Sustainability transformations in the balance: exploring Swedish initiatives challenging the corporate food regime

ABSTRACT

This paper explores to what extent organic initiatives that go beyond mainstream organic (so-called Organic 3.0) can challenge the corporate food regime and how they can push the food system towards sustainability transformations. We depart from the assumption that individual initiatives may differ in their potential to influence the corporate food regime and that this potential can be assessed by examining traits linked to reformist, progressive or radical food regime/food movement trends that they may possess. Rather than establishing a dichotomy between niche and food regime or categorizing Organic 3.0 initiatives within one of these trends, we explore the nuances in niche–regime relationships within the food system from a multi-level perspective, using the cases of two Organic 3.0 initiatives in Sweden. The results show that relations between these initiatives and the food regime share key characteristics, but also differ in important respects. While a reformist strategy facilitates niche growth, progressive and radical approaches are more likely to challenge the regime. The choice of approach in both cases involves trade-offs between growth and organic values. We conclude that one of the primary roles of Organic 3.0 initiatives may be to illustrate the viability of alternative models.

KEYWORDS:

• Organic 3.0 initiatives
• food regimes
• sustainable food systems
• sustainability transformations
• multi-level perspective (MLP)
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jacob von Oelreich http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3722-6084

Rebecka Milestad http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8626-7288

Notes

1. Stiftelsen biodynamiska produkter, in Swedish.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Forskningsrådet Formas (Swedish Research Council Formas) being a partner of the FP7 ERA-net project CORE Organic II [grant number 2012-1937].