Rethinking livestock future : behavioural insights from value-focused thinking and MCDA

Transforming agri-food systems, particularly livestock production, is a pressing challenge due to different visions, unavoidable trade-offs between sustainability dimensions, conflicting opinions, and multiple uncertainties. To advance the debate on the future of Swiss livestock production, we conducted a multi-criteria decision analysis using value-focused thinking. We developed four visions (business-as-usual, efficient, consistent and sufficient) and a hierarchy of 14 objectives based on literature and expert feedback. Twenty actors from the Swiss livestock value chain, covering the three policy clusters that make up the Swiss agricultural landscape, participated in a survey. We elicited (1) their a priori preferred vision for livestock production in 2050 and (2) their weighting of the sustainability dimensions. Our findings revealed key behavioral issues. First, for one cluster, the a priori preferred vision diverged from the vision recommended by the MCDA. Second, objective weightings reflected each cluster’s beliefs, with major disagreements around self-sufficiency and animal welfare. Third, despite these differences, the consistent and sufficient visions performed best across clusters. These results suggest that one cluster may misunderstand or lack proper information about the system’s predictions. We propose measures to address these gaps, fostering informed decision-making and paving the way toward more sustainable livestock production.