Guest lecture – Ways of seeing food systems policy: challenges, paradigms, and tools

Food system transformation will depend on the effective use of policy by governments and other competent authorities to enact change. Broad agreement on major issues relating to issues such as climate change, environmental degradation, increasing malnutrition, economic sustainability, and social injustices. However, there is less consensus on their underlying causes. Three challenges for understanding connections between different elements of food systems are an absence of systems thinking, a lack of policy coordination, and competing values, goals, and ideologies. This talk will first outline the challenges for promoting systems thinking at government level and the practical issues of coordination and coherence. The discussion will then turn to how issues and their range of available solutions are determined by policy paradigms that can operate at different scales within institutions and governments. The presentation will conclude by discussing some tools that enable ways of seeing system interactions, policy interactions, and underlying value systems.

Speaker

Dr Jeremy Farr is currently a postdoctoral research fellow investigating the enablers and barriers to food system transformation in Australia and beyond. His work explores critical questions such as: What should future food systems look like? How can we achieve that vision? And how do we navigate the complex challenges along the way, including climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical tensions, and economic instability?

He completed his PhD on the archaeology of food systems in Zambia during the 1st and early 2nd millennium CE, examining their relevance to contemporary food security. His doctoral research integrated archaeological science, theory and methods with biogeography, botany, multispecies ethnography, and critical theory.

During his PhD, Jeremy also earned an MSc in Environmental Sustainability (2023) and taught undergraduate social sciences at the University of Queensland.

Prior to his academic career, Jeremy spent five years in project management, delivering change initiatives and operational support across local and central government in the UK. His roles included work in election management, judicial appointments for the Ministry of Justice, and strategic policy development at the Office for National Statistics.

Jeremy brings a wide-ranging set of interests to his work, with a particular focus on environmental sustainability—especially in relation to food systems. He also maintains strong interests in environmental impact assessment, governance, and public policy.