Back in the 1990s, a pioneering sustainability scientist, Donella Meadows, realised that many efforts to improve sustainability focus on obvious and tangible areas of intervention which, although well intentioned, bring about limited change and don’t address the root causes of unsustainability. Instead, deeper ‘leverage points’, associated with system norms, values and mindsets, could have the greatest potential to enable transformative change (Figure 1). This concept has gained much traction in sustainability science, notably through Dave Abson’s work, but is largely unexplored in food systems. Hence, we applied the ‘leverage points’ approach to the organic sector in the UK, in order to understand how to promote sustainable food production and consumption.

We used organic farming as an example of sustainable food production, based on its emphasis on sustainable principles such as reduced synthetic inputs, diverse crops and livestock, and soil health. While organic farming is no silver bullet for global food challenges, especially given its productivity limitations, the organic sector has an important role in inspiring a broader food system transformation.

To explore the leverage points concept in organic farming, we decided to construct a mental model, called a Fuzzy Cognitive Map, of factors influencing the uptake of organic farming in the UK. To do this, we harnessed the expertise of 18 organic specialists from policy, academic institutions, and organic-focussed charities and businesses. We brought the experts together in a workshop and asked them what they thought would influence the uptake of organic farming by 2050. Next, we asked the experts how a change in each of those factors would affect each of the other factors. This allowed us to produce a collective mental model of drivers and barriers for the uptake of organic farming, and their interactions. The resulting model was complex, with 55 factors and 720 interactions,  so for visualisation purposes we produced a simplified map with the top 11 most influential factors (see Figure 2).

Once we had produced the mental model, we could look at which factors were the most influential in affecting the whole system, i.e. deep leverage points. The most influential factor was ‘short-term thinking in economics’. By this, the experts meant that currently, as a society, our mindsets tend to be focussed on short-term economic profit, often at the expense of long‑term sustainability. Landowner engagement with organic farming was the second highest influential factor, again suggesting that the system is highly influenced by behavioural norms and mindsets – backing up Donella Meadows’ leverage points theory.

We then asked our organic experts how they expected the drivers and barriers of organic uptake to change in the future, under two contrasting scenarios – a fossil fuel-driven future, versus a highly sustainable future. Perhaps surprisingly, the model predicted that systemic change under a sustainable future was less than under a future of fossil fuels. This was because the experts did not identify deep leverage points as the most likely factors to change under a sustainable future. Instead, their focus was on those more obvious and tangible areas of intervention which Donella Meadows had hypothesised that we tend to focus on, but have limited potential to bring about change. Therefore, to bring about transformative change, our findings support Meadows’ theory that we need to shift focus to target deeper leverage points associated with system norms, values, worldviews and mindsets.

Twenty-five years on from Meadows’ seminal paper, the leverage points concept continues to shine a light on how we can change course and move towards a sustainable future, in this case in the context of sustainable food production and consumption. However, understanding how the system works is the easy part. The final and crucial challenge is to use this understanding to actually bring about change. Future policy design could play a pivotal role in this by incorporating systems thinking, such as through true-cost accounting, which aims to value the social, human, and natural impacts of food systems.