This How-To supports SDC staff, partners, and stakeholders, providing practical guidance on applying a food systems approach in development cooperation projects and programmes.
This guidance explains why food systems matter for achieving sustainable development outcomes, and outlines how systems thinking can help address complex, interconnected challenges related to food security, nutrition, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability. It supports practitioners in analysing food systems, identifying leverage points, engaging relevant stakeholders, and designing interventions that contribute to lasting, systemic change.
Why work along a food systems approach?
A food systems approach recognises that challenges related to food security, nutrition, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability are deeply interconnected and cannot be effectively addressed in isolation. By applying systems thinking, it helps to understand how actors, activities, and drivers interact across the food system, making it possible to identify root causes, leverage points, and critical trade‑offs. This approach is particularly suited to addressing complex and ‘wicked’ problems, supports cross‑sectoral and multi‑stakeholder collaboration, and helps design interventions that reduce unintended effects while contributing to sustainable, system‑wide change.
What are the key challenges?
Food systems are inherently complex, multi‑actor, and dynamic. Practitioners must balance the need for a holistic perspective with the practical need for defining clear system boundaries, identifying leverage points that are both impactful and feasible, and managing trade‑offs between economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Moving beyond traditional sectoral silos and coordinating across institutions with different mandates and incentives adds further complexity.
In addition, food systems transformation is long‑term and non‑linear, while projects often operate within fixed funding cycles and planning frameworks. Impactful stakeholder participation requires time, skills, and attention to power dynamics, and data gaps often limit robust system analysis and monitoring. Successfully applying a food systems approach therefore demands flexibility and strong capacities for systems thinking, facilitation, and learning - capacities that need deliberate investment.
Food system The interconnected set of activities, actors, and processes involved in food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal, shaped by economic, social, and environmental drivers and resulting in food security, nutrition, and sustainability outcomes.
Food systems approach A holistic, systems-based way of designing and adapting projects that considers interactions, trade-offs, and feedback loops across food system components rather than working within isolated sectors.
Systems thinking An analytical mindset focusing on relationships, dynamics, and interdependencies within the system, rather than linear cause–effect chains.
Food system outcomes Well-functioning food systems simultaneously support economic and social well-being and resilience, ensure food and nutrition security for all, and safeguard environmental sustainability by preserving natural resources and ecosystems.
Trade‑offs and synergies Situations where improving one food system outcome may negatively affect another (trade‑offs), or where interventions generate benefits across multiple outcomes simultaneously (synergies).
Treating the food systems approach as a sector rebranding Don’t: reframe a conventional agriculture or livelihoods project as a “food systems project” without critically assessing the underlying analysis or ensuring a more systemic logic of intervention Do: systems thinking to design interventions that aim to influence system behaviour, not just sector outputs.
Trying to address the entire food system at once Don’t: attempt to intervene in the full food system through one project, at the risk of over-complexifying designs or creating unrealistic ambitions. Do: define clear system boundaries and a focused entry point, while remaining aware of the connections to the wider system and the related interactions, manging key risks and spillover effects.
Focusing on activities instead of system change Don’t: develop interventions as a list of activities, without clearly articulating what system changes (in behaviours, relationships, incentives, or rules) they are meant to trigger. Do: start from the desired food system outcome(s) and change(s) in behaviour, identify leverage point(s), and build a theory of change that builds on causal pathways.
Underestimating power dynamics and stakeholder complexity Don’t: assume all stakeholders share the same interests or that participation alone will ensure inclusivity and ownership. Do: analyse political economy and power relations, deliberately include marginalised actors, and design participatory processes that are meaningful, representative, and grounded in local realities.
Designing rigid projects for dynamic systems Don’t: apply linear planning, fixed logframes, and rigid targets, particularly in fragile contexts marked by uncertainty and shocks. Do: apply flexible adaptive management, allowing interventions and assumptions to be adjusted as the food system evolves.
Paradigms and narratives
Influence public discourse and dominant narratives around food, sustainability, and nutrition (e.g. media work, national transformation pathways)
Promote shared visions for sustainable and equitable food systems at national and local levels
Consumer behaviour and food environments
Raise awareness of healthy, safe, and sustainable diets among different population groups
Shape food environments so that healthy and sustainable choices are accessible, affordable, and desirable
Use behavioural approaches (e.g. nudging, social norms) in markets, schools, workplaces, and public institutions
Policies
Generate and communicate evidence to inform food system-relevant policymaking
Support coherence and coordination between policies across agriculture, health, trade, environment, and social protection
Integrate nutrition, sustainability and resilience objectives into national and subnational strategies
Governance and participation
Strengthen inclusive governance arrangements that give voice to diverse food system actors
Empower rights-holders and civil society to participate meaningfully in food system decision-making
Build institutional capacity for systems thinking (e.g. multi-stakeholder platforms, food councils)
Market relationships and market governance
Improve the functioning of food markets to make them more inclusive, transparent, and resilient, including through appropriate market rules and standards (e.g. food safety, competition, quality assurance)
Strengthen relationships between producers, traders, processors, and consumers through fair and predictable arrangements
Business models and private sector engagement
Support value addition, processing, and aggregation that create economic opportunities along the food chain.
Strengthen business capacities of agrifood SMEs, with attention to youth- and women-led enterprises.
Promote inclusive, sustainable, and nutrition-sensitive business models.
Practices and capacities
Improve production, processing, and marketing practices through training and knowledge sharing
Strengthen extension, advisory, and local service provision systems
Enhance access to quality inputs, seeds, and services, including locally adapted and traditional options
Technology and innovation
Promote innovations that increase sustainability, efficiency, and resilience of food systems, including context-appropriate technologies that reduce environmental impacts and food loss or waste
Support digital tools for advisory services, market access, traceability, and information sharing
Finance
Expand inclusive access to rural and agrifood finance for producers, SMEs, and consumers
Promote climate- and shock-responsive financial instruments (e.g. insurance, blended finance)
Influence public and private investment priorities to align budgets and subsidies with food system outcomes
Questions?
If you have any question, or wish to call upon resources or expertise, don’t hesitate to reach out to us – or contact members through the MS Teams channel !
