Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Co-Creating Sustainable Transformations of Food Supply Chains through Cooperative Business Models and Governance

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production.

The project focuses on transdisciplinary research approaches engaging local stakeholders on how to innovate, convert, and strengthen food supply chains in different socio-cultural-political contexts across 6 countries. Conventional, globalized food supply chains are vulnerable to many factors such as climate change, pandemics, political unrest, food insecurity, high food prices, injustices against workers, and dependence on trade partners violating human rights.

Various efforts have been undertaken to transform food supply chains towards sustainability by reducing transport, paying fair prices, adding value in the region of origin, adopting worker safety standards, and increasing accountability along the supply chain from production to consumption. Cooperative business models, such as worker or consumer cooperatives, as well as cooperative governance such as food policy councils or community-supported agriculture adopt many of these sustainable practices.

Yet, there is little empirical, comparative research on how to implement sustainable food supply chains through cooperative models. The project will explore entire supply chains, and the case studies will be used to focus on specific supply chain issues addressed, the phase of the supply chain open for the transformation, the range of food products, and the governance elements from the supporting entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The case studies will employ a theoretical framework that links sustainability transformation, short supply chains, and alternative food networks, while using a research methodology that combines sustainability assessment, visioning, strategy building, real-world experimentation, and evaluation methods, in transdisciplinary collaboration with supply-chain and governance actors. Results from this project will provide guidance and inspiration to researchers and practitioners on how food supply chains can be successfully transformed towards sustainability.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.