Environmental communication, social practices, and food system transformation

Abstract

The global food system has significant social and environmental impacts, requiring urgent transformation to address issues such as environmental degradation, food insecurity, and health problems. Communication plays a crucial role in driving this transformation by engaging stakeholders in sustainable and healthy food practices. This chapter examines theoretical frameworks used in environmental communication initiatives for food system transformation. While some initiatives rely on the transmission paradigm, treating communication as the one-way delivery of messages to consumers, others emphasize interaction and the exchange of meaning among active participants. This highlights the importance of co-construction, reflec tion, and learning by doing. The chapter reviews theoretical perspectives that focus on cognition, segmentation, networking, and dialogical aspects of communication, but fall short of adequately addressing the communicative dimensions of social practices in everyday life. To overcome this limitation, I suggest a practice theoretical approach to frame food-related environmental communication dimensions as part of, emerging through, and resulting from bundles and complexes of practices. I then analyze the main shortcomings of a practice-based approach and suggest three avenues for future research in environmental communication to account for the communicative dimensions of social practices in food system transformation.