Learning for sustainability transitions: a discussion on the role of mainstream business actors towards more sustainable food systems

Sustainability transitions involve the disruption of pre-existing commitments, roles and rules, and the development of new practices, values and identities, implying the transformation of the governance of the whole socio-technical system. Such powerful changes are the outcome of multiple interactions, developments and learning processes within and between the three levels of a socio-technical system – niche, regime and landscape (Geels and Schot, 2007; Smith et al., 2010). This paper addresses the role played by mainstream business actors in collaborative learning for sustainability transitions, particularly in the context of niche-regime interaction, by looking at two cases of local procurement by food retailers in Belgium and their interactions with local producers and initiatives. The question driven this analysis is whether the introduction of local products on food retailers’ sourcing represents an opportunity for transformation of the dominant agri-food system by triggering profound changes in practices and values of incumbent regime actors; or instead, whether the learning processes engendered by such niche-regime interactions represent marginal adjustments in the socio-technical system. The analytical framework borrows insights from the scholarly work on organisational, inter-organisational and network learning, and has two dimensions. The first provides elements to look at learning and changes in retailers’ practices and values engendered by their local sourcing strategies. The core idea in based on the concepts of single, double and triple loop learning. The paper argues that sustainability transitions require regime organisations to engage in multiple loops learning, which can lead to radical changes in their practices and values. In the cases of local sourcing by retailers the aim is to search for evidences of the impacts of such strategies on their practices and values, and trying to identify if changes are localised or if they have the potential to spread to the retailers’ organisations as a whole. The second dimension addresses the transformative power of retailers’ local sourcing strategies, particularly in the context of their interactions with non-mainstream actors. It turns to the related concepts of inter-organisational and network learning, and focuses on inter-organisational network learning, i.e. collective learning by a group of organisations as a group, implying that learning has to be embedded across the group of organisations as a whole (Knight, 2002). The paper argues that transitions require learning at the level of the socio-technical system as a whole, and that such system learning is more than the sum of the learning of the individual actors from the different levels; instead socio-technical system learning implies changes in the core attributes of the system, resulting its transformation into a new system. In the studied cases the aim is to search for evidences of the impacts of the interactions between retailers and the non-mainstream actors in terms of their practices, views and believes across the food system as a whole. The cases studies are based on the qualitative analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews with different actors (retailers, producers and local initiatives), and complementary data from several documentary sources. Preliminarily analysis does not suggest that nor each of the retailers has learnt as an organisation as a whole, and neither that the food system as a whole has learnt. At the organisational level, the local concept is still a rather parallel system to the traditional network of suppliers, suggesting that the local product strategies in both retailers are not (yet) transformational. Moreover, the two cases of local sourcing are rather very localised and in progress learning experiments, suggesting that the learning impacts on the food system as a whole are rather limited, not allowing the identification of any changes in practices and views at the system level as a whole