“The question of how to involve consumers in transitions, is often left out”

Transforming consumption-production systems toward just and sustainable futures, that was the title of the conference held in Wageningen in early July 2023. Here, different networks came together for the first time. Wageningen University & Research joined forces with the Sustainable Consumption Reasearch and Action Initiative (SCORAI), an international network of social scientists, and with the European Roundtable of Sustainable Production and Consumption (ERSPC). That alone was special, said Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, associate professor of Global Food System Sustainability.

But what was especially important, was the societal perspective. “In the debate about the sustainability challenges facing us in the world, there is a strong belief in the social engineering of the necessary transition. As if we can innovate our way out of it. However, history teaches us that technological innovation often also leads to more consumption.”

Unintended perverse incentives

There were several keynote speakers, including Diederik Samsom, former Dutch political leader and closely involved in the making go the EU Green Deal. He offered the hundreds of scientists present an insight into political decision-making in the EU and, as an alumnus of TU Delft, showed himself to be a techno-optimist: policy should stimulate technological innovation and interventions. By positioning himself this way, he managed to excite the attendees.

“This way of thinking about sustainability transitions is dominant,” noted Wertheim-Heck. “There is a strong emphasis on the production side of sustainability. So: if you replace unsustainable production with sustainable production, you are sustainable. From a social science perspective, however, we see that self-produced sustainable energy, for example, is a perverse incentive for more energy consumption.”

What happens if everyone has solar panels? The result may well be that during a hot summer consumers are more likely to buy an air conditioner, because the energy they generate is free. “In the food domain, where I am mainly active, you see the same obstinacy,” says Wertheim-Heck. “The consumption of meat substitutes is increasing, but the consumption of meat is hardly decreasing. Sustainability assignments are often thought in terms of directions: we have to go from a to b. The question of how to include the society in the transition is often left aside. However, that is the challenge. During the conference, this was emphatically addressed during various sessions.”

Ineffective transitional policies

One session at the conference focused on replacing meat in current and future food practices. “Protein transition is a 'western' construct that is partly promoted through replacing a piece of meat lying in the cellophane in the supermarket with a non-meat product similar to it,” explains Wertheim-Heck. “But in Asia, people buy a chicken alive at the market and eat all of it. There, you need different ideas there to make the transition to more plant-based proteins.” This starts with a genuine interest in routine consumption patterns, which are often culturally determined. It is essential for a sustainable future to create a 'new normal'.

Sigrid has worked in Vietnam, where food safety is an important issue. There she saw how policy interventions can miss the mark if no proper analysis is made of why people behave the way they do. “The government wanted people to stop buying their food on the streets and go to the supermarket instead, where the food products are safer. But there are important reasons why Vietnamese do buy their food on the street. They often know the street vendor personally and can quietly leave their child or their elderly father with them to do an errand somewhere else themselves.”

Even though more supermarkets were built, they had trouble selling their products. As a result of closing markets and reducing street sales, people found other ways to informally make contact. Increasingly, food is was sold online through social networks, outside the sphere of influence of policymakers. “When policy does not have a feel for everyday behaviour patterns, there is a high risk that policy will be ineffective. This local government gained less rather than more control over food safety.”

Social differences and injustice

Wertheim-Heck endorses the objective of the European farm-2-fork strategy, where produce is farmed locally and delivered more directly to customers. At the same time, she looks to social dynamics around the strategy. “Take the affordability of fresh vegetables, for example. For that, we are now dependent on people from North Africa who harvest those vegetables for us in deplorable conditions. So should we take that for granted?”

“Or take the idea that Europe should move towards more local food production. That transformation is unfolding differently in the Netherlands than in, for instance, Eastern Europe. The Netherlands is increasingly pushing for local food supply, the situation is totally different in Eastern Europe. There, 65 to 80 per cent of local fruit and vegetable production comes from kitchen gardens. Should those countries then make the switch according to one and the same model?”

This was the topic of discussion at the policy session on transitions in Ukraine's food system. “Ukraine's paradox is: how is it that the country is known as the granary of the world while locals depend on informal kitchen garden production and imports for daily fruits and vegetables?”

Question how we consume as a society

According to Sigrid, it is important not only to focus on how we produce, but also to pay attention to what we really need in the future and how we distribute it equitably. “Although ecological preconditions are clear and new governance models around soil and water are promising, social issues remain complex. When we focus on quick fixes and ignore the pluralistic social reality, we risk missing the mark, creating too much resistance or not paying enough attention to various possibilities for change.”

“I miss a discussion on how we consume in our society and whether we should consider this abundance normal. When I was a student, there wasn't even a kiosk at the railway station. Now every shop that goes bankrupt becomes an eatery. When we meet up with someone, we do it in places like that.

Transitioning from what is normal today to what should be normal in the future is not something a society does overnight. It is a long-term process. “The trick is to understand how to accelerate, while also monitoring where we encounter direct resistance and why that resistance is there. As sociologists, we need to be involved in this process. The food system as we have designed it is primarily a social issue: how do we create a culturally appropriate and equitable food system and how does this relate to the three big issues of our time: biodiversity loss, climate change and natural resource depletion?”

The future puzzle of transitional change

“We have to keep asking ourselves: which pieces of the puzzle do we have, how do they relate to each other and which are still missing? We need solid and diverse-oriented research and an open dialogue for diverse perspectives,” emphasizes Wertheim-Heck. “Normative views need to be respected, because they have a basis somewhere. It demands genuine interest to want to understand another, but let's stay away from dogmatic ideologies.”

The question remains of whether we should continue to follow the path of technological optimism. “As I said, it has only led to more consumption. How long we can continue down this path and how fair it is to those who cannot catch up? In Malaysia, there are already people who never go outside. They sit in their air-conditioned flat, go to their air-conditioned office by car and take vitamin D to compensate for the lack of sunlight—in the sunniest country in the world.”

In the Dutch food system too, policy makers continue to choose technological solutions, says Wertheim-Heck. “As sociologists, we should not only continue to ask critical questions about this, but also offer directions for solutions. The social sciences are needed to map social dynamics and question prevailing norms.”