The Complexity of Food Systems: Defining Relevant Attributes and Indicators for the Evaluation of Food Supply Chains in Spain

© 2016 by the authors.The wide-ranging literature on food systems provides multiple perspectives and world views. Various stakeholders define food and food systems in non-equivalent ways. The perception of the performance of food systems is determined by these specific perspectives, and a wide variety of policies responding to different aims are proposed and implemented accordingly. This paper sets out to demonstrate that the pre-analytical adoption of different narratives about the food system leads to non-equivalent assessments of the performance of food supply chains. In order to do so, we (i) identify a set of relevant narratives on food supply chains in Spanish and Catalan contexts; (ii) identify the pertinent attributes needed to describe and represent food supply chains within the different perspectives or narratives; and (iii) carry out an integrated assessment of three organic tomato supply chains from the different perspectives. In doing so, the paper proposes an analysis of narratives to enable the analyst to characterize the performance of food supply chains from different perspectives and to identify the expected trade-offs of integrated assessment, associating them with the legitimate-but-contrasting views found among the social actors involved.This work has been carried out within the framework of the EU FP7 research project “Global and Local food chain Assessment: a Multidimensional performance-based approach (GLAMUR)” (KBBE.2012.2.5-03—Grant Agreement No.: 311778). The European Union or the European Union Commission cannot be held responsible for results and opinions quoted in the text. The research of Gonzalo Gamboa is funded by the Spanish National project HAR2013-47182-C02-01 and the Catalan Research group 2014SGR591. Marta G. Rivera-Ferre is funded by the Ramon y Cajal fellowships programPeer reviewe