Learning from the future: mainstreaming disruptive solutions for the transition to sustainable food systems

We comment on one of the scientific paradoxes of our times in the field of global studies on food: the influential scenario studies that call for new paradigms for the global food system are themselves locked into a past solution space. We posit that the extrapolation of past solution spaces into the future runs the risk of restricting the modelled scenarios to futures that are very similar to the status quo. We propose a novel complementary approach to scenario building, which we provocatively refer to as “Learning from future successes”: identifying and studying existing, successful early exemplars of disruptively novel farming systems that have independently reconfigured, and as such ‘break the rules’ of the relationships between the agronomic, environmental, economic and entrepreneurial variables commonly modelled in global food studies. By analyzing these existing exemplars, we can reconstruct their transition pathways as the basis to examine futures for regional and global food systems that are simultaneously radically progressive, yet proven to be attainable and desirable. Using disruptive exemplars as the starting point, we may discover novel sets of drivers of the future (e.g., cultural diversity, trust, gender relations), that have thus far eluded past experiences and trends. Drawing also from imagination and creativity, this approach broadens the gamut of possible pathways and people’s agency to shape desired futures. We illustrate our approach with three international initiatives: the Global Network of Lighthouse Farms, Agroecological Lighthouses, and Seeds of Good Anthropocenes. All three networks have identified and brought together existing early exemplars of disruptive farming and food systems; together they demonstrate complementary applications of our approach, namely: 1) the redesign of future farming systems, 2) the illumination of pathways for scaling disruptive systems, and 3) the formulation of narratives and visions that are inspirational and that incentivize change.