Governance of sustainability transitions: key values and features derived from Belgian initiatives aiming at introducing local products on supermarket shelves

Food retail corporations are powerful actors of the dominant food system, accounting for more than 95% of food market share in Belgium. Driven by motives of profit maximisation, they exert strong lock-in effects that hinder the transition towards a more sustainable food system. Through the criteria they impose on the upstream part of the food chain (e.g. homogeneity standards, volume and uninterrupted supply requirements) and through their marketing practices (e.g. back margins), they exclude a significant part of sustainable food products from their shelves which makes them lowly available for consumers. Recently, several initiatives aiming at enabling the introduction of local, low-input, small farmers’ products on supermarket shelves have emerged in Belgium. These initiatives mainly take the form of logistic platforms, that have been launched by local authorities and/or civil society organisations (CSOs). As supermarkets seek to improve their image, they are becoming a flourishing activity. This raises the following question: is the development of local sourcing in supermarkets an opportunity for a transition towards more sustainable food systems (i.e., for sustainable farming and food practices and for fair marketing practices to be broadly adopted), and if so, under which conditions? In our research, we combine the multi-level perspective with a pragmatist approach to analyse three initiatives, which rely on different governance arrangements and produce different subsystems. In order to assess the impact of these initiatives on the broader food system, we take into account all the actors involved (producers, processors, retail corporations, alternative retailers, public authorities, CSOs, consumers), and for each one of them, we jointly analyse: the key ethical issues and professed values, and their evolution over time; the implementation (or absence) of related practices; and the coordination and governance features they participate in and their evolution over