Societal Drivers of Food and Water Systems 1

Food chains interact with the vast, complex, and tangled webs of material flows —nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, water, energy—circling the globe. Cities and households are where those material flows interact with the greatest intensity. At every point within these webs and chains, technologies enable them to function: from bullock-drawn ploughs, to mobile phones, to container ships, to wastewater treatment plants. Drawing on the theory of plural rationality, we show how the production and consumption of food and water in households and societies can be understood as occurring according to four institutionally induced styles: four basic ways of understanding the world and acting within it; four ways of living with one another and with nature. That there are four is due to the theory of plural rationality at the core of this chapter.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  The Oxford Handbook of Food, Water and Society

• Publication date

  2018-05-08

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Business, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190669799.013.48
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

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