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Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons and care. This redesign should be supported by coordinated education and research efforts that do not simply replicate dominant discourses on food system sustainability but point towards a post-growth world in which agroecological life processes support healthy communities rather than serving as inputs for the relentless pursuit of economic growth.

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2019. New pathways for governing food system transformations: a pluralistic practice-based futures approach using visioning, back-casting, and serious gaming. Ecology and Society 24(4):2. https://doi.ABSTRACT. The global environmental change that characterizes the Anthropocene poses a threat to food systems. Cities increasingly serve as the spaces where civil society, private actors, and local governments come together to strategize toward more sustainable food futures and experiment with new forms of food governance. However, much of the futures literature in the context of sustainability focuses on large-scale, global scenarios. These are important pieces of knowledge, but they often do not effect a change in local perspectives and practices. In this paper we respond to the need for novel futures approaches to help urban coalitions of societal actors create pathways to sustainability transformations. We investigate how existing examples of good practices, or "seeds," can be used to open up novel, desirable, bottom-up futures in the case study of Kyoto (Japan). Innovative combinations of methodologies (visioning, back-casting, simulation games) are used and assessed in order to create multiple ways of experimenting and engaging with food system futures. Our results consist of a pluriform pathway to a sustainable Kyoto food system. Each method brings in its unique pathway elements: visioning to formulate a desired end goal, back-casting to create a step-by-step action plan, and gaming to practice with the future. The combination of Kyoto-based "seeds" with initiatives from elsewhere and with a new food system governance model (a food policy council) resulted in participants learning about new food system practices, extending their networks, and support for actualizing a food policy council. We conclude that multimethod futures processes that combine existing practices and new modes of governance are a promising new way to outline various pathways for sustainability transformations.Ecology and Society 24(4): 2 https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss4/art2/ reasons for the success of specific alternatives as inspiration, combining them to generate holistic alternative futures rooted in the present (Bennett et al. 2016).

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Upland Japan suffers from extreme depopulation, aging, and loss of agricultural, economic, and social viability. In addition, the absence of a successor generation in many marginalized hamlets endangers the continuation of local knowledge associated with upland agricultural livelihoods and severely limits the prospects of rural revitalization and development. Resettlement by incomer organic farmers represents an opportunity to both pass on valuable local knowledge and rejuvenate local society. Survey and interview data are used to explore the knowledge dynamics at play in upland Japan between local and incomer organic farmers. Using a ''knowledge culture'' framework, socio-cultural and symbolic barriers and spatial conditions limiting local knowledge exchange are identified and analyzed. Despite a number of reasons to suggest affinity and natural alignment toward knowledge sharing, each group's ideas of ''legitimate knowledge'' and acceptable behavior have contested the field of communication and confused the negotiation process. Building on previous studies of farmer's knowledge networks, examples in this study suggest that negotiation between knowledge cultures can be facilitated by both active means and intrinsic factors, and be derailed because of physical and temporal symbolic references. The degree to which locals and incomers collaborate and identify with each other as stakeholders with a common future may determine the extent to which local knowledge, especially local knowledge from past agricultural regimes, can play a role within upland endogenous development.

The negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have further exposed and exacerbated the structural weaknesses and inequalities embedded in the global industrial agri-food system. While the mainstream narrative continues to emphasise the importance of ensuring the uninterrupted functioning of global supply chains to counter COVID-related disruptions, the pandemic has also highlighted the resilience of small-scale, sustainable family farming and of spatially and socially embedded food systems. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of three surveys, this study examines organic and agroecological farmers’ responses to the first COVID-related lockdown (March–May 2020) in Italy, as well as the responses of grassroots alternative food networks (AFN) in the city region of Rome. The results show how local grassroots action played a significant role in ensuring food access, provisioning, and distribution, often in the face of delayed or insufficient action of mainstream food system actors and institutions. These grassroots responses identify opportunities and barriers for agri-food system transformation away from neoliberal, market-based interventions and towards policies that support food sovereignty and democracy in the context of localised, agroecology-based and more resilient agri-food systems.

Can shrinking cities harness population decline to improve their sustainability by repurposing land use, for example, for localizing food production? Whether such a transition is feasible depends on the pre-shrinkage state of urban agricultural land use, including ongoing trends in local land use change. This study examined agricultural land use from 2007-2017 in Kyoto City, Japan. Kyoto is on the brink of a large projected population decline (~190,000 or~13% until 2040) and serves as a representative for a large number of regional Japanese cities in a similar situation. Analysis was based on a public 2007 land use data set, aerial and satellite imagery and ground truthing. Results showed a decline of 209 ha or 10% in agricultural land use over ten years, but also highlight the diversity of ongoing agricultural land use types not captured by standard categories. The main post-agricultural land uses were residential (40%) and vacant land (28%). These results have implications for planning and policy. Kyoto City is currently not set to benefit from the projected shrinking process through localizing food production, despite a tradition of vegetable production. Future research should analyze drivers of change for observed agricultural land use.