Paradigms of sustainability
This essay is part of a series that explores the intersections of sustainability, food innovation and food culture. The series grew in part from an internal discussion on what our research group name—the Sustainable Food Innovation Group—might mean to different people, and different food futures the name might conjure up. In Part I, we examine some of the various and often conflicting framings that are mobilised under the same banner of sustainability. In later essays we will explore how the differences between sustainability paradigms might be reconciled and how innovation might be guided towards our preferred futures using a tool called the Three Horizons Framework; our approach to innovation and how food cultural research can guide us to do better food innovation; and how food innovation and agroecology can support each other. We hope that this series can contribute to more nuanced and fruitful discussions on what sustainable food innovation can be, and what it can hope to achieve.
Table of Contents
People have long imagined what the future of food might look like.¹ When future historians look back on some of the dominant ideas of today, might they be looked on as quaintly as we today view the Retrofuturist ideas of the 1960s & 70s?
Throughout its history, the term ‘sustainability’ has been used in a great many ways. Today, there are multiple, often competing interpretations, all mobilised under its banner. The term has been described as one of the most ‘ubiquitous, contested and indispensable concepts of our time… though the term suffers from clichéd use… turning it into a fuzzy, empty and imprecise shell for a wide public’.² Because of this fate, it has been argued that one ‘can’t use the term sustainability in a general setting and be confident of being understood’.³
Different interpretations of sustainability involve different value systems, which in turn envision different food futures and prioritise—and exclude—different types of food innovation to get there. Awareness of this values-based selectivity can help us think more critically about who stands to win or lose in each of those futures, and what some of the consequences of each, intended or not, might be.
In this essay, we describe some of the dominant paradigms of sustainability that we’ve come across, before reflecting on how their different values influence the types of futures—and innovations that would get us there—they permit or don’t.⁴ Some of these paradigms are incompatible with each other (e.g. incrementalism vs absolute sustainability) but others are not (e.g. absolute sustainability and degrowth). Furthermore, some of the paradigms are about more than ‘just’ sustainability, as will become clear. Still, we felt assured in including them here in that they are all concerned with ensuring the persistence, if not flourishing, of humanity and ecology and illustrate the breadth of ways that have been put forward to achieve that aim.
i. Incremental sustainability
We begin with what real sustainability probably isn’t.
Sustainability has warped into a myriad of incremental approaches that lack a long-term vision for system transformation. They are often global and top-down rather than place-based and context-specific, and about simply about doing less harm, rather than changing the harm’s source. They pay lip service to real change. Many decry this paradigm as a co-option, that ‘undermine[s] actual sustainability by creating an illusion of meaningful change’, leading some to reject the term ‘sustainability’ outright.⁵
Corporate conceptions of the term, like Environmental Social Governance (ESG), epitomise this paradigm. Here, sustainability is largely permitted only to the extent that shareholder returns can be maximised in the short-term, or as a tool for attracting and retaining investors, or for managing risks by adhering to existing (and insufficient) certification and reporting standards. It is built on the assumption that the ecological crisis can be solved with ‘green growth’ by tweaking or optimising the current extractive system in lieu of more radical system change. If the impacts of products or businesses are quantified, they are typically presented as ‘X% less impact’, against a reductionist set of metrics, without any wider context to evaluate how ‘good’ that is—so-called ‘relative sustainability.’
Baseless claims along these lines about the sustainability of businesses and their products and services have led to greenwashing.⁶ Research by the World Benchmarking Alliance reveals the gulf between rhetoric and action. By 2023, just 13 of the 350 largest food and agriculture companies had set a science-based target for climate change, whilst over 165 of those largest agri-food companies have yet to disclose even any commitments in this area, let alone start operationalising them.⁷
Meanwhile, as climate change scientist Professor Kevin Anderson witheringly affirms: ‘the climate does not respond to good intentions, Machiavellian policies, eloquent arguments, legal niceties, promises of tech tomorrow or accountancy scams… all are trumped by the brutal beauty of physics.’ Of course, as important as climate change is, ‘sustainability’ is about even more than that. Though Anderson isn’t discussing that here, this same sentiment could apply just as easily to ecology, human flourishing, and countless other dimensions of sustainability in one way or another.
ii. Absolute sustainability
The Planetary Boundaries framework attempts to quantify the Safe Operating Space (SOS) for humanity for Earth’s natural systems.⁸ As of 2023, six of the nine Planetary Boundaries have been crossed—biosphere integrity (genetic and functional), climate change (CO₂ concentration and radiative forcing), novel entities, biogeochemical flows (P and N), freshwater change (Green and Blue), and land system change. Only three remain within the SOS—stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and ocean acidification, although the latter is thought close to being exceeded.⁹
Figure 2: The Planetary Boundary Framework
Absolute sustainability attempts to allocate portions of the SOS to individual humans (downscaling) before upscaling that allocation to different products, sectors or industries, including the food system and its nebulous constituent parts.¹⁰ The result, proponents argue, is an objective, binary determination: if a product or industry uses less than or equal to its allocated portion of the overall SOS, it is sustainable, whereas if it exceeds its allocated portion, it is unsustainable. Various methods for fairly and justly allocating the overall SOS at different scales have been explored. Each has tradeoffs, and selecting an allocation method is always value-laden and not something that can be answered by purely technical means. For example, the extent to which industrialised countries should bear a greater burden for reducing their impact (i.e. be allocated less of the SOS) since they have greater liability for the ecological crisis is an ethical judgement. Important work has been undertaken recently to develop allocation methods that are more equitable and just.¹¹ Ultimately, absolute sustainability is only a framework for assessing the SOS of Earth’s natural systems and for assessing options to remain within it—it doesn’t tell us how to get there, nor does it assess human socio-economic conditions. Some related frameworks that build upon this paradigm include Doughnut Economics, ArkH3’s ‘Sustainability-As-The-World-Needs’, and Degrowth (see section v.).
iii. Ecomodernism
Ecomodernism posits that the ecological crisis is a purely technical problem that can be solved by intensifying food production, and ultimately decoupling it from land, energy, and resource use.¹² Its proponents argue that minimising the land footprint of food production and other human activities would allow us to spare land for ecosystem restoration to ‘make room for nature’.¹³
There is a range of opinions on how this should happen. Some Ecomodernists advocate for increasing crop yields through the precision application of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, using GMO crop varieties, increasing mechanisation and technologisation of agriculture, and intensifying meat production and aquaculture.¹⁴ Others go further, arguing that technologies such as cellular agriculture, lab-grown meat, vertical farming and insect cultivation should largely replace conventional agriculture in the longer term.¹⁵ This is the dominant, Silicon Valley, venture capitalist mode of innovation and is what a lot of people think about when they hear the words ‘food innovation’.
This narrative is built on the idea of ‘progress’, modernisation, and increasing human living standards globally by ‘liberating people from the drudgery of agricultural work’ through technological innovation and economic growth, using ‘humanity’s extraordinary powers in service of creating a good Anthropocene.’¹⁶ It is also based on a Dualist conception of nature, in which humans and nature are considered ontologically separate.¹⁷
Many open questions remain including whether agricultural intensification would result in ecosystem restoration on spared land; what the energy requirements of technologies are and where this energy would come from; what the unintended consequences of these technologies might be; whether this model reduces or exacerbates existing power dynamics, injustice and inequality; and what novel food cultures an Ecomodernist paradigm would give birth to.¹⁸
iv. Regeneration
Regeneration is another highly contested paradigm.¹⁹ Regenerative agriculture—the way of producing food that would underpin any regenerative food system—is a term that increasingly suffers from the same problem as ‘sustainability’ in that you ‘can’t use it… in a general setting and be confident of being understood.’ There is surprisingly little consensus over exactly what is meant by regeneration and what that food future might look like.²⁰
We’ve encountered two broad conceptions of ‘regeneration’ in a food system context, with quite different value systems. The first argues for a deeper, more radical transformation of the food system that requires the dismantling of existing power structures, with equity, justice and decolonialism at its heart. In this vision, agroecosystems are complex living systems situated in their specific context, and humans are viewed as part of those systems, acting as keystone species and stewards of the land.²¹ To some, regeneration is a mindset shift and personal internal transformation with ethical, philosophical, and sometimes spiritual components that can follow the leadership of indigenous peoples.²² This conception of regenerative agriculture shares much in common with ‘agroecology’, a closely related approach to agriculture with roots in agrarian grassroots political and food sovereignty movements.
A second conception of regenerative agriculture appears to be more shallow and ‘apolitical’, which is to say its politics are about supporting the status quo. For its proponents, regenerative agriculture is something that can be added on top of the current food system, by changing practices like reducing tillage or replacing synthetic fertilisers with green manures or organic fertilisers, but without the need for changing the system itself. It assumes that the role of agri-food businesses will and should remain largely the same, and that consumers should continue to be able to buy all their favourite products (but now regenerative!) which will drive ‘green growth’. Proponents of the first conception of regeneration and agroecology often deem this second one as co-option or a form of ‘regen-washing’.²³ Note the parallels with incrementalist sustainability.
The contested nature of the regeneration paradigm leaves many open questions, including what should count as regeneration or not and who gets to decide; which food system actors should be involved to what extent and what is their role; and how can an actor ‘prove’ that their actions are regenerating land, amongst many others.
v. Degrowth
Degrowth is an emerging, contested and oft-misunderstood paradigm that rejects the idea that sustainability can be achieved at all in a growth-oriented economy. It argues that GDP is a poor measure of the success of society as ‘it's not aggregate production that matters but rather what we are producing, whether people have access to the essential goods they need and how income is distributed.’²⁴
Proponents of degrowth advocate for an overall reduction in production and consumption to move into the SOS for humanity per the Planetary Boundaries Framework (as identified in the section on Absolute Sustainability) whilst maintaining equitable human and ecological flourishing. It is based on three primary values²⁵:
Equality and justice, through more equitable access to resources.
Sufficiency, based on the understanding that a good life filled with prosperity and well-being is not determined by or conditional on material consumption.
Economic democracy, which argues for a more democratic and participatory model for the economy, to democratically determine how wellbeing should be prioritised, what the finite budget of the SOS should be allocated to or ‘spent on’, and which less necessary sectors and industries should be scaled down.
There is an emerging body of literature that explores how the food system could look within a degrowth paradigm, with many conceptions built upon ideas of regenerative agroecological agriculture described in the previous section.²⁶
Open questions include: how would economic democracy work in practice, and how can it be ensured that it achieves a food system aligned with degrowth; how do we avoid unintended consequences; how can we overcome the growth imperative; and if it is utopian and/or unrealistic.
vi. How might conflicts between these paradigms be resolved?
This article is the first part in an ongoing series exploring the intersection between sustainability, food innovation and food culture. We examined some of the conflicting framings that are mobilised under the banner of sustainability: incremental sustainability, absolute sustainability, ecomodernism, regeneration, and degrowth. Taken together, these differences might seem irreconcilable. We propose they need not be. In part II, we explore one way to reconcile some of these differences using the Three Horizons Framework.
Contributions & acknowledgements
Eliot and Josh conceived this essay together. Eliot wrote the first draft, Josh provided editorial input, and they developed it further together.
Header image credit: Roy Scarfo, (1965). ‘Subsurface Lunar Colony’.
Planetary Boundaries Framework image credit: Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Related posts
Endnotes
[1] Warren Belasco (2006), Meals to come: a history of the future of food, University of California Press, Berkeley, USA. An illuminating book that explores humanity’s ‘deep-seated anxiety about the future of food’, which has a much more storied history that many might imagine.
[2] Tobias Luthe and Michael von Kutzschenbach (2016), ‘Building Common Ground in Mental Models of Sustainability’, Sustainability and Climate.
[3] Why it's not sustainability vs. regeneration - Bill Baue & Daniel Wahl in dialogue
[4] This list is necessarily incomplete and intentionally not MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive). Rather than aiming for it to be a comprehensive overview of every paradigm of sustainability ever conceived, we simply hope to summarise some of the most dominant paradigms that seem pertinent to us and our work. For a more complete terminological history, see: Ben Purvis, Yong Mao, Darren Robinson (2019), ‘Three pillars of sustainability: in search of conceptual origins’, Sustainability Science; Jeremy Caradonna (2014), ‘Sustainability: a History’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
[5] Leah Gibbons (2020), ‘Regenerative—The New Sustainable?’, Sustainability.
[6] John Willis et al. (2023), ‘The Greenwashing Hydra’, Planet Tracker.
[7] World Benchmarking Alliance (2023), 2023 Food and Agriculture Benchmark, World Benchmarking Alliance. A science-based target for climate change is defined as setting a target to reduce company GHG emissions (scopes 1, 2 and 3 per the GHG Protocol) to a level aligned with 1.5℃. See here for more.
[8] Catherine Richardson et al. (2023), ‘Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries’, Science.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Anjila Wegge Hjalstad et al. (2020), ‘Sharing the safe operating space: Exploring ethical allocation principles to operationalize the planetary boundaries and assess absolute sustainability at individual and industrial sector levels’, Journal of Industrial Ecology; Yan Li, Ajishnu Roy and Xuhui Dong (2022), ‘An Equality-Based Approach to Analysing the Global Food System’s Fair Share, Overshoot, and Responsibility for Exceeding the Climate Change Planetary Boundary’, Foods.
[11] Johan Rockström et al. (2023), ‘Safe and just Earth system boundaries’, Nature; Joyeeta Gupta et al. (2023), ‘Earth system justice needed to identify and live within Earth system boundaries’, Nature; Anjila Wegge Hjalsted et al. (2020), ‘Sharing the safe operating space: exploring ethical allocation principles to operationalise the planetary boundaries and assess absolute sustainability at individual and industrial sector levels’, Journal of Industrial Ecology
[12] Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (2015), ‘Nature Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation’, The Breakthrough Institute.
[13] John Asafu-Adjaye et al (2015), ‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’, The Breakthrough Institute.
[14] Helen Breewood and Tara Garnett (2022), ‘What is ecomodernism?’, Table Debates. This is a brilliant primer on the topic that we encourage people to read. This former conception of this paradigm shares much with sustainable intensification, another related and disputed concept that seeks to increase agricultural production whilst minimising its impacts and land footprint.
[15] George Monbiot (2022), ‘Regenesis: Feeding the world without devouring the planet’, Penguin: London, UK.
[16] John Asafu-Adjaye et al (2015), ‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’, The Breakthrough Institute; Helen Breewood and Tara Garnett (2022), ‘What is ecomodernism?’, Table Debates.
[17] Kristin Hällmark (2023), ‘Politicization after the ‘end of nature’: The prospect of ecomodernism’, European Journal of Social Theory.
[18] Chris Smaje wrote ‘Saying No to a Farm Free Future’ in response to George Monbiots ‘Regenesis’, in which he debunked many of the latter’s Ecomodernist claims. This essay, ‘George and the Food System Dragon’ by Jim Thomas, summarises the debate well.
[19] Some readers might baulk at our framing of regeneration as a sustainability paradigm, since it is common to frame regeneration as a more ‘evolved’ and mutually exclusive successor to sustainability. We think this rejection of ‘sustainability’ is mostly of incrementalist sustainability specifically, as some more rigorous paradigms of sustainability have much more in common with regeneration than things that divide them. One way of reconciling the two concepts that we quite like is a relational framework of ‘authentic’ sustainability and regeneration. In this discussion Bill Baue argues that sustainability and regeneration are related and interdependent terms and that it is ‘not particularly useful to compare them in a hierarchical format.’ He continues that ‘regeneration is an ongoing process, whereas sustainability is an outcome… can that regeneration sustain itself… with resilience?’ In other words, regeneration is how we can improve the degraded status quo, and authentic sustainability is how we can keep it.
[20] Peter Newton et al (2020), ‘What Is Regenerative Agriculture? A Review of Scholar and Practitioner Definitions Based on Processes and Outcomes’, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems; Joe Fassler (2021) ‘Regenerative agriculture needs a reckoning’, The Counter. The Newton et al. (2020). study revealed huge variance in the way the term is defined and used in academic journal papers and on practitioner websites, with some describing regenerative agriculture as a set of practices (none of which were mentioned by >50% of participants), others as a cluster of outcomes (only soil health and carbon sequestration were mentioned by >50% of participants), and still others as a combination of the two. Of the academic journal papers (‘a’) and practitioner websites (‘p’) reviewed, some described regenerative agriculture as a set of practices, like minimising tillage (a=11.6%, p=40.9%), using cover crops (a=8.3%, p=36.4%), reducing or eliminating external inputs (a=26.4%, p=31.8%) and integrating livestock (a=19.0%, p=40.9%). Others described regeneration as a cluster of outcomes, like improving soil health (a=40.5%, p=86.4%), increasing biodiversity (a=21.5%, p=45.5%) and sequestering carbon (a=17.4%, p=63.6%). Still others used a combination of both practices and outcomes.
[21] Ethan Soloviev (2021), ‘Paradigms of agriculture’, Self-published.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Beatrice Walthall et al. (2024), ‘Complementing or co-opting? Applying an integrative framework to assess the transformative capacity of approaches that make use of the term agroecology’, Environmental Science and Policy.
[24] Timothée Parrique (2023), Twitter thread on ‘The impossibility of green growth and the necessity of degrowth’; Jason Hickel, addressing Dutch Parliament
[25] Jason Hickel (2020), ‘Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World’, Penguin, London, UK.
[26] Leonie Guerrero Lara et al. (2023), ‘Degrowth and agri-food systems: a research agenda for the critical social sciences’, Sustainability Science; Julien-François Gerber (2020), ‘Degrowth and critical agrarian studies’, The Journal of Peasant Studies; Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards (2021), ‘Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices’, Routledge Environmental Humanities.