Organisations need to think more about food security from a systems perspective, as it remains one of the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century. In this blog for World Food Day, we reflect on the urgent need for more systems thinking in food security and insights from our work on this topic over the last few months. Millions still lack access to healthy, affordable diets, while the way we produce and consume food continues to exceed planetary limits. It is as much an ecological challenge, being a driving factor behind climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and pollution, as it is a socio-economic and political challenge, shaped by deep inequities and geopolitical instability.
Why Transformation Requires Joined-Up Thinking
Food security thinking has evolved beyond yields and calories (availability). There is now a recognition that access, utilisation (equity), stability, agency and sustainability are core components of understanding food security through a food systems lens. By ‘system’, we mean the web of interlinked stakeholders, relationships, and feedback loops that shape how food is produced, distributed, accessed and governed, to how it reaches people’s plates and affects our health and our environment. The system, then, encompasses the environmental, economic, social and political dynamics that link ecosystems, markets, and people.
Despite broad global consensus on the need for transforming our global food system, competing agendas and institutional silos still pull efforts in different directions. Overcoming this fractured consensus requires joining up approaches that have too long been treated as separate, precisely what a food systems perspective enables. Achieving food security requires transforming food systems, including the institutions that shape policy and practice. Systems do not simply change themselves.
Systems in Practice: What We’ve Learned from Recent Work
This complexity demands collaboration across the UN system, beyond the Rome-Based Agencies, to include governments, civil society, and the private sector. A recent MOPAN assessment conducted by IOD PARC affirmed the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) technical excellence and convening power, both central to a systems approach that depends on bringing stakeholders together. Yet it also revealed a familiar systems dilemma, of a global mandate constrained by institutional design, with an apparent tension between FAO’s growing responsibilities and its limited structural flexibility. A tension that mirrors many organisations navigating transformation.
However, change and coherence are needed not only between organisations, but also within, as highlighted by our recent work with the Austrian Development Agency (ADA).
Our evaluation of their engagement on food security identified key enablers, particularly their development of longer-term projects in key geographic locations, continuous interaction in building trusted partnerships, and responsiveness and flexibility to the various contexts they worked in.
Yet their engagement lacked a unifying food systems framework, which contributed to some barriers, such as fragmented internal coherence across projects and limited stakeholder participation in intervention design. In identifying this, ADA now has an opportunity to articulate a singular, clear food systems framework to guide their interventions, which we saw as key to shift from isolated, though often effective, project-level action to system-aware organisational practice.
While coherence within organisations is vital, systems thinking also depends on understanding the wider landscape those organisations operate within. The starting point for systems thinking is, unsurprisingly, having an overview of the system. To this end, we recently worked alongside some key partners, including Eunomia, CECAN and Mott MacDonald, to develop a comprehensive, evidence-informed causal map of the UK food system for the UK’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). We synthesised academic and policy evidence across four interlinked pillars of food security, health, environment, and economic resilience. These pillars helped reveal key drivers, feedback loops, and trade-offs shaping the UK’s food future. This type of systems mapping is exactly the kind of evidence base needed for joined-up policymaking.
Our Shared Responsibility for Change
Across these engagements, our perspective was clear. Partial solutions are not enough. Food systems are deeply interlinked, and addressing siloed outcomes in isolation may undermine others. Coherence and structured change management at the organisational level are needed to affect systemic transformation. Change is inevitable. What matters is how it is managed.
Transformation is not a choice, but a trajectory, and the question is whether this transformation is engaged with proactively, in ways that advance equity, or left to unfold through continued crisis and cumulative shocks and stresses. We work with our clients to shift away from more siloed, linear thinking towards embedding systems thinking, supporting our clients to navigate the complexity of systems and help them on their journey on becoming more system-literate, embedding learning and adaptiveness into how they plan, learn, and act.
World Food Day is a reminder of our obligation to transform how food is produced, shared and consumed in support of more just, equitable and inclusive systems.
Further Reading
ADA, 2025. Strategic Evaluation of ADC’s Engagement on Food Security. Available at: https://www.entwicklung.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Dokumente/Evaluierung/Evaluierungsberichte/2024/Food_Security/Evaluation_Report_Food_Security.pdf
Benton, T. G., Bieg, C., Harwatt, H., Pudasaini, R., & Wellesley, L. (2021). Food system impacts on biodiversity loss. Three levers for food system transformation in support of nature. Chatham House, London. Available at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-02/2021-02-03-food-system-biodiversity-loss-benton-et-al_0.pdf
Clapp, J (2016). Food (2nd Edition). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Clapp, J., Moseley, W., Burlingame, B., & Termine, P. (2022). The case for a six‑dimensional food security framework. Food Policy, 106.
Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Guizzardi, D., Monforti-Ferrario, F., Tubiello, F. N., & Leip, A. J. N. F. (2021). Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions. Nature Food, 2(3), 198-209. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00225-9
FAO. (2021). The state of the world’s land and water resources for food and agriculture – Systems at breaking point. Synthesis report 2021. Rome. Available at: https://www.fao.org/3/cb7654en/cb7654en.pdf
Maye, D., & Kirwan, J. (2013). Food security: A fractured consensus. Journal of Rural Studies, 29, 1–6.
MOPAN, 2024. MOPAN Assessment of FAO. Available at: https://www.mopan.org/en/our-work/performance-evidence/fao.html
Posthumus, H., Bosselaar, J., Brouwer, H., 2021. The food system decision support tool – a toolbox for food system analysis. Wageningen University & Research and KIT Royal Tropical Institute.
