Governing the Donut: Transformation for Sustainable Food Governance

Mainstream systems of food provisioning inherited from the twentieth century have failed, resulting in a complex governance challenge: to transform into a more sustainable and just configuration. The failure to ensure access to adequate and sustainable food for the world’s population exposes the limited capacity of governance regimes to deal with present and future challenges. This paper starts from the understanding that governance arrangements play a central role in the dynamics of sustainability transformation but that research into appropriate characteristics of such arrangements has been limited. Drawing on theories of sustainability transition and transformation, as well as literature on food, environment, and resource management governance, this paper proposes a concrete set of characteristics to imagine the reordering of food governance regimes so that they may empower transformative pathways towards a safe and just operating space for humanity: the so-called “donut space”.