Browsing by Author "Aarts, Noelle"

Research in the sustainability sciences often emphasizes values and value change as important drivers of sustainability transformations. Drawing from conceptualizations of values developed in environmental psychology and the environmental social sciences, this study offers a survey-based examination of values among stakeholders involved in or close to policymaking processes. the empirical context is the Dutch agri-food system-a hotspot of biodiversity loss, water pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions, and challenges to human and animal health. Based on a survey fielded among stakeholders, including public institutions, researchers, consultancy firms, agribusinesses, and others (n = 174), we investigated the prevalence of environmental and food-system values. Moreover, we asked how food-system values are related to stakeholders' views on transformative change. Our analysis yields three insights. First, biospheric and altruistic values, often considered in the literature as backbones of a socially and environmentally sustainable food system, were quite strongly endorsed among the surveyed stakeholders. By contrast, egoistic values, which revolve around the cost-benefit calculus of different courses of action irrespective of their environmental or social consequences, received comparatively less endorsement. second, stakeholders expressed strong agreement with food-system values emphasizing health and community aspects, food and nutrition as a global public good, and ecological and animal-free agriculture, but were less favorable toward values emphasizing technology and markets. Finally, using regression analysis, we show that stakeholders' food-system values help explain the degree to which they perceive a need for change, and the extent to which they support public policies to make the agri-food system more sustainable.