Can We Expect Agri-Food Stakeholders to Develop Transformative Policy Mixes? A Comparative Analysis of Co-Design Experiments in Nine European Countries

Europe’s agri-food systems face significant environmental, economic and social challenges. Maintaining their desired functions (production of food, fibre, energy, ecosystem services, positive spatial externalities) requires systemic change. However, the evolution of agri-food systems is constrained by deeply embedded internal and external barriers, e.g. infrastructural dependencies, market concentration, entrenched productivist norms and path-dependent policy frameworks. At the farm level, such barriers limit farmers’ capacity to adopt more sustainable practices, while at the governance level they restrict policymakers’ ability to design effective policy interventions to support a shift towards more resilient and sustainable system trajectories (Daugbjerg & Feindt, 2017; Galli et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2024). To overcome systemic lock-ins, deliberatively designed policy mixes are necessary – combinations of policy instruments and strategies that address multiple barriers in a coordinated and well-sequenced way (Grohmann & Feindt, 2023; Kern et al., 2019; Rogge & Reichardt, 2016). Policy co-design builds on the assumption that participatory processes can support the formulation of more integrated policy mixes which address different parts of the system in a coherent manner. By involving farmers, civil-society organisations and value-chain actors, co-design aims to foster collaborative problem framing and enhance the perceived legitimacy of resulting policy proposals (Ball & Rejón, 2024; Blomkamp, 2018). However, participatory processes are always vulnerable to representational biases, institutional boundaries and dominant paradigms. In agricultural policy, these often result in the reproduction of productivist framings rather than interventions that challenge the underlying system logic (Grohmann et al., 2025; Hurley et al., 2022; Turnhout et al., 2020). This paper examines policy mixes generated in experimental cooperative–deliberative co-design processes with agri-food stakeholders in ten European case studies conducted within the Horizon Europe project ENFASYS. The co-design processes built on prior system analyses that identified key barriers and lock-ins and invited stakeholders to formulate goals and combinations of policy instruments through structured workshops. The resulting policy mixes reveal how actors envision pathways for change. Their analysis allows to develop a conceptual linkage between the policy co-design literature and transition and transformation scholarship. The analysis reconstructs the transformation mechanisms and intended outcomes embedded in the policy mixes and assesses their transformative potential internally and externally. Internally, the extent to which proposed goals and instruments directly address the identified barriers serves as the primary benchmark. Externally, the analysis draws on the Transformative Outcomes framework by Ghosh et al. (2021) which identifies early-stage changes associated with sociotechnical transformation, including learning processes, networking, institutionalisation and niche-regime interactions (Rodríguez-Barillas et al., 2024; Schot & Steinmueller, 2018; Weber & Rohracher, 2012). Preliminary results show that the co-designed policy mixes emphasise transformation mechanisms associated with building and nurturing niches, such as learning, actor coordination and the stabilisation of alternative practices through financial and advisory instruments. Institutionalisation within existing policy frameworks is frequently envisaged, while mechanisms associated with opening up and unlocking dominant regimes remain largely absent. Overall, the findings suggest that experimental co-design can generate coherent policy mixes aligned with identified barriers yet tends to frame transformation as gradual system reconfiguration rather than structural change.