In the effort to build sustainable and resilient local food systems, a clear understanding of community dynamics and values is essential. This dissertation addresses the critical need to align food system strategies with community-identified values. Community-identified values are fundamental principles and priorities that reflect the unique needs, desires, and characteristics of a community. These values can vary widely depending on local contexts; each community has its own cultural, economic, and environmental contexts that shape its food system needs and goals. This heterogeneity means that a one-size-fits-all approach in local food system planning is ineffective. Instead, understanding and integrating diverse community perspectives can lead to more tailored, effective solutions that respect local traditions, meet specific nutritional needs, and enhance economic opportunities. The primary objectives of this dissertation are threefold: first, to explore various ways for measuring community-identified values within local food systems; second, to analyze the variations in expert predictions regarding the impacts of specific interventions within these systems; and third, to integrate these values into community-based resilience planning, emphasizing a balanced consideration of both monetary and non-monetary factors.The second chapter of this dissertation explores various methods for measuring community-identified values within food systems. This exploration is essential as it acknowledges the diversity of perspectives that different stakeholders contribute, and highlights the challenges in quantifying values that are often subjective or culturally specific. Instead of proposing a rigid framework, this chapter delves into comparing the features of different measurement ideas to ensure they capture a comprehensive understanding of community needs and aspirations. By developing and aggregating ideas for measuring these values, this chapter directly contributes to more effective food system planning by ensuring that policies and interventions are grounded in a comprehensive understanding of community needs and aspirations. The identification and measurement of these values enable planners and policymakers to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies more accurately, ensuring that the interventions are truly beneficial to the community. This sets the stage for the subsequent chapters by establishing the importance of integrating a wide range of community perspectives into food system planning. Building on the measurement ideas discussed in the second chapter, the third chapter delves into the mental models of food system experts, utilizing fuzzy cognitive maps to illustrate how different experts predict the impacts of known leverage points on community-identified values. This analysis not only reveals the degree of consensus or disagreement among experts but also contrasts these individual predictions with outcomes from a collective intelligence model. The significance of this chapter lies in its demonstration of how diverse expert opinions can lead to varied predicted impacts, underscoring the necessity of considering multiple perspectives in food system planning. This chapter enriches the localized food system planning process by highlighting the potential discrepancies and alignments between individual and collective predictions, thereby informing more balanced and inclusive policymaking. The insights gained here complement the previous chapter’s focus on measurements by showing how different interpretations of data and projected impacts can influence planning outcomes. The fourth chapter extends the discussions from measuring and modeling community values to applying these concepts in community-based resilience planning for local food systems. It critiques the dominant economic focus in strategy evaluation and advocates for a more comprehensive approach that includes non-monetary criteria such as community empowerment and partnership. This chapter is pivotal as it synthesizes the ideas presented in the earlier chapters into practical strategies for enhancing food system resilience against hazards and risks. By incorporating community-identified values into the evaluation process, this chapter promotes a more holistic approach to resilience planning, emphasizing the importance of stakeholder engagement and the exploration of trade-offs between different criteria. It ensures that the strategies not only are economically viable but also resonate with the community’s values. Together, these chapters create a cohesive narrative that advances the field of localized food system planning by integrating community-identified values into every phase of policymaking, from measurement and modeling to implementation and evaluation. This approach highlights the interconnectedness of various planning phases, ensuring that local food systems are designed to be sustainable, culturally sensitive, and responsive to the specific needs of the community.
Read
