Enhancing food security through a multi-stakeholder process: the global agenda for sustainable livestock

Abstract

Feeding the world is not only a complex technical matter, but also a demanding governance issue. As food security has all the characteristics of a wicked problem (variety of problem definitions, conflicting interests, interconnectedness across scales, inherent uncertainties), conventional governance arrangements do not seem to work. New ways of concerted actions are introduced to better link global challenges with local practices. One example of this is the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock: a partnership of public, private, social, and civil society actors, committed to the sustainable development of the livestock sector. It aims to enhance shared understanding of sustainability and its underlying development issues and to build consensus on the path towards sustainable food security through dialogue, consultation, and joint analyses. This article analyses the Agenda as a new type of governance arrangement to enhance food security. It relies on a theoretical framework that consists of five governance capabilities, which are considered crucial for coping with wicked problems: reflexivity, resilience, responsiveness, revitalisation, and rescaling. The aim of this paper is threefold: 1) to assess the Agenda and learn from that; 2) to evaluate the capabilities framework as a tool to assess governance arrangements; and 3) to reflect on the potentials of new governance arrangements to deal with food security. The article illustrates how the governance capabilities framework can be used as a tool to analyse the multi-stakeholder platform for enhancing food security. It concludes that the Agenda successfully encompasses many elements of these capabilities although improvements are possible.

Methodological Challenges in Sustainability Science: A Call for Method Plurality, Procedural Rigor and Longitudinal Research

“…System thinking presents a classic approach to the integration of diverse knowledge, for instance by focusing on resources [44]. In order to realize a transformational agenda, modes of governance of the systems that need sustainability solutions [45][46][47][48] and interaction need to change [49], even going beyond established societal goals and transdisciplinary paradigms [50].…”

Communication on the Science-Policy Interface: An Overview of Conceptual Models

“…As a result, institutional boundaries were transcended to create new innovation environments as well as new inter-organisational and interdisciplinary discourses [2,3,44]. Such networks are shaped by three functions: organized knowledge production (academia), economic wealth creation (industry), and reflexive control (government and politics) [45]. The dynamic of such networks is dependent on the development of communicative competencies that are necessary to establish a mutual understanding between all related actors; in turn, their communication can be intensified by information and communication technologies [46].…”

“…Breeman et al [45] introduced multi-stakeholder deliberation platforms, which are a mechanism to gather diverse stakeholders from the domains of policy-making, science, and society around one problem and to develop common scenarios. Multi-stakeholder platforms at the science-policy interface include new forms of knowledge production in light of complex societal challenges and thereby attempt to conceptualize opportunities for a meaningful inclusion of stakeholders in political decision-making [46,48,49].…”

Assessing the food security outcomes of industrial crop expansion in smallholder settings: insights from cotton production in Northern Ghana and sugarcane production in Central Ethiopia

“…These linkages are very profound in industrial crop systems of Africa (Gasparatos et al 2011(Gasparatos et al , 2015Wiggins et al 2015), suggesting that within such systems food security has all the characteristics of a wicked sustainability problem that cannot be tackled through simple solutions (Breeman et al 2015).…”