Sustainability

The Sustainability module will develop and apply a new sustainability assessment approach to the two case study supply chains of the Deliberative Diets project (cocoa/chocolate from Ecuador and olives/almonds from Spain). The module aims to build strong arguments for the involvement of diverse stakeholders to frame what sustainability is and how it should be assessed in practice. It is led by the sustainability assessment group of the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) Switzerland, where we have been conducting such research in various contexts for many years. We aim to use innovative research methods to identify criteria and indicators and to apply these to transformative visions of how these supply chains to understand how they compare to the status quo. The alternative visions will be developed in collaboration with the Transformations module of the project. We also aim to include the multiple specific values local people hold for agroecosystems and their services, which are being studied in the Valuation module of the project. A short background on sustainability assessment is provided below, to give context to the work. 

Sustainability is a loaded term and means different things to different groups of people. Concerns about sustainability in the 1970’s originally surrounded the impact of a growth-based economy on the ecological life support systems and natural resources of a finite planet. Those concerns about environmental “limits to growth” proved highly prescient, and foresaw quite accurately how society would lurch into the multiple, existential and interrelated crises we find ourselves facing today (i.e. climate breakdown, mass extinction of biodiversity, severe water scarcity etc.). This environmental argument for sustainability evolved into a debate about the “social limits to growth” and whether a capitalist market economy that prioritizes consumption above all else, erasing the distinction between superfluous wants and basic needs, can ever deliver human wellbeing or “flourishing” to those that lacking key elements of a good life, such as material sustenance, fair remuneration for work, peaceful coexistence, self-determination, justice, identity and belonging. These social goals are much more subjective, and how they are met varies enormously across societies and cultures. In addition, meeting such goals requires consideration of the means available to society as a whole, which is a question of economic organization. The concept of economic sustainability is perhaps least well understood, because there is very little consensus among economists on what a sustainable economy should actually look like. Can it be growth based, whether green or otherwise? Can it even function without growth? Is it democratically organized, centrally planned or determined purely by market forces? Is inequality a necessary evil to promote innovation or a waste of scarce resources? Inequality of what and between whom? 

As a result of this wide scope, there is no commonly agreed method to assess sustainability in practice, whether at the level of a product, cropping system, farm or value chain. At a minimum, the environment must feature, but how the social and economic “dimensions” are dealt with is open to considerable interpretation. The term “sustainability assessment” can thus be understood as a big tent of related methods (i.e. a methodology) that is part of a participatory decision-making process that aims to improve all three dimensions (environmental, social and economic), or at least managing trade-offs across these dimensions as they appear. This typically involves consideration of multiple criteria within each dimension, the development of key indicators, and applying some kind of procedural rules to aggregate the results into a coherent and defensible decision to act (e.g. choose an alternative production method, implement a public policy, halt or change a regional development path etc.). For the more subjective (social and economic) aspects, and indeed to prioritize what people value most about their food systems, different stakeholders should be involved somehow in this process. At a minimum, the views of those most affected by a decision should be included. But participation also brings new forms of knowledge born out of practice (e.g. a farmer known much more about how a new technique will change their workload than a researcher juggling numbers) or collected through experience (e.g. localized knowledge of how the soil reacts to new management, or of flora and fauna found on the farm or of how likely it is that a promised benefit will actually materialize). Researchers can thus gain a huge amount of information by listening to the people they work with, and by considering them as collaborators rather than merely objects of research. However, the level of participation by stakeholders in sustainability assessments to date ranges from very little (so-called “top down” approaches that aim for standardization and comparability) to very much (so-called “bottom up” approaches that aim for flexibility and local context). The field is also evolving rapidly. In the Sustainability module of the project, we hope to build on all of these points to generate an approach that is truly new, inclusive and meaningful for catalysing real-world change.