Paul Plummer: Fields of vision: Grounding innovation systems for alternative food production within sustainability transitions

Abstract

Innovation is often positioned as a response to the sustainability challenges facing food systems. However, the same sustainability challenges are historically entangled with earlier innovations. This implies a need for scholars and policymakers to think carefully about the developments innovations promote within food systems. Such thinking can be guided by the conceptual and analytical approaches used in sustainability transitions research, a field concerned with the processes through which societies can adopt more sustainable modes of production and consumption. A central framework in this field is innovation systems, which are understood as configurations of actors, networks and institutions that shape the development and diffusion of novel technological and social solutions. In this thesis, the innovation systems approach is used to investigate the development of alternative forms of food production.

Two contrasting examples provide the basis for this investigation. The first is wild berries in Sweden, which grow in natural abundance across forests, bogs and moors. The second is precision fermentation, a technology which harnesses genetically engineered microorganisms to manufacture food ingredients including proteins, fats and flavour molecules. While both represent alternatives to agricultural food production, and are associated with sustainability benefits, they depart from radically different social, technological and ecological conditions. Through a qualitative, multiple case study, alongside conceptual adaptations within sustainability transitions and innovation systems frameworks, the thesis explores how innovation systems are shaping the development of these alternatives in view of different normative and strategic objectives within food systems.

Three focal concepts guide the investigation: directionality, which concerns the developments innovation systems promote; reflexivity, which concerns how actors engage with these developments; and materiality, which concerns non-human factors that shape innovation processes. These concepts are applied in dialogue with one another in an analysis of the wild berry and precision fermentation innovation systems. In the wild berry case, two different development pathways are interpreted, one oriented towards a reconsolidation, and the other towards a reconfiguration of existing production arrangements. The analysis of precision fermentation suggests a more convergent orientation towards the assimilation of this technology within industrial food supply chains. Through its empirical findings and conceptual arguments, the thesis contributes towards thinking about how alternatives within food systems are formed, and how they could be formed otherwise.