Presentation short abstract

Research on Wales' protracted agri-environmental reform process illustrates how co-design can be mobilised to depoliticise sustainability transitions when market power and structural drivers of ecological harm go unchallenged, narrowing the scope and scale of "just" agri-food transitions.

Presentation long abstract

State policies to meet climate and nature goals in food-system transitions increasingly invoke the rhetoric of participation and just transition as strategies of legitimation. Yet the politics and outcomes of such processes remain under-examined. In Wales, post-Brexit agricultural reform was explicitly framed around co-design and well-being, yet in practice became mired in contestation and protest, with ambitious proposals progressively diluted in pursuit of consensus.

Drawing on interviews, workshops and documentary analysis, this paper examines the protracted co-design of a national farming scheme and its attempt to reconcile conflicting ideas about what farming is for, and who the transition should serve, at a time of growing polarisation and uncertainty in rural Wales. These tensions were not only ideological but reflected the structural demands of a food system built on cheap food, efficiency and competition. In this context, efforts to transform a predominantly livestock-based sector toward environmental objectives were constrained by the same market pressures driving ecological harm and the precarity of workers and smaller-scale farmers. Government attempts at structural reform were thus foreclosed, with co-design reduced to marginal “win-wins” and symbolic inclusion.

By tracing how conflict, compromise and silences shaped the emergence of “acceptable” pathways, the paper argues that just transition rhetoric risks being absorbed into governance arrangements that mobilise participation to depoliticise transitions, and tolerate inequalities as necessary for sustainability. The Welsh case illustrates that a meaningfully just agri-food system transition must be a struggle over political economy, not merely a matter of procedural participation.