Understanding food security from a transdisciplinary perspective

Abstract

Transdisciplinary thinking can help identify the path forward for long-term food security where there are challenges, because sometimes one way of evaluating situations in search of a better solution is to start with the issues at hand. Through transdisciplinary thinking, looking at the system as a whole, we aim to understand the different drives and objectives of different components within a system and how they interact. These components, more often than not would involve things beyond soils, plants and animals. In this process of identifying key stakeholders, we almost certainly need to consider the socio-economic context and the institutions, or ‘rules of the game’. These key stakeholders, playing different roles within a system, inevitably have different goals and targets for themselves. It is this explicit recognition of multiple objectives within a complex sociological context associated with multiple stakeholders, institutional structures, and power structures is the key distinction between interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking