Exploring the Value of Critical Systems Thinking in Food Systems Interventions: The Case of RAISE-FS

Abstract

The concept of food systems has become a buzzword, whose interpretive flexibility often leads to confusion and enables co-option by powerful agribusiness actors, reinforcing dominant agro-industrial practices. Some food systems scholars have pointed to the need for deeper engagement with systems traditions, noting that barriers to collaboration may stem from conflicting understandings of systems, typically grounded in hard or soft systems paradigms. Despite its origins in addressing such paradigm divides, Critical Systems Thinking (CST) remains largely absent from efforts to transform food systems. Aside from engagement by Gerald Midgley and Bob Williams in the grey literature, CST has yet to inform food systems research or practice. This study seeks to explore its potential contribution to more inclusive and reflexive framings of food systems and related interventions. Drawing primarily on Midgley’s systemic intervention, I develop a food systems intervention framework that emphasizes boundary critique and strategies to address marginalization as tools to expose hidden assumptions, power asymmetries, and exclusions, and to enhance inclusion throughout interventions. This framework is applied to analyze the Resilient Agriculture for Inclusive and Sustainable Ethiopian Food Systems (RAISE-FS) program. Through desk review, interviews, surveys, and participant observation, I investigate how program-affiliated actors from Ethiopian research and innovation (R&I) systems navigate contested framings of food systems, and whether features associated with CST are reflected in the program designs or in actor capacities. Findings reveal that program designs addressing marginalized gender and nutrition issues helped broaden R&I actors’ concerns, facilitated alignment with program goals, and contributed to coordinated action. However, boundary critique was largely absent, potentially limiting these interventionists’ ability to respond to complex challenges and contribute to systemic change over the long term. I therefore argue that achieving systemic food systems transformation may require parallel shifts in R&I systems through cultivating critical systems thinking skills among interventionists.