Today’s farmers find it difficult to deal with the several lock-ins within food systems that keep them from transitioning to sustainable farming systems. Policies, together with business models and social innovations, need to be strengthened to overcome lock-in challenges. The EU-funded ENFASYS project aims to better understand lock-ins and levers in farming and food systems, as well as factors stemming from the behaviour of farmers, consumers, and other food chain stakeholders. It will test the possible effectiveness of policy and business interventions in European countries and screen 160 current intervention cases. The project will design policy mixes, business strategies, and social innovations that encourage farmers to transform their production systems.
The main objective of the project is to move farmers towards more sustainable farming systems through policies and private strategies. In a first stage in ENFASYS, we identify system and behavioural lock-ins and integrate these into ‘theories of change’, i.e. stylized descriptions of the farming systems indicating which handles we need to push. Next, we conduct a number of co-creation activities to design policies and private strategies that could help to overcome these lock-ins. Around some of these policies and strategies, economic experiments will be conducted to provide on their effectiveness.
Expected outputs will consist of insight and evidence on effectiveness of policies and private strategies to encourage farmers to move towards more sustainable farming systems.