Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST)

Permanent URI for this community

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/126537
This department was formerly known as Centre for Complex Systems in Transition

Browse

Browsing Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) by Author "Drimie, Scott"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Food system transformation : integrating a political–economy and social–ecological approach to regime shifts
    (2020-02) Pereira, Laura M.; Drimie, Scott; Maciejewski, Kristine; Tonissen, Patrick Bon; Biggs, Reinette, 1979-
    Sustainably achieving the goal of global food security is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The current food system is failing to meet the needs of people, and at the same time, is having far-reaching impacts on the environment and undermining human well-being in other important ways. It is increasingly apparent that a deep transformation in the way we produce and consume food is needed in order to ensure a more just and sustainable future. This paper uses the concept of regime shifts to understand key drivers and innovations underlying past disruptions in the food system and to explore how they may help us think about desirable future changes and how we might leverage them. We combine two perspectives on regime shifts—one derived from natural sciences and the other from social sciences—to propose an interpretation of food regimes that draws on innovation theory. We use this conceptualization to discuss three examples of innovations that we argue helped enable critical regime shifts in the global food system in the past: the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen fixation, the rise of the supermarket, and the call for more transparency in the food system to reconnect consumers with their food. This paper concludes with an exploration of why this combination of conceptual understandings is important across the Global North/ Global South divide, and proposes a new sustainability regime where transformative change is spearheaded by a variety of social–ecological innovations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Planning for change : transformation labs for an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa
    (BioMed Central, 2020-11-17) Pereira, Laura; Drimie, Scott; Zgambo, Olive; Biggs, Reinette, 1979-
    There has been a call for more participatory processes to feed into urban planning formore resilient food systems. This paper describes a process of knowledge co-production for transforming towards an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa. A ‘transformative space’ was created though a T-Lab process involving change-agents advocating for an alternative food system, and was designed to discuss challenges in the local food system from a range of perspectives, in order to co-develop potentially transformative innovations that could feed into government planning. In this paper, we describe and reflect on the T-lab in order to consider whether its design was able to meet its objective: to initiate an experimental phase of coalition-building by diverse actors that could feed into the provincial government’s strategic focus on food and nutrition security. Our findings indicate that T-labs have the potential to be important mechanisms for initiating and sustaining transformative change. They can be complementary to urban planning processes seeking to transform complex social-ecological systems onto more sustainable development pathways. However, as with all experimental co-production processes, there is significant learning and refinement that is necessary to ensure the process can reach its full potential. A key challenge we encountered was how to foster diversity and difference in opinions in the context of significant historical legacies of inequality, whilst simultaneously acting for ‘the common good’ and seeking ways to scale impact across different contexts. The paper concludes with deliberations on the nature of planning and navigating towards systemic transformative change.