Defining regeneration within China’s agrifood system: Institutional frames and practitioners’ perspectives

In the past two decades, the concept of sustainability and its dominant developmental paradigm have been widely criticized for failing to halt environmental and social degradation. As a response, regeneration or ‘regenerative sustainability’ has emerged as an alternative paradigm, advocating holistic, process-oriented, and place-based approaches that support the thriving of socio-ecological systems. Agrifood systems, which strongly affect ecosystems and are closely linked to issues of social justice, are among the sectors where regeneration is urgently needed. Yet the concepts of regeneration and regenerative practices have already been defined in academic debates and have also been co-opted by industrial agriculture to reinforce eco-modernist narratives. This raises important questions about how regeneration can be defined from the bottom up in ways that reflect its emphasis on place-based approaches, and how such a context-specific definition can be meaningfully situated within the Chinese agrifood landscape. This contribution addresses these questions by presenting the results of a participatory online workshop that brought together practitioners from different fields within China’s agrifood system. Through collaborative activities, participants identified drivers, practices, and outcomes of regeneration and co-created a working definition that can serve as a foundation for further socio-ecological research.