Education is considered a key leverage point for sustainability transformation. Yet, dominant human-capital-based discourses, promoted by actors such as the OECD, have long framed education in an economistic way, marginalizing the creative, critical, and transdisciplinary pedagogies required for sustainability. Using the case of Spain, we apply discourse analysis to analyse historically (1975 to the present) how human-capital-based discourses have shaped education policy and where opportunities and constraints for transformative sustainability education (TSE) emerge. The findings reveal three major periods: (1) emancipatory aspirations during Spain’s democratic transition (1975–1990), (2) consolidation of a neoliberal consensus shaped by OECD discourse (1990–2018), and (3) the emergence of discursive openings for TSE (2019–present). While in the last period sustainability has become a central signifier with an education law that legitimises transdisciplinary, experiential and embodied pedagogies, its implementation remains partly constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. The analysis of these discursive shifts reveals key opportunities and barriers for transformative shifts in education systems, showing that while dislocatory events and the linking of different struggles for educational reform can enable the introduction of elements of TSE into policy, the strong persistence of market-oriented logics risks leading to a co-optation of sustainability.
Youth face interconnected constraints: unemployment, inequality, limited access to resources and information, and a lack of training. These systemic challenges hinder their effective participation in agri-food systems. This study builds on previous studies, two scoping reviews, and stakeholder consultations, whose outputs were used to develop a Change Theory (CT) for youth inclusion and empowerment in agri-food systems in sub-Saharan Africa. A transformation in four interlinked change domains, namely (a) knowledge, awareness, attitude, and skills, (b) political will, (c) policies and (d) partnerships, is proposed. These change domains are mutually reinforcing and contribute to achieving Sustainable Development Goals 2, 8, 10, 13 and 17. Our proposed CT highlights that youth participation in agri-food systems necessitates a systematic, integrated, and context-specific strategy, fostered by collaboration and coordination among stakeholders across all aspects that affect youth well-being, development, and empowerment. It provides an initial starting point for developing a theory of change or contextualisation to guide the design of interventions, highlighting pathways for addressing challenges within institutional arrangements that affect the implementation, efficiency, and effectiveness of policies on the ground, enabling transformation.
This paper examines Vietnam’s efforts to develop a gender-responsive, low-emission food system, focusing on the gap between policy design and practical implementation. Drawing on stakeholder perspectives, including government agencies, women, men, and youth, the analysis examines the effectiveness and implementation of national policies aimed at promoting women’s leadership, participation, and visibility in climate-smart agriculture. While Vietnam has made progress in mainstreaming gender into its food system strategies, persistent challenges remain. These include limited funding, entrenched social norms, inadequate attention to women’s specific needs, and weak alignment between national and local implementation. As a result, gender disparities in knowledge and participation continue to hinder the effectiveness and equity of climate-smart agriculture policies and projects. The paper highlights the importance of participatory, locally driven approaches to ensure inclusive and effective policy outcomes. Strengthening institutional coordination and investing in gender-sensitive implementation are key to achieving equitable, low-emission food systems in Vietnam.
In regions where local livelihood needs intersect with international conservation priorities, finding ways to safeguard biological diversity while promoting human well-being is essential. Beyond debates on different approaches, the literature highlights critical research gaps regarding governance processes in conservation and development initiatives. This study examines how participation of local actors and inclusion of different knowledges shape decision-making in such initiatives. We introduce a novel analytical lens that combines three complementary frameworks: participation, knowledge sources (local, scientific, and practitioner), and knowledge types (systems, target, and transformation knowledge). By applying this lens to four conservation and development initiatives in Madagascar, we trace how participation and knowledge inclusion evolved over time. Our results show that local participation and the inclusion of diverse knowledge sources generally increased throughout the initiatives’ trajectories. However, participation often remained consultative, creating a risk of extracting local knowledge without granting genuine influence over decisions. The involvement of local actors and the combination of multiple knowledge sources largely depended on deliberate choices by project managers and funders, highlighting both power asymmetries and the agency of those leading these interventions. Analysis through the lens of knowledge types further revealed that insufficient integration of systems, target, and transformation knowledge resulted in significant setbacks in the initiatives’ trajectories, underscoring the importance of intentional knowledge integration in decision-making. Taken together, these findings highlight the central role of knowledge co-production in the design and implementation of conservation and development initiatives. Facilitating iterative co-production processes that explicitly address power relations, engage plural worldviews, and integrate systems, target, and transformation knowledge offers a promising pathway to strengthen the governance of such initiatives. These insights provide practical guidance for informing ongoing and future conservation and development actions.
Degrowth is gaining scholarly attention as a means of transforming affluent societies, by downscaling production and consumption whilst guaranteeing a good life for all within planetary boundaries, through collectively defined self-limitation. However, little empirical research has investigated communication and framing techniques to translate degrowth’s system-level focus into individual consumption decisions and self-limitation practices. There is also little critical reflection on the role of the messenger, that is, how commercial versus non-commercial messengers may effectively promote sufficiency or support the degrowth agenda. In two online experiments and subsequent regression analyses, we explored how framing messages around degrowth versus green growth influenced intentions, values, and behaviors to act more sustainably amongst U.K. millennial respondents (N1 = 969, N2 = 933). In Study 1, comparing the effect of sufficiency-promoting marketing (SPM) messages expressing self-orientation without (green growth) or with (degrowth) limits uncovered little difference in consumption attitudes and behaviors between conditions. SPM appeared ineffective at making degrowth values relevant to individuals or promoting widespread self-limitation, making it incompatible with any degrowth agenda. Study 2 tested whether Degrowth- or Green-Growth-framed communications from a non-commercial messenger affected civic-oriented values and policy support for collective limitations. Green Growth framing garnered higher environmental policy support, whilst Degrowth framing increased the likelihood of choosing degrowth or a-growth positions in the growth-versus-environment debate. These findings suggest degrowth framing inspires values whilst green growth spurs policy support. Further, degrowth messaging focused on system-level problems and solutions based on reductions may disengage individuals from mobilizing for societal change. This research exposes the paradoxical nature of sufficiency-promoting marketing. However, it also reveals potentially counterproductive psychological implications of degrowth messaging that can guide advocates developing communication strategies in non-commercial contexts.
Participatory Forest Management decentralizes forest governance by granting local communities rights and responsibilities to manage forest resources, aiming to reduce degradation and enhance livelihoods. This study explores PFM as an adaptive governance strategy in Gargeda State Forest, western Ethiopia, where Farm Africa initiated 30 Forest User Groups in 2013, of which only 10 remain active. Using a mixed method approach 324 Forest User Groups surveys, Key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and document reviews the research assessed governance performance, socio-economic outcomes, enabling conditions, and barriers. Results reveal high community awareness (85%) and moderate transparency in enforcement (62%), contrasted by low women’s participation (15.6%) and limited satisfaction with benefit sharing (48%). Willingness to engage in conservation training (83%) and patrols (53%) indicates growing collective commitment. Governance evaluations show moderate policy and legal frameworks (60%), but weaknesses in planning (40%) and implementation (40%). Major challenges include reduced NGO support, weak technical capacity, poor coordination, political instability, and tensions between statutory and customary rules. Nonetheless, strong NGO facilitation, community bylaws and youth engagement were key enabling factors identified as enhancing the sustainability of forest resources. However, sustained institutional backing, technical and financial capacity building, and inclusive participation particularly of women and youth are essential for long term success and wider replication across Ethiopia.
Transformation in societal systems such as food systems is required to overcome global crises. An essential part of stewarding desirable transformations is for organizations and initiatives to develop understanding of whether such transformations are occurring, their contributions (both potential and actual) to transformation, and the impacts of transformations already underway, as well as maintaining capacity for agility and adaptation. These are fundamentally issues of evaluation-the process of assigning quality, value or importance to something-that enables learning about transformations. However, the movement towards transformation-focused evaluation is a relatively recent chapter in the evolution of the evaluation field, a major and challenging departure from mainstream evaluation practice, and lacking in case studies of its design and application. Here we provide a rare insight into the collaborative process of designing, and starting to implement and embed, transformation-focused evaluation in the context of a large regional-scale food system transformation initiative, Food for the Future in North Yorkshire. We present the transformation-focused evaluation and learning system designed for the initiative, which shows how core evaluation questions, goals and guides, and different forms of feedback, sense-making and learning could be integrated and reinforce each other within an ecosystem of actors striving to support food system transformation. We discuss the innovations, progress and challenges in the framework and its application, as well as our lessons more broadly for the growing number of organizations and initiatives interested in using transformation-focused evaluation to support large-scale system transformation.
Cottonii seaweed ( Kappaphycus alvarezii) farming is a growing activity in Madagascar, promoted as part of the country’s blue economy strategy for sustainable development. Despite its expansion, few interdisciplinary studies have simultaneously examined its environmental, social, and legal dimensions. In 2024, we conducted an interdisciplinary study in Nosy Boraha, where seaweed aquaculture is rapidly developing. Combining anthropology, marine ecology, and environmental law, the research aimed to assess the effects of seaweed farming on local communities, describe the lagoon’s environmental characteristics and benthic habitats, and analyse the legal framework governing the activity, including national legislation and local customary law (Dina). The results indicate that seaweed farming provides an important supplementary livelihood for residents of Ilampy and nearby villages, particularly as fisheries resources decline. However, farmers reported challenging working conditions and expressed concerns about potential impacts on coral reefs and traditional fishing grounds. Remote sensing analyses using satellite and drone imagery estimated the north reef lagoon at approximately 600 ha. This shallow environment (<5 m) is dominated by sandy substrates and macrophytes, we have identified four seagrass and three macroalgal genera in the seaweed cultivation areas. Coral communities, comprising roughly four genera, are mainly concentrated near the reef crest. The company Nosy Boraha Seaweed operates across about 300 ha of the lagoon, although cultivation plots cover only 8.3% of this area. Nutrient analyses showed uptake of dissolved inorganic nitrogen and phosphates both within farming zones and in control areas without seaweed cultivation. Finally, the local Dina, grounded in the Fihavanana principle of solidarity and reciprocity, plays a central role in marine resource management. It operates alongside formal governance structures led by local fisheries committees and Madagascar’s Environmental and Blue-Economy Ministries.
A rising number of companies have made zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) to decouple deforestation from their supply chains, encapsulated in No Deforestation, No Peat, and No Exploitation (NDPE) commitments. These interventions are designed by powerful downstream supply chain actors, typically without the involvement of the upstream-level non-industrial producers who are affected both directly and indirectly. This study draws on bottom-up perspectives from oil palm smallholders, cooperatives, and other local stakeholders in Indonesia to explore the state of company-community relationships and the implementation and expectations of corporate ZDCs. Through an analysis of 28 focus group discussions and 25 expert interviews in two provinces in Sumatra, Indonesia, our findings reveal significant gaps in procedural equity, highlighting inadequate mechanisms for voicing concerns, insufficient procedures for meaningful participation, and a lack of attention to expected implementation procedures. Most importantly, we uncover the critical need to recognise historical and ongoing relationships between communities and companies when designing corporate sustainability policies. Recognising equity as an evolving concept that ideally should be shaped by contextual realities, our study advocates for the integration of relational aspects and care-based support into ZDCs, complementing the current understanding of equity.
Soybean contract farming is increasingly encouraged for agricultural sustainability and transformation, and improved smallholder welfare in Ethiopia. Despite the contemporary significance and economic advantages of soybeans for farmers, current yields consistently fall short of their potential, and local sources struggle to meet growing demand. This research investigates the institutional and systemic constraints of the soybean contract in Metema, West Armachio, and Quara districts. Previous studies usually use a reductionist approach, investigating isolated factors and thus failing to explore the multifaceted interdependent nature of these farming systems. To address existing knowledge and methodological gaps, this research employs an inclusive, multilevel analytical apprpach within a transaction cost theoretical framework, utilizing a cross-sectional design. A multi-stage sampling procedure is employed to collect data from 369 smallholder farmers, comprising 170 contract farming participants and 199 non-participants. The bivariate Tobit model findings confirm that poor seed quality, lack of enforceability, low contract price, and limited market power are critical systemic constraints of soybean contract farming in the study areas. To address the problems, the responsible bodies should resolve oligopsony market issues by strengthening farmers' multi-purpose cooperatives and employing anti-collusion measures to ensure market fairness. Policymakers must establish a clear legal framework that mandates strict contract enforceability, competitive pricing, and the use of collateral requirements to build farmer trust. Finally, securing good-quality inputs from certified suppliers through a fair contract model is crucial to promote sustainable growth and structural transformation within Ethiopian agriculture.
As resource envelopes to fund research for development activities become tighter, demonstrating value for money is key. This is difficult for various reasons, chief among these being the failure to embed evaluation frameworks in project design. The multiplicity of scaling partners and their interests, and levels of involvement makes it even more complicated to ensure consistent monitoring and evaluation. We demonstrate how to estimate the reach in research for development projects using a population-based computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) survey methodology that is statistically representative at the desired administrative unit level. This approach was applied to the CGIAR Research Initiative - Diversification in East and Southern Africa (Ukama Ustawi) implemented with several scaling partners across 12 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa. The assessment focused on five of the 12 target countries covered in phase one of implementation. The goal of the assessment was to measure the extent of reach and use of agronomic, mechanization, livestock, and nutrition innovations promoted under Ukama Ustawi, and to assess the extent to which the Initiative reached its intended targets. The data comes from 6,445 randomly sampled rural individuals across 27 districts in the five countries. Approximately 1.05 million people were aware of Ukama Ustawi activities, with Kenya and Zambia showing the highest awareness at 16%. Overall, 164,363 people benefited from various innovations promoted by Ukama Ustawi as of September 2024, about 3 years from the beginning of the project. Of these, 135,767 people were direct beneficiaries in areas where specific interventions were implemented. The rest benefited from spillover effects. About 52% of the beneficiaries were female and 56% were youth aged 18-35 years. Innovation use was highest for minimum tillage and post-harvest mechanization in Zimbabwe, followed by agronomic and mechanization options in Malawi. The benefit-reach ratio was highest in Zimbabwe at 61%, followed by Malawi at 31%. This means that Ukama Ustawi activities were most effective at converting reach to beneficiaries in Zimbabwe and Malawi, partly because implementation was layered on past similar interventions. While our results are comparable to more traditional case studies, our survey approach is nearly fourfold cheaper, demonstrating cost-effectiveness and efficiency. We discuss project design and implementation issues necessary to facilitate this kind of evaluation in international development projects.
Understanding why certain values of nature become legitimate and institutionalised while others remain marginal is central to advancing sustainability transformations. This paper develops a conceptual framework that integrates the notions of symbolic power and socially endorsed beliefs to explain how values are formed, emerge, and gain legitimacy. Values are understood not as fixed attributes or individual preferences but as evolving through recursive feedback between personal commitments and socially endorsed beliefs, mediated by everyday practices. Disruptive events and deliberative spaces are seen as key entry points for shifts in the symbolic legitimacy of values, enabling the reconfiguration of moral and institutional orders. An illustrative case of small-scale fisheries governance in Japan demonstrates how symbolic power stabilises existing arrangements yet also conditions the possibilities for transformation.
A growing body of literature has documented the links between extreme ecological shocks and poor mental well-being. Nonetheless, postharvest loss remains an underexplored shock to farmers that has the potential to trigger suicidal ideation. The need to examine the connection between postharvest loss and suicidal ideation in Africa is reinforced by rising farmer suicides and food loss in the region. Applying logistic regression to a cross-sectional survey with smallholder farmers (n = 1033) in Ghana, our findings show a unit increase in postharvest loss is associated with 0.3% higher odds of experiencing suicidal ideation (OR: 1.003, p < 0.001). Consistent with this finding, smallholder farmers who rated their ability to manage food loss as poor were 2.25 times more likely (OR: 2.258, p < 0.001) to report suicidal ideation. Our findings also demonstrate the protective role of familial support, access to credit, and joint decision making in reducing the odds of suicidal ideation. This contribution points to the need to broaden agricultural policy to address the material and psychosocial dimensions of postharvest loss. Following a food loss event, counselling is crucial. Yet, in the Global South, where mental health resources are limited, farmer counselling can be mainstreamed into existing primary healthcare systems while the training of gatekeeper farmers can be leveraged to help provide culturally sensitive peer support in hard-to-reach rural areas. The provision of safety nets in the form of food aid, subsidies, credit, and insurance to farmers will further help address food insecurity and other long-term distress produced by postharvest loss.
Sweden has an abundance of wild bilberries which are collected and distributed by domestic firms. A large part of the collected berries are exported to other countries where compounds such as anthocyanins are extracted and supplied to producers of dietary supplements and cosmetics, rather than refined domestically. This paper aims to identify historical dynamics explaining the lack of a bio-extraction industry in Sweden and discuss potential future pathways using a multi-scalar technological innovation systems framework. Drawing on 21 expert interviews and desktop research, the analysis shows that dynamics at the global level propelled a cycle of innovation that in the 1980s and 1990s established an international bilberry bio-extraction industry. When this industry entered a period of rapid growth in the early 2000s, the increased demand for bilberries was met by the Swedish bilberry industry, which in turn became dependent on international value chains for bilberry extract products. Although this multi-scalar interdependence has historically hindered Swedish efforts to increased value added from the vast domestic bilberry resource, recent developments may create opportunities associated with bio-refining processes that combine bio-extraction with food production. These findings testify to the merits of multi-scalar TIS approaches, bring empirical insight to Swedish stakeholders, and add to the literature on technological innovation and industrial path creation by showing how multi-scalar interactions can give rise to path dependency as well as by highlighting that technological relatedness may serve as both facilitator and obstructor in the emergence of new industries.
Degraded peatlands are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, requiring innovative strategies for their restoration and sustainable use. Paludiculture, or wet agriculture, is an approach to align climate protection with productive land use. However, its adoption requires a deeper understanding of farmers' attitudes and targeted support to facilitate their transition from conventional to more sustainable alternatives. This study investigates pioneer farmers' motivations and barriers to adopting paludiculture in Germany. Using a qualitative approach guided by the Health Belief Model (HBM), we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 German farmers engaged in or transitioning to paludiculture. Farmers perceived multiple threats associated with conventional drainage-based agriculture, including climate change impacts, soil degradation, and economic risks, while acknowledging paludiculture's benefits for reducing emissions, biodiversity conservation, and water management. Farmers saw themselves as confident, innovative, and cooperative-key qualities for adopting paludiculture. Nonetheless, adoption was hindered by economic challenges, bureaucratic hurdles, and limited capacity building. Support programs, networks, and historical legacies were seen as important enablers. Yet, wider adoption will require expanded support programs, strengthened markets for paludiculture products, and adaptive regulatory frameworks. Pioneer farmers' experiences can inspire others, and the leadership of experienced practitioners will be vital for driving broader adoption. Empowering farmers as agents of change and fostering collaboration among stakeholders are essential to unlocking the full potential of paludiculture as a sustainable wetland-use strategy.
In small-scale production systems, a transition to natural farming systems, characterized by minimal soil disturbance, reliance on bio-inputs, crop diversification, and elimination of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, may achieve higher social-ecological sustainability. While indicators of such positive outcomes have been shown when comparing conventional systems to agroecological systems, we know very little of the incremental changes in social-ecological sustainability during a transition. This study investigates a suite of indicators during such transitions among farms in central India. We operationalize a spectrum of farms -conventional farms (chemical input-dependent monocultures), transitional (bio-input adoption with partial synthetic fertilizer use), and agroecological (full bio-input usage, no synthetic inputs for at least two years, multiple agroecological practices). We collected qualitative data on social, economic, and ecological factors via farmer interviews [n = 60]. We analyzed our data using well-being indicators and the five capital assets framework. Our results showed that farms in-transition and established agroecological systems report positive social outcomes, including higher farmer well-being indicators related to community support. Importantly, even farmers in transition had stronger community networks than those using conventional practices. Dietary diversity improved as the transition progresses, with established agroecological farmers tending to have higher diversity of foods across all farmers compared to conventional farmers. Social, physical and natural capital assets were significantly higher for transitional and agroecological farmers, while financial capital assets were the same across all farmers. Our results indicate that farmers who transition from conventional practices to agroecological practices enhance many aspects of livelihood resiliency while maintaining financial assets. We contribute key dynamics in social-ecological outcomes during the process of refining conventional practices into agroecological practices, with implications for informing policy making.
The clean energy transition, while critical for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, poses a threat to regions specialized in fossil fuel extraction. Advocates point to the development of green industries in those places as a solution. However, it is not clear that these industries will emerge in the same regions as fossil fuel extraction. This paper maps the changing geography of U.S. primary energy production by assembling a dataset across the contiguous U.S. between 2004 and 2021, and uses a spatial-quantitative approach to describe how the geography of primary energy production has changed over this period. We find that the primary energy transition involves a shift in both technology and geography, from regionally concentrated fossil fuel production to nationally distributed renewable energy. Less than one third of wind and solar generation in 2021 occurred in areas specialized in fossil fuel extraction. There are few examples of cases where declines in fossil fuels have been offset by growth in wind and solar electricity generation. Our research documents well-known patterns of regional decline, as well as a small number of surprising cases of renewables growth in fossil fuel heavy regions. We discuss the policy implications of these findings for place-based green industrial strategies, and the need for diversified economic development strategies that help regions transition away from fossil fuel extraction.
