Disruptive Seeds: challenging the status quo

In light of the climate crisis we’re facing today, it is becoming increasingly clear that—unless we take immediate action—our collective future is bleak, or as UN Secretary General António Guterres recently put it at COP27, “We’re on a highway to hell.”

It is therefore paramount that we imagine and envision brighter, sustainable alternatives, and think about how to get there. Incremental adaptation to climate change doesn’t suffice anymore—we need to fundamentally rethink the way we do things and organize society. In other words, we need transformative change. Future scenarios approaches allow us to explore alternative trajectories, and envision desirable, sustainable futures.

Recently, Elena Bennett—professor at McGill University—and a group of other leading scholars in sustainability science developed a scenario approach in response to the need to imagine “hopeful”, transformative futures. These are based on innovative initiatives from the present that fundamentally challenge the current, unsustainable status quo. They call them “Seeds of Good Anthropocenes.” The approach is a much-needed way to generate creative, bottom-up scenarios and imagine sustainability transformations. However, the role of power dynamics in such transformations remains under-researched. This is a crucial aspect of transformations, as shifts from one regime to another imply shifts in power. So, my colleagues and I further developed the Seeds of Good Athropocenes approach to focus on the role of power shifts and conflicts in transformations, by incorporating insights from scholarship on power. The central idea of this updated “Disruptive Seeds” approach is that for a sustainable niche initiative, or seed, to become a dominant component of our future world, it needs to challenge or disrupt the current, unsustainable systems in some way.

We are applying the Disruptive Seeds approach in the context of Guatemala’s food system as part of the new CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience, ClimBeR. We are identifying disruptive seed initiatives from indigenous farming communities that represent radical alternatives to the current food system, which is dominated by unsustainable, large-scale industrial farming and monocultures. We are building stakeholder coalitions to develop pathways for transforming Guatemala’s food system based on these seed initiatives, aimed at shifting power from big agricultural companies to indigenous smallholder farmers. This way, we hope to contribute to a brighter, more just future in Guatemala. Eventually, learning from our experiences there, we will apply the approach in Kenya, and beyond.