SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS IN BOSNIAN AGRO-FOOD SYSTEM

Agriculture plays an important socio-economic role in rural areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH); the rural population accounts for 61% and almost half of the rural households is still engaged in agriculture. Faced with several environmental, economic and social problems, Bosnian agriculture needs a deep transformation to achieve both food security and food system sustainability. This paper explores the dynamics of past and ongoing transition towards sustainability in Bosnian agro-food system through the lens of the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions. MLP heuristic posits that transitions come about through interacting processes within and between niches (locus of radical innovations), regimes (locus of established and dominant socio-technical system) and an exogenous landscape. There are different agro-food niches in BiH (e.g. organic farming) but they are still marginal both in terms of land use and market share. Bosnia is characterised by a dual agro-food regime i.e. traditional farming and intensive agriculture. Landscape factors (e.g. civil war, Common Agricultural Policy, climate change) have shaped transformation in both sub-regimes. It is argued that changing climate and harmonisation with the regulatory acquis of the European Union will put pressure on the agro-food regime, whose de-alignment will create opportunities for nascent agro-food niches in the country. This also implies that transition pathways will likely be diverse; from technological/input substitution, to transformation and reconfiguration. Diversity of pathways means that different, tailored policy interventions are needed to foster transition-in-the-making towards sustainable agro-food system in BiH. MLP is useful to map sustainability transitions but further refinement is needed to adapt it to agro-food systems.