Food Governance & Sustainability

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/AM_1263

Course Objective

To provide students with a profound understanding of how the public and private sector, as well as consumers can contribute to the transformation towards a more sustainability food system, and to challenge students to design their own solutions contributing to this transformation. By the end of this course, students should: 1. Understand how barriers related to policy, regulation, finance, innovation, or behaviour lead to unsustainable food systems; 2. Learn about how nature-based solutions can be designed to support sustainable food producers; 3. Understand the challenges of food justice and food sovereignty; Students should be able to: 4. Examine how policies and interventions are implemented to diversify food supply and reduce food waste; 5. Analyse opportunities in the food supply chain are created through digitalization, investments & gender-specific measures; 6. Critically examine how transformation will look different from one country to the next, and from one food system to the next; 7. Synthesize and evaluate the academic literature and lessons learned during the course for a specific food transition process at a certain governance level (international, national, regional, local) into a pitch for experts. 8. Feel confident to work efficiently in groups and take feedback on board for individual assignments.

Course Content

The world faces an enormous challenge to increase the sustainability of the current food system thereby helping to ensure healthier diets, increase food security, and support rural communities while addressing climate change and safeguarding biological diversity. Alternatively, leaving food systems to follow current trends will further jeopardize human health, biodiversity, climate, natural resources, and rural economies. Therefore, transformation of food systems is an urgent priority for the public and private sector, civil society, international organizations, research communities, and consumers. Can a sugar or fat tax drastically influence consumers food choices? How can we encourage farmers to grow crops and cattle more sustainably? And are there ways to allocate profits more fairly across the food supply chain? To be able to answer these questions a thorough understanding of the governance of sustainable food systems is required, ranging from local to global interventions. The master course “Sustainable Food Governance” aims to provide students with a profound understanding of how the above-mentioned stakeholders can contribute in their own way to the transformation towards a more sustainability food system. In doing so, we adopt a holistic agenda developed by leading international experts which is centered around ten critical transitions that would enable food systems “to provide food security and healthy diets for a global population of over nine billion by 2050, while also tackling our core climate, biodiversity, health and poverty challenges” (Food and Land Use Coalition – FOLU 2019).

Teaching Methods

This course will follow the principle of blended learning, which is an educational approach that combines online educational materials and opportunities for interaction online with traditional place-based classroom methods, offering flexibility for both teachers and students. In total the course will consist of main live and online lectures, working group sessions, and online and live guest lectures. Students will develop their own proposition on how to contribute to the transformation towards a more sustainable food system.

Method of Assessment

The course is assessed through:
- Written exam (50%)
- Pitch presentation (40%)
- Paper club presentation (10%)Students must pass all elements (5.5 or higher).

Literature

Jennifer Clapp (2020) Food
- third edition. Polity Press. Cambridge.ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4177-5Further readings will be available on Canvas.

Entry Requirements

Students do not require a specific disciplinary background, although affinity with food sustainability and food security is useful. An emphasis within this course is the use of ‘systems thinking’ which is not a discipline, but a way of thinking about problems that tries to be holistic, focus on interdependencies and dynamics, and the different people involved.