Addressing interlinked challenges related to food systems, such as malnutrition, climate change, and equity in food systems employment, requires novel, creative, and integrated approaches that engage diverse actors and work across components food systems, as opposed to in sectoral silos. 

The 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) crystallised widespread agreement on the need for this kind of “food system transformation” to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and other development goals. However, concrete examples of what food system transformation can look like in practice remain limited, and not much is known about the factors that can foster or inhibit these transformative steps or processes.

The ‘Exemplars of Food System Transformation’ initiative, part of a multi-donor programme led by GAIN called Nourishing Food Pathways, thus seeks to document case studies of food system transformation in action. Wageningen Social & Economic Research is a key partner of GAIN on this piece of work.

By considering individual cases on their own, as well as viewing a diverse set of cases jointly, the initiative seeks to better understand the process of food system transformation, including facilitating factors and how they can be fostered and barriers and how they can be overcome. To systematise the collection of generalisable lessons across cases, the initiative uses an adaptation of the 'Kaledeiscope Method' to view the change process over time:

Through a compendium of examples, as well as generalisable lessons, the work seeks to inform and inspire others seeking to transform food systems. Please see below for the outputs produced to date.