Scaling-Up Sustainable Development Initiatives: A Comparative Case Study of Agri-Food System Innovations in Brazil, New York, and Senegal

Abstract

To effectively address the sustainability crises our planet faces, decision-makers at different levels of government worldwide will have to get a handle on three key challenges: learning from Global North and South initiatives in tandem, taking stock of social innovations alongside technological fixes, and nurturing grassroots sustainable development initiatives next to, or in place of, top-down corporate and government interventions. Current scientific literature and grant-making institutions have often reinforced the compartmentalized fashion in which we learn and draw policy lessons from North/South, social/technical, and bottom-up/top-down sustainability initiatives, including local food system innovations. The strategic levers for global sustainable development lying in-between are thus left out. This paper uses exploratory, multiple case study analysis to address this omission. By concurrently drawing lessons from grassroots innovations in Brazil, New York, and Senegal—three profoundly different socioeconomic and geographic contexts—we identify common pressure points that have enabled local communities to drive system-wide transformations toward climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in the agri-food system. The findings of this paper would be of value to scholars, government officials, and community groups engaged in agri-food systems sustainability and interested in the processes of change that have allowed budding innovations to stabilize and scale up.

Agroecological public policies to mitigate climate change: public food procurement for school canteens in the municipality of Ames (Galicia, Spain)

“…The effect of the initial measures shows the potential for environmental (and social) progress that can be achieved when the political will to improve the food situation of school canteen users is strong. Successful experiences like that of Ames, where public policies favor the production and consumption of agroecological food (for instance, the public procurement of food for school canteens has progressively incorporated more seasonal food through the participation of local producers in the design of the menus), allow advancing the scaling out and scaling up of agroecology, and furthering agroecological transition processes (Ilieva and Hernández 2018;Mier y Terán Giménez Cacho et al 2018). Should the transformation of public food procurement for the local school canteens started in Ames be generalized to, for instance, the 120,000 children studying in Galician primary schools, the aggregated GHG emissions reduction effect might reach, under the same conditions considered herein, between 3,900 and 11,700 t of GHG (AT1 and AT2 scenarios).…”

“…However, and despite the increasing number of successful experiences, massification and the scaling of agroecology are still two of the main challenges in that fight (Gliessman 2018). In scientific literature, the debate on agroecological scaling strategies is intense (see, for example, Ilieva and Hernández 2018;Mier y Terán Giménez Cacho et al 2018). Scaling agroecology does not mean identifying the "good practices" of a territory to replicate them somewhere else (Wigboldus et al 2016), but transforming the whole agrifood system at different scales from a political and structural perspective.…”

Mind the Gap: The Potential Transformative Capacity of Social Innovation

“…Other authors look at transformation in ecosystem management using SI as a framework [80,[87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94]. This line of research is consistent with SES and resilience thinking approaches [95], the main argument being the need for fundamental transformation of largely sectoral and expert centred ecosystem management institutions [87].…”

How does Innovation Contribute to a Sustainable Agri-Food Chain? A European Overview

“…Other papers offered comparative studies between countries or regions (Ilieva & Hernandez, 2018); (Vasa, et al, 2018), while some authors depicted the subject of sustainability in agriculture at country or group of countries level (Perez-Mesa, et al, 2019); (Patidar, et al, 2018); (Adhikari and Prapaspongsa, 2019); (Salazar, et al, 2020); (Zollet and Maharjan, 2021). Furthermore, sustainable agri-food systems were investigated at the crop level as follows: honey (Pippinato, et al, 2020); cocoa (Moreno-Miranda, et al, 2019); (Lerner, et al, 2021); Parmigiano Reggiano (Arfini, et al, 2019); legume-based food (Balazs, et al, 2021); wine industry (Pullman, et al, 2010); (Martucci, et al, 2019).…”