Relational values in regenerative agriculture: a systematic review & checklist for transformative potential
Modern agriculture has increased yields but degraded socio-ecological systems all over the world. Consequently, advocates of regenerative agriculture aim to regenerate land and transform food systems. We undertook a systematic literature review of 104 peer-reviewed articles to determine how relational values might be contributing to regenerative agriculture.
Relational values are values that emerge from specific human-nature relationships or meaningful relationships between people that happen in nature. Cultivating these values could inspire mindset shifts that support agricultural transformations.
This review was guided by our research questions: (1) to what extent have relational values been implicitly or explicitly examined across the regenerative agriculture literature? (2) What implications might relational values have for the transformative potential of regenerative agriculture?
Building on prior research, we explored salient articulations of relational values – identity through relationships; good life; sense of place; care; and human connections through nature. The review highlighted the role of Indigenous knowledges in regenerative agriculture; sustaining conditions for relational values; and the valuing of life supporting processes in regenerative agriculture.
Our results reflect a distinction between productivist framings of regenerative agriculture that primarily emphasise instrumental values and relational framings of regenerative agriculture that foreground relational values but embrace value pluralism. We propose this distinction is more significant to regenerative agriculture’s transformative potential than the process-outcomes distinction.
We suggest that conceptualisations of regenerative agriculture are more likely to contribute to sustainability transformations if they mobilise the (often latently held) relational values evident in the regenerative agriculture literature. Based on these results we develop checking questions for regenerative agriculture advocates to reflexively assess whether key actors are engaged in relational regenerative agriculture.
Three of the co-authors: Dr Ethan Gordon, Dr Matías Hargreaves-Mendez, and Professor Hannah Gosnell at the Society of Range Management Conference, Lake Tahoe