2) and transition pathways, i.e., “patterns of changes in socio-technical systems unfolding over time that lead to new ways of achieving specific societal functions” (Turnheim et al. 724) scenarios, i.e., explorations of “how the future may unfold … from a defined initial situation” (Mitter et al. Visions are part of a broader set of directionality-providing futuring and foresight outputs that include future images, i.e., “iconic symbols that mediate the exchange of values, ideas and information” (Beers et al. Visions play a crucial role in changing the dynamics and outcomes of large, complex systems because they portray a desirable future state for a system that is currently not meeting societal needs or staying within ecological boundaries (Fig. Such a vision can guide transformations, including the necessary agronomic innovation, setting a distant but desirable and achievable goal (Ostrom 2009 Wiek and Iwaniec 2014). Changing the rules, structures, and incentives that currently lead to the unsustainable outcomes outlined above requires a broadly shared understanding, or vision, of what needs to be different in the future (Caron et al. In the EU alone, there were 9.8 million farm owners in 2016 (European Commission 2020). Transforming such a large complex system also needs to be a collective effort, especially because of the economic interests of the large number of actors involved.
A transformation of the ways in which we produce, process, trade, and consume food is therefore urgently needed (Gaitán-Cremaschi et al. Furthermore, agri-food systems are locked into logics and processes like an overemphasis on cost-price reduction that contribute to these unsustainable outcomes, and because of this lock-ins are resistant to change (Oliver et al. They threaten to push ecological systems beyond safe boundaries and undermine their future productive potential through strains on soils, water, air, and functional biodiversity (InterAcademy Partnership 2018 Springmann et al. There is a great need and urgency to imagine different futures for our agri-food systems, as these systems are now increasingly seen as fundamentally unsustainable. The crucial empirical novelty of this paper is that progress on environmental and social matters is restricted by divergent views on the economic characteristics of a future agri-food system, adding further complexity to mission-oriented transition and innovation policies.
The apparent consensus on environmental and social issues provides clear societal expectations for agronomic development and innovation, while the divergence on economic issues highlights the rift between growth-oriented paradigms and more holistic paradigms like agroecology. For the issues of international orientation, sector size, and farm business models, we found a lack of consensus on the problem, indicating fundamental disagreement about the type of agricultural sector desired by stakeholders. Stakeholders were fully aligned in recognizing the problem for the majority of issues, but showed agreement on solutions for less than a quarter.
We are the first to categorize them according to a recently proposed problem-solution space for wicked problems. We identified 23 issues as the main challenges for the transition in these documents. This paper analyzes 42 vision documents for the future of Dutch agriculture from a broad range of stakeholders to determine stakeholder alignment using an inductive coding approach. When stakeholders do not agree on the goals or methods of a transition, this can be a serious obstacle to success. Agri-food system transitions are a considerable challenge requiring stakeholder alignment on what changes need to be made and how.
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