Book Description

Stimulating the transformation towards more sustainable, healthy, and just food systems is an urgent challenge. However, this is also a highly difficult challenge, since food systems are complex systems that are resistant to change. The type of research that explicitly aims to facilitate systemic change, called transformative research, has the potential to accelerate sustainable food system transformation. Such research is characterised by knowledge co-creation, experimentation, and learning and reflexivity among a variety of different actors. However, to date, transformative research is scarce in practice. With this thesis we aim to contribute to an increased insight into how we can better understand and enhance the transformative capacity of research, so that it can act as a catalyst for sustainable food system transformation. To this end, we performed six studies that followed an emergent design and were conducted in the context of the European Union project FIT4FOOD2030 (2017–2020). With the first two studies, we aim to increase our understanding of research as a catalyst for food system transformation. We argue that in order to scale up transformative research, we need to transform the systems in which knowledge is produced and used, which we refer to as Research & Innovation (R&I) systems. Just as food systems, R&I systems can be best viewed as complex systems that are resistant to change. We introduce the FIT4FOOD2030 project as an example of a multi-level boundary innovation that aims to trigger the transformation of food systems and their coupled R&I systems. In the last four studies of this thesis, we zoom in on two capacity building strategies that we consider key for supporting such a coupled systems transformation, namely: competence development and network building.