PREPARE: a theoretical framework to improve food supply security in highly privatised and fragmented food systems

Food supply is fundamental to societal resilience and, again, a priority across Europe. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to inform ongoing efforts to improve food supply security in highly privatised and fragmented food systems, grounded in the perspectives of key actors involved in securing food supply in Sweden. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 31 participants from public authorities, private companies, associations and foundations, academia, and voluntary organisations. Nine overall themes emerged from the data, concerning the governance setting, system vulnerabilities, and capacity for adaptation and intervention. The resulting PREPARE framework specifies seven practices, in three categories. P erceiving systemic , multi-hazard risk and R ecognising complexity are epistemic: how actors perceive and frame the problem. E qualising time perspectives and objectives and P romoting transparency in communication and decision-making are relational: how actors align with each other across time and information gaps. A bsorbing costs along the value chains , R econciling self-sufficiency and secure international trade , and E nhancing existing capacities within the system are distributive: how resources, costs, and structural positions can be reallocated for resilience. Theoretically, the study suggests that the challenges for resilience in highly privatised and fragmented food systems are best understood as a dual market-and-governance failure to internalise food supply security into the everyday functioning of the food system, requiring practices that operate jointly at the epistemic, relational, and distributive levels, rather than simply amassing discrete interventions when anticipating or responding to crises.