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  • Perspective
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Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 1011–1017 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons and care. This redesign should be supported by coordinated education and research efforts that do not simply replicate dominant discourses on food system sustainability but point towards a post-growth world in which agroecological life processes support healthy communities rather than serving as inputs for the relentless pursuit of economic growth.

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Acknowledgements

This paper stems from research conducted in the FEAST Project (Lifeworlds of Sustainable Food Production and Consumption: Agrifood Systems in Transition) (no. 14200116), Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN). We thank RIHN and the organizers of the 15th International Symposium entitled ‘Transitioning cultures of everyday food consumption and production: stories from a post-growth future’, which served as a starting point for developing this paper. Additional research funding for this paper is from JSPS Kaken research grants no. 19K15931 and no. 20K15552. A.W. acknowledges funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (TRANSFORM, grant no. 50658-10029). G.K. acknowledges support by the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence (no. CEX2019-000940-M) grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. P.J. acknowledges support from the Czech Academy of Sciences, Lumina quaeruntur award (no. LQ300282103). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 870759. The content presented in this document represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect to the content. This paper is supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), who funded the NWO Vidi project ANTICIPLAY (project no. VI. Vidi.195.007) and its research team.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Steven R. McGreevy, Christoph D. D. Rupprecht, Daniel Niles, Arnim Wiek.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Behavioural, Management, and Social Sciences, Section of Governance and Technology for Sustainability (CSTM), University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

    Steven R. McGreevy

  2. FEAST NPO, Kyoto, Japan

    Steven R. McGreevy & Maximilian Spiegelberg

  3. Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan

    Steven R. McGreevy, Daniel Niles, Rika Shinkai & Ken-ichi Abe

  4. Faculty of Collaborative Regional Innovation, Department of Environmental Design, Ehime University, Matsuyama, Japan

    Christoph D. D. Rupprecht

  5. College of Global Futures, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Arnim Wiek

  6. Sociology Department, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Michael Carolan

  7. Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain

    Giorgos Kallis

  8. Institute of Environmental Science & Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Giorgos Kallis

  9. Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom, Thailand

    Kanang Kantamaturapoj

  10. Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Astrid Mangnus & Joost Vervoort

  11. Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Praha, Czechia

    Petr Jehlička

  12. Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Oliver Taherzadeh

  13. Department of Sociology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Marlyne Sahakian

  14. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany

    Ilan Chabay

  15. Rizoma Field School, Nueva Helvecia, Uruguay

    Ashley Colby

  16. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Jose-Luis Vivero-Pol

  17. Calcutta, India

    Rajat Chaudhuri

  18. Center for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Education and Research, Asian Studies Unit (KUASU), Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Mai Kobayashi

  19. Environmental Social Science Research Group, Budapest, Hungary

    Bálint Balázs

  20. Social Systems Division, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

    Kazuaki Tsuchiya

  21. Department of International Area Studies, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Clara Nicholls

  22. Department of Community and Leadership Development, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Keiko Tanaka

  23. Graduate School of Agriculture, Division of Natural Resource Economics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Motoki Akitsu

  24. Faculty of Letters, Kyoto Prefectural University, Kyoto, Japan

    Hein Mallee & Yo-Ichiro Sato

  25. Department of Policy Studies, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan

    Kazuhiko Ota

  26. Amrita Bhoomi Agroecology Center, Hondarabalu, India

    Ashlesha Khadse

  27. Graduate School of Project Design, Osaka, Japan

    Norie Tamura

  28. Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Miguel Altieri

  29. Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Masashi Tachikawa

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  1. Steven R. McGreevy
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Contributions

S.R.M., C.D.D.R., D.N., A.W., M.C., G.K., K.K., A.M., P.J., O.T., M. Sahakian, I.C., A.C., J.-L.V.-P., R.C., M. Spiegelberg, M.K., B.B., K. Tsuchiya, C.N., K. Tanaka, J.V., M. Akitsu, H.M., K.O., R.S., A.K., N.T., K.A., M. Altieri, Y.-I.S. and M.T. contributed to the framing and argumentation. S.R.M., C.D.D.R., D.N. and A.W. led the writing and revisions. M.C., G.K., K.K., A.M., P.J., O.T., M. Sahakian, I.C., A.C., J.-L.V.-P., R.C., M. Spiegelberg, M.K., B.B., K. Tsuchiya, C.N., K. Tanaka, J.V., M. Akitsu, H.M., K.O., R.S., A.K., N.T., K.A., M. Altieri, Y.-I.S. and M.T. contributed to the writing and revisions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steven R. McGreevy.

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McGreevy, S.R., Rupprecht, C.D.D., Niles, D. et al. Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world. Nat Sustain 5, 1011–1017 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00933-5

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