Co-designing policy mixes to overcome lock-ins towards resilient agri-food systems: The case of the pig sector transformation in Brandenburg, Germany

Policy design is the deliberate attempt to create policy mixes characterized by coherent policy objectives and consistent policy instruments that are suitable to achieve the objectives in an effective, efficient and legitimate way. In the face of multiple crises, policy design becomes more urgent and more difficult. However, agri-food policies in the European Union (EU) continue to focus on farm income support with mostly rhetorical attention to the combined food security, climate, resource scarcity and biodiversity crisis. Co-design of public policies, based on the principles of design thinking and giving stakeholders as experts of their own lifeworld a central role, has been proposed as an innovative alternative for the development of agri-food policy options in the face of transformative problem pressures. This paper reflects experiences with a co-design process during the EU research project ENFASYS* which addressed the pig production sector in Brandenburg, Germany, as an exploratory case. The design process aimed to address structural causes of lock-ins which constrain sustainability and animal welfare efforts. The paper contributes to current discussions on agri-food policy in the face of cascading crises in two ways. First, it provides a detailed bottom-up analysis of lock-ins that prevent sustainable food system transformations. Second, we discuss the suitability of co-design processes to develop effective, efficient and legitimate policy responses to systemic challenges. * ENcouraging FArmers towards sustainable farming SYstems through policy and business Strategies (https://www.enfasysproject.eu/), funded by the European Union under GA no. 101059589