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One of the project's focus group meetings with local stakeholders in Java, Indonesia

This project is led by Dr Shova Thapa Karki, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Sustainability (Business School), and Dr Bradley Parrish, Honorary Professor in Strategy and Marketing (Business School). Shova and Bradley told us about their project.

What’s your project about?

We’re looking at the role of place-based knowledge in sustainability transitions. This is interesting and complex because different kinds of knowledge need to be integrated at different scales to facilitate transition pathways. Sustainability is a concept that applies to whole systems, aiming at the need for human activities to stay within safe boundaries of critical earth systems. Yet the unsustainable overshoot of these boundaries is the cumulative effect of human activities driven at smaller scales by specific circumstances in many diverse places. Knowledge at both scales is critical to devise effective, ground-level solutions.

A current trend in sustainability science is to develop transition pathways by integrating knowledge from multiple scientific fields. There has been much work done for various sustainable development goals, but what is still missing is a way to integrate large-scale, generalised scientific knowledge with small-scale, contextual place-based knowledge. That’s where this project comes in! We are looking specifically at how place-based knowledge can be integrated into grounded solutions for sustainability transitions in the context of food systems.

Where is your project based?

There is a global North-South dimension to our project. We have two study areas, one here in Sussex where Shova is based, and the other in the Global South, located in Java, Indonesia where Bradley is based. In Sussex, we are extending the work of the SSRP theme South Coast Sustainability by focusing on food production. Our work in Indonesia is focused on food consumption and we are collaborating closely there with Dr. Zamzam Fauzanafi at Gadjah Mada University. We limited the project’s focus to one aspect in each study area due to resource and time constraints, yet the two sides of the equation are closely related. In fact, our interaction with local actors has demonstrated to us just how interlinked they are: we cannot discuss sustainable food consumption practices without considering the sustainability of food production and vice versa.

What methods are you using?

We are using focus group discussions to understand how communities make sense of and appropriate generalised scientific knowledge represented by expert guidance reports. We have selected two influential guidelines as the basis for discussions: the EAT-Lancet Commission’s Summary Report on healthy diets from sustainable food systems served as the basis for discussions in Indonesia; and the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission’s Multifunctional Land Use Framework served as the basis for discussions in the UK. 

We co-designed our methodology with local partners as their current work and existing networks have been indispensable for identifying relevant groups of participants. For instance, on the South Coast we are focusing on food production, so we are having discussions with farmers, tenants and estate owners, as well as the “trusted agents” on whom they rely for advice, including agronomists, environmentalists, consultants and land agents. We also included various organisations that influence land use decisions, such as the local authority, national parks, The Living Coast, Southern Water, The Rivers Trust, and so on. In Java, we categorized participants into four groups who take responsibility in different ways for food processing decisions. These comprised housewives active in a local empowerment network, professionally trained chefs, community caterers and small eatery owners, and food activists. 

The goal is to bring data from the two sites together to understand the way local actors interpret or make sense of these expert guidance reports.

What have you found?

Our data is still being analyzed but we are already finding important boundaries between scientific knowledge–codified as generalities abstracted from place and time, and place-based knowledge–tacit understandings specific to place and time. For example, one of our focus group participants explained that they are working with farmers on six farms. From the outside all six look the same, but what happens on these farms is completely different from one to another in response to their specific contexts. This is where place-based knowledge is vital to integrate with the expert guidance to devise solutions that counteract local drivers of unsustainability at the larger scale of food systems.

We are analyzing how these two types of knowledge interact through the process of sense making, and identifying possibilities for boundary-spanning to develop integrated solutions. An important insight that has come out of this study is that integrating science with place-based knowledge needs to take place in place. This means it cannot be a top-down process, but requires a grounded process that is inclusive of the communities where the solutions will be utilized. This suggests that, just as there is a social infrastructure in place to integrate scientific knowledge across fields in the academy, a different kind of social infrastructure needs to be developed for the explicit purposes of integrating knowledge on the ground.

What are the next steps for the project?

Shova is going to Indonesia to co-organise an impact and engagement symposium with Bradley and Zamzam at Gadjah Mada University. The aim is to bring focus group participants and other relevant stakeholders together in one space to present the preliminary findings and get feedback from them. The next step after that is to engage with policy makers and those responsible for authoring and implementing sustainable food system guidelines in Indonesia. We have a similar hope for engagement in the UK. Additionally, an online webinar in the Autumn is planned to present the final results and coordinate future collaborations to continue this work in both research and practice.

Find our more about the project here.

This project supports the fulfilment of the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

SDG 2 – Zero Hunger
SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities
SDG 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production
SDG13 – Climate Action
SDG 15 – Life on Land
SDG 17 – Partnerships for the Goals

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