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Despite the widespread disruptions of lives and livelihoods due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it could also be seen as a gamechanger. The post-pandemic recovery should address fundamental questions concerning our food systems. Is it possible to reset existing ecologically unsustainable production systems towards healthier and more connected systems of conscious consumers and ecologically oriented farmers? Based on three illustrative cases from different parts of India, we show how managing transitions towards sustainability require institutional innovations and new intermediaries that build agency, change relations, and transform structures in food systems. Lessons from three diverse geographies and commodities in India are presented: urban farming initiatives in Mumbai, conscious consumer initiatives in semi-urban Gujarat for pesticide-free mangoes, and resource-poor arid regions of Andhra Pradesh. Through these examples, we show that, beyond the technological solutions, institutional innovations such as urban community-supported farming models, Participatory Guarantee Schemes, and Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) can enable sustainable transitions. Sustainable lifestyles in a post COVID-19 world, as the cases show, require collective experimentation with producers that go beyond changed consumer behaviour to transform structures in food systems.
Shambu Chebrolu; Deborah Dutta. Managing Sustainable Transitions: Institutional Innovations from India. Sustainability 2021, 13, 6076 .
AMA StyleShambu Chebrolu, Deborah Dutta. Managing Sustainable Transitions: Institutional Innovations from India. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (11):6076.
Chicago/Turabian StyleShambu Chebrolu; Deborah Dutta. 2021. "Managing Sustainable Transitions: Institutional Innovations from India." Sustainability 13, no. 11: 6076.
A key mandate of environment education (EE) is to motivate people to engage in environmentally responsible actions. However, school-based EE has not been successful in nurturing environmentally responsible actions in students. This is partly because of the information-oriented structure of current EE, which assumes that symbol-based knowledge directly leads to motivation and action. In contrast, educational initiatives based on practices and actions in the world, with farming as an important component, have been successful in creating transformative changes in behavior. To develop similar transformative interventions that motivate school students, it is necessary to understand the general psychological principles that make such participatory designs successful. Here we report a year-long observation study that seeks to contribute to such a general model, analyzing how farming actions changed the motivation of volunteers working in an urban community farm. We take an analysis approach inspired by recent embodied cognition models, where volunteers’ lived experiences and interactions with material entities are analyzed, to understand how motivation and values develop through such interactions. Based on this data, we propose a spiral model of motivation and action, where specific farming actions coalesce together to form motivation and values, which then seed wider environment-oriented actions in the world.
Deborah Dutta; Sanjay Chandrasekharan. Doing to being: farming actions in a community coalesce into pro-environment motivations and values. Environmental Education Research 2017, 24, 1192 -1210.
AMA StyleDeborah Dutta, Sanjay Chandrasekharan. Doing to being: farming actions in a community coalesce into pro-environment motivations and values. Environmental Education Research. 2017; 24 (8):1192-1210.
Chicago/Turabian StyleDeborah Dutta; Sanjay Chandrasekharan. 2017. "Doing to being: farming actions in a community coalesce into pro-environment motivations and values." Environmental Education Research 24, no. 8: 1192-1210.