Quantifying ambivalence towards sustainable intensification: an exploration of the UK public’s values

Andrew P. Barnes (), Amanda Lucas and Gregory Maio
Additional contact information
Andrew P. Barnes: SRUC
Amanda Lucas: University of Exeter
Gregory Maio: Cardiff University

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, 2016, vol. 8, issue 3, No 13, 609-619

Abstract: Abstract Sustainable intensification (SI) has been proposed as a solution to meeting the challenge of feeding a growing global population under increasing land pressure. This paper explores the level of ambivalence felt towards SI and towards experts promoting SI based solutions to meet food security. A web-based experiment was conducted with 600 respondents who had varying degrees of knowledge about food security issues. We found a diversity of public ambivalence towards sustainable intensification and a high level of felt ambivalence towards experts promoting SI as a solution to global food security. High levels of ambivalence towards experts seemed to influence how messages on global food security were accepted. Moreover, within the respondents here sustainable consumption and greater equity ranked higher than production based sustainable intensification solutions. This paper represents the first application of the psychological construct of ambivalence applied to the topic of sustainable intensification and we argue this helps to localise the debate around SI as it offers the opportunity to capture or disentangle responses towards food security issues.

Keywords: Sustainable intensification; Aambivalence; Ordinal logisitic regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12571-016-0565-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssefpa:v:8:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1007_s12571-016-0565-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ulture/journal/12571

DOI: 10.1007/s12571-016-0565-y

Access Statistics for this article

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food is currently edited by R.N. Strange

More articles in Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food from Springer, The International Society for Plant Pathology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().