Interpretations of social sustainability in UK food policy: The pliable pillar

Abstract

Since its advent in the 1980s, policy for sustainability has been seen to comprise three strands or “pillars”: environmental, economic and social. The social pillar, characterized as having both substantive elements (referring to desired social outcomes) and procedural elements (referring to the social processes by which outcomes are to be achieved) has proved the hardest to define and implement. In the UK, the sustainability lens was first applied to the food supply in 1994, after which a series of food sustainability policies struggled to specify and accommodate the social dimension. Numerous attributes, including food availability, safety, quality and adequacy, ethical trading, worker welfare, animal welfare, rural livelihoods, decent wages, trust, equity and assorted “social values,” were listed under the social heading in these frameworks. But efforts to incorporate a social element in food sustainability programmes looked experimental and opportunistic; conspicuously, they lacked the “green filter” that would distinguish “social sustainability policy” from other social policy relevant to food. The social pillar emerges not as a rigid feature but as a pliable component that can be molded to fit changing agendas, co-opted to legitimize other policy initiatives, retrofitted to pre-existing policies, or omitted altogether. Throughout the period reviewed (ending in 2015), the social dimension of sustainability, though often mentioned and sometimes prioritized, persistently lacked a clear and agreed definition in relation to food.

Introduction

The task of achieving sustainability in all human endeavors—in other words the need to find a sustainable form of development—has been described as many things, including rubric, vision, philosophy, goal, movement, mandate and marketing ploy (Kates et al., 2005; Larsen, 2009), but represents “above all a crisis of governance” (Adger and Jordan, 2009): (i) Since the idea entered “policy circles” (Redclift, 2005: 212), after the publication of Our Common Future, the seminal report of the United Nations (UN) World Commission on the Environment and Development (WCED, 1987), policy makers at all levels have seen the need to accommodate it in their agendas. With its roots in pre-existing and often contradictory programmes for, on one hand, economic development and, on the other, environmental protection, Sustainable Development emerged as a fissiparous concept most often characterized as having three elements or “pillars”: environmental, economic and social. It has been widely observed that this tripartite formulation can be counterproductive, re-fragmenting what was intended to be a unifying policy (WCED, 1987) and leading to competitive or distracting trade-offs (Leach et al., 2010; Prudham, 2009; Redclift, 1987, Redclift, 2000). Nevertheless, the three pillars remain ubiquitous in discussions of sustainability and Sustainable Development: it has become commonplace for governance actors in many contexts to refer to and attempt to implement all three of them. This paper traces the emergence and interpretation of the social “pillar” of sustainability in one area of UK public policy, namely food policy, from the time of its emergence until 2015, which is the period for which data was collected.

Despite widespread insistence on its centrality to sustainability, the social dimension has been both the least studied and the most diversely defined, found to be vague, over-inclusive and hard to measure (Sharpe, 2016). Although some consensus has emerged around definitions, the concept is still seen to be dynamic and “fuzzy” (Bostrom and Klintman, 2014: 85). Summing up in 2013, Dempsey defined social sustainability as:

A nebulous term that has conceptual overlaps with numerous other terms: social capital, cohesion, solidarity, order and integration, to name a few. It is also considered an umbrella term, encompassing a wide and diverse range of factors or dimensions including education, mental and physical health, personal safety, access to services, facilities and resources, a sense of community, a sense of place attachment, poverty, human rights, social equity, participation and social exclusion.

(Dempsey, 2013: 1089).

Importantly, social sustainability has come to be seen as encompassing both substantive and procedural aspects. It is concerned both with the desired social outcomes of transitions to sustainability, such as adequate food or health; and with the desired social processes by which these outcomes are to be achieved and maintained, for example, through transparent and democratic procedures (Agyeman and Evans, 2004; Bostrom, 2012; Dillard et al., 2009). Equity, in both outcomes and procedures, is often cited as a key social element of sustainability, for both moral and instrumental reasons (Meadows et al., 1974; SDC, 2011). Crucially, these social outcomes must be achieved while simultaneously meeting environmental objectives—an aspiration for “green social policy” (Bostrom, 2012: 3–4).

Given that food is fundamental to health and wellbeing, and is inextricably entangled in questions of inequality and resource access, it is not surprising that the social dimension of sustainability has seemed relevant to food scholars and policymakers. “Sustainable food” has long been seen to comprise social elements, though these have been contested (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Allen, 1993; DuPuis and Goodman, 2005). From the wide array of substantive and procedural attributes associated with social sustainability in relation to food, a summary would include: food safety, adequacy, quality and affordability; the nutritional quality of food; the availability and quality of paid work in the food supply; the quality of relationships among participants in the food supply; the welfare of farm animals; fairness in the distribution both of access to food and the impacts of the food supply; notions of responsibility and accountability; and the importance of engagement as the prerequisite and enabler of sustainable innovation in food production and consumption.

The remainder of this paper examines how UK food policy engaged with the concept of social sustainability. It does so by looking first at how wider public policy for sustainability in the UK tackled the social “pillar” and then by looking at how these evolving interpretations were transposed into food policy. The study is based on a close analysis of publically available policy documents from the period. The data were gathered as part of a larger investigation of meanings and implementations of social sustainability in the UK industrial food supply (Sharpe, 2016).