Revealing strategic conversations around future visions of agriculture to improve the debate

To address sustainability of agro-food systems, different innovation models are proposed, which carry underlying pathways for change. Making explicit the divergences between these visions for the future could give more visibility to alternative visions, which otherwise could be dismissed by visions of the dominant regime. The generation and discussion of future visions for agro-food systems can open up or close down options for radical change. Therefore, we aim at analysing the cross-relations between the representations of pathways for change carried by actors and their strategies for change. We follow future-oriented debates, consisting both of a corpus of future representations, and of a community of actors associated to their discussion. We focus on one case study: the future-oriented debate on agriculture and water quality, in the Seine river watershed in France (between 2000 and 2016). We organise the materials from documentary sources and interviews through a narrative of the links between the future-oriented debate and strategies. Our results highlight three types of strategies: (i) opening the map of options for change; (ii) promoting radical change for agro-food systems; (iii) using the future-oriented debate to build an intervention strategy. We identify a gap in this debate: very few explicit transition pathways exist, while it may improve their credibility. We show that some alternative visions integrate performance criteria of the dominant narrative to strengthen their credibility. We conclude by suggesting that another strategy could be to embed future visions in a consistent alternative narrative, revealing the social dimension of water management by agriculture