The first section identifies several important trends that may either limit, support, or influence such a transition (Sect. 6.1). Following this, I will provide an overview of several research and innovation activities that our research group is currently involved in, such as the Dutch national research programme (NWA) ‘Transition to a Sustainable Food System’ (Sect. 6.2), nature-inclusive and regenerative agriculture (Sect. 6.3), closing the gaps between citizens, farmers, and nature (Sect. 6.4), measuring sustainability and health aspects of our food supply chains (Sect. 6.5), and the South Holland Food Family, an open innovation and food transition network (Sect. 6.6). This last section also provides an example of TSEI-framework application to analyze institutional change during initiation, development, and implementation of the South Holland Food Family innovation network (Sect. 6.6).

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Transition to a Sustainable and Healthy Agri-Food System

Agri-food system transitions are a considerable challenge requiring stakeholder alignment on what changes need to be made and how. When stakeholders do not agree on the goals or methods of a transition, this can be a serious obstacle to success. This paper analyzes 42 vision documents for the future of Dutch agriculture from a broad range of stakeholders to determine stakeholder alignment using an inductive coding approach. We identified 23 issues as the main challenges for the transition in these documents. We are the first to categorize them according to a recently proposed problem-solution space for wicked problems. Stakeholders were fully aligned in recognizing the problem for the majority of issues, but showed agreement on solutions for less than a quarter. For the issues of international orientation, sector size, and farm business models, we found a lack of consensus on the problem, indicating fundamental disagreement about the type of agricultural sector desired by stakeholders. The apparent consensus on environmental and social issues provides clear societal expectations for agronomic development and innovation, while the divergence on economic issues highlights the rift between growth-oriented paradigms and more holistic paradigms like agroecology. The crucial empirical novelty of this paper is that progress on environmental and social matters is restricted by divergent views on the economic characteristics of a future agri-food system, adding further complexity to mission-oriented transition and innovation policies.

A new green revolution or agribusiness as usual? Uncovering alignment issues and potential transition complications in agri-food system transitions

Verkenning kennisbehoeftes van agrariërs t.a.v. natuurinclusieve landbouw en het reeds bestaande aanbod van deze kennis : waar is de match, de mismatch en hoe die te overbruggen

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Verkenning kennisbehoeftes van agrariërs t.a.v. natuurinclusieve landbouw en het reeds bestaande aanbod van deze kennis : waar is de match, de mismatch en hoe die te overbruggen