Exploring Participatory Methods for Achieving More Just Processes in the Food Systems Transformation

Food systems must urgently be transformed to be more just, healthy, and sustainable. Due to the enormous scope of change required, Food Systems Transformation (FST) literature to date has focused on coordination of actors and efficiency. While this is important for achieving change, for that change to be more just, it must also be inclusive of actors across all FST processes, particularly low-influence actors that may be otherwise “left behind” in such processes. Recent calls have encouraged diverse stakeholder inclusion and participatory approaches, however, how to go about this for the purpose of facilitating transformation remains relatively unexplored and there has been a lack of comparative evidence on methods aimed at engaging low influence actors. Using justice-oriented participatory systems approaches in a case study with Papua New Guinea cocoa smallholder farmers, this Letter investigates and compares a suite of participatory methods used to elicit system drivers, outcomes, and feedbacks. We go on to explore the implications of each method for systems understandings and how participatory methods can support and shape transformation in data-poor contexts. Methods are reflexively compared for their transformative potential and their use in enabling more just processes around FSTs. Results indicate that co-creative methods in which researchers adopted a facilitative rather than directive role, enabling greater participant-participant interaction, were most useful in problem framing by shedding light on trade-offs, blind spots, or assumptions from top-down perspectives (those informed only by interviews and/or literature). Further, this work explores how these methods contribute to or constrain justice-oriented systems transformations.