Search results

In September 1998 six European companies involved in PCB manufacturing and electronic packaging started collaborating in a development project known as “PRIME”. The “Program for Re‐engineering and Innovating (PCB) Manufacturing and Equipment” project lost one of its original members in late 1999, and Coates Circuit Products joined as the dielectric supplier. The project is now approaching the mid‐term assessment (MTA), where alternative production scenarios will be discussed and the most attractive carried forward to fabricate test vehicles and ultimately demonstrator patterns. Some essential features of the project have already been demonstrated and these initial results will be presented.

We aim to compare multifunctionality, ecosystem services and just transition as overall conceptual approaches to understand agri-food systems.

This is a theory-motivated literature study.

This paper argues that the concepts of multifunctionality and ecosystem services are unsuitable for considering the systemic complexities of today’s food system in order to tackle its grave environmental and social problems. Furthermore, these two concepts tend to neglect the negative externalities of food systems and overemphasize the positive ones. The notion of just transition puts justice and sustainability at the center of agri-food studies and defines targeted systemic interventions in food systems.

While the approach of just transition is only starting to be widely applied to the agriculture–food nexus, we argue that it is better suited to re-orient diets, production processes, the value chain and labor conditions in a more sustainable direction. The just transition approach is also useful in drafting systemic policy innovations.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2023-0740