# Flow approaches in agri-food systems research: revealing blind spots to support social-ecological transformation

Sandrine Allain, Simon de Muynck, Pierre Guillemin, Kevin Morel, Tiago

Teixeira da Silva Siqueira, Lynda Aissani

► To cite this version:

Sandrine Allain, Simon de Muynck, Pierre Guillemin, Kevin Morel, Tiago Teixeira da Silva Siqueira, et al.. Flow approaches in agri-food systems research: revealing blind spots to support social-ecological transformation. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 2025, 49 (4), pp.471-493. 10.1080/21683565.2024.2421977. hal-04773727

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# Flow approaches in agrifood systems research: Revealing blind spots to support social-ecological transformation

**Article Type:** commentary

This document is a **post-print** of a published peer-reviewed paper accessible at: Allain, S., De Muynck, S., Guillemin, P., Morel, K., Teixeira da Silva Siqueira, T., & Aissani, L. (2024). Flow approaches in agri-food systems research: revealing blind spots to support social-ecological transformation. *Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 1–23*. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2024.2421977

**Authors:**

Allain, Sandrine ¹, De Muynck, Simon², Guillemin, Pierre³, Morel, Kevin ⁴*, Teixeira da Silva Siqueira, Tiago ⁵, Aissani, Lynda ⁶

**Affiliations:**

¹ University Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, LESSEM, St-Martin-d'Hères, France
ORCID: 0000-0002-9119-1898

²Urban Ecology Centre & Université Libre de Bruxelles, Faculty of Architecture, Laboratory on Urbanism, Infrastructures and Ecologies, Brussel, Belgium
ORCID: 0000-0003-3500-2615

³ INRAE, ASTER, Mirecourt, France; University Caen Normandie, UMR CNRS 6590, Espaces et Sociétés, Caen, France
ORCID: 0000-0002-5319-2208

⁴ UMR SADAPT, INRAE, AgroParisTech, Université Paris Saclay, France
ORCID: 0000-0002-8211-3003

⁵ University of Montpellier, UMR SELMET, Cirad, INRAE, Montpellier, France
ORCID: 0000-0003-0285-9903

⁶ INRAE, UR OPAALE, Rennes, France
ORCID: 0000-0002-0736-2691

*Corresponding Author: Kevin Morel, UMR BAGAP, Institut Agro Rennes-Angers
65 rue de Saint-Brieuc, CS 84215, F-35042 Rennes Cedex, France. kevin.morel@inrae.fr
**Abstract:**

Agrifood systems are called upon to undergo profound transformation. The development of “flow approaches” (including lifecycle assessment, carbon footprint, ecological footprint, and metabolism methodologies) has been crucial to point to the material side of human activities. More specifically, these approaches highlight the material and energetic costs of long agrifood value-chains, intensive farming practices, high levels of geographic specialization, as well as the production of non-food commodities. In the logical progression from diagnosis to action, flow approaches are currently being used as decision-support tools. But what are the biases induced by flow approaches when it comes to supporting real-world transformations? Based on our experience and interdisciplinary background, we argue that flow approaches provide a decontextualized and narrow framing of issues related to agrifood systems, such as accumulations and transfers across space and time, inequalities and asymmetries along the chain of activities, or long-lasting environmental impacts. Some aspects are measured and emphasized, while others are difficult to observe or neglected. Flow approaches, alone, are not well suited to inform issues of environmental justice, radical transformation, and local governance. As in most cases methodological advances will not suffice to overcome the biases induced; we call for hybridizing methods and for broadening analytical perspectives.

**Keywords:** social metabolism, LCA, environmental footprint, environmental justice, SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production
# 1. INTRODUCTION

Since the industrial revolution, and especially after the mid-twentieth century, the impact of human activities on the environment has drastically increased and has become one of the main drivers of changes in the Earth system that surpass geological forces, with irreversible consequences (Crutzen and Steffen 2003). Economic activities, in particular, generate polluting emissions that affect water quality (eutrophication and acidification), air quality (acidification, creation of low-level ozone, and depletion of the ozone layer), the climate, and, more generally the health of ecosystems and human beings (Rockström et al. 2009). These activities also consume resources, particularly non-renewables (fossil fuels, minerals, water, and land), generate new synthetic entities such as (micro- and nano-) plastics (Persson et al. 2022), and modify the habitability of various regions of the world for human and non-human populations (Pörtner et al. 2022).

Some of the biggest contributors to environmental impacts and spatial inequalities are global agrifood systems (Oteros-Rozas et al. 2019), which the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines as follows: ‘agrifood systems encompass the entire range of actors and their interlinked value-adding activities in the primary production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as in food storage, aggregation, post-harvest handling, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal, and consumption’ (Anon 2021). The FAO notes that ‘agrifood systems interact with non-food supply chains through the purchase of inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and farm and fishing equipment, and the provision of intermediate inputs for the production of non-food commodities (e.g., maize for biofuel production or cotton for textiles)’. Following Kleinpeter et al. (2023), we add to this definition the activities linked to nutrient flows and waste management.

In their dominant form, agrifood systems are characterized by long, globalized and ramified value chains, geographical specialization, and open biogeochemical cycles (nutrients, carbon), with little regard for fair and equitable value-sharing and environmental sustainability (Ericksen 2008). Rethinking the organization of agrifood systems and their associated narratives is undoubtedly one of the main paths to a desirable future (Gowdy and Krall 2013; Bai et al. 2016; Reisman and Fairbairn 2021).

Political hope for reducing the severe environmental footprint of dominant economic models, including the global agrifood system, has largely rested on productivity gains and technological innovations (i.e. decoupling, Fischer-Kowalski and Swilling 2011). However, this hope has been
challenged, due to historical evidence and thermodynamic laws (Allain et al. 2022; Parrique et al. 2019) showing that the growth and complexification of socioeconomic systems are closely entangled with resource consumption and waste generation. The amount of material extracted, used, and transformed into built stocks, waste, and pollution on Planet Earth has never been greater (Haas et al. 2020), despite efficiency gains in production systems, the rise of circular value chains, and the development of responsible consumption behaviors.

Calls for transformative changes have increasingly been made, along with demands for reopening the spectrum of possible socio-economic models (Fedele et al. 2020; Díaz et al. 2019). Meanwhile, regional and local actors are maneuvering within the leeway they have (Juhola et al. 2012) to address global and local challenges. For instance, many innovations are emerging at the local scale in agrifood systems, both technically (e.g., agroecological farming practices, innovative waste and water treatment) and organizationally (e.g., local food supply, water and waste management based on industrial ecology approaches, collective governance) (Duru et al. 2015; Fernandez et al. 2013). Since 2000, energy and matter flow approaches have gained significant popularity in academia for revealing the “material side” of our economies (Bringezu et al. 2003). Many of these approaches employ the metabolism analogy (Wassenaar 2015; Daniels 2002; Pauliuk and Hertwich 2015; Bobulescu 2015), which refers to the inputs and outputs of matter and energy that an organism—and, by extension a society—requires to reproduce and develop. These flow approaches use material and/or energy-based metrics to characterize the functioning of cities (urban metabolism (Zhang 2013)), nations, or regions (societal metabolism (Gerber and Scheidel 2018)), trace the footprint of products and value chains (Godar et al. 2015), ecodesign products, and design circular industries (industrial metabolism (Wassenaar 2015)). Weight equivalents and energy equivalents are among the most frequently used metrics, as they enable large-scale accounting distinct from classical economic values<fnref n="1" />. An increasingly wide spectrum of economic activities and resources has been integrated, with the creation of large databases (e.g., Wood et al. 2015). Methods have also been developed to assess the efficiency, viability and even fairness of activities, and to connect these assessments with prospective and anticipatory thinking, for instance about the vulnerability of agrifood systems in the face of pandemics, climate change, and energy crisis (Bahers et al. 2020).

<footnote n="1">¹ For example EROI (energy returns on investments, Cleveland et al 1984); embodied energy (Odum 1984), HANPP (human appropriation of net primary production, Imhoff et al 2004); and ecological footprint (Wackernagel and Rees 1996), among others.</footnote>
Growing attention is being paid not only to the input flows of matter and energy but also increasingly to their outputs in terms of environmental and social impacts. This has led to the development of lifecycle thinking, which, for instance, has extended the assessment of an agricultural product's impacts from 'farm to fork' and further, from 'cradle to grave' (Caffrey and Veal 2013). Many assessment methods and applications are now available for this purpose (Fan et al. 2022).

In the following, we use the term ‘flow approaches’ to refer broadly to socio-environmental impact assessment methodologies (including lifecycle assessment, carbon footprint, ecological footprint, etc.) and metabolism methodologies (Material Flow Analysis, MultiScale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism; see Gerber and Scheidel 2018 for a review). All these approaches relate to material and energy flows. Some explicitly focus on identifying and quantifying these flows between the socio-technosphere and the biosphere to estimate the consequences of the former on the latter, while others include flows only in their metrics and analysis, or additionally cover other aspects of social-ecological interactions.

The counterpart of the boom in ‘flow approaches’ (fig. 1) is that it inevitably introduces a framing bias in how we consider – and, *a fortiori*, reduce – the impacts of production and consumption systems. Some aspects are measured and emphasized, while others are difficult to observe or are neglected. Beyond methodological and robustness issues, flow approaches are known to be techno-economically centered (Cherp et al. 2018), even though their application is increasingly oriented towards addressing more and more complex issues, including governance.

We acknowledge the advances made since the beginning of flow approaches and their success in raising awareness about the link between consumption/production choices and the socio-environmental crisis. However, in light of the aforementioned issues, we believe that the focus of flow approaches, as they spread across technical, economic and political arenas, is too narrow to deeply transform agrifood systems.

The insights presented in this paper were developed through a week-long interdisciplinary workshop on material flows linking cities and hinterlands. The workshop brought together researchers from various fields – ecological and agricultural economics, agroecology, environmental engineering and assessment, geography, urban ecology and sustainability sciences – and approaches – participatory-action research, engineering and expertise, and academic research. The aim of this paper is to highlight some limitations in flow approaches, which currently
make them inaccurate to guiding collective choices. As in most cases methodological advances
will not suffice to overcome the biases induced, so we argue for the development of a ‘flow
approach literacy’, where flow approaches are used reflexively and within pluralistic governance
settings.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Scientific production in four strands of flow approaches applied to agrifood systems</figcaption></figure>

(SCOPUS database, 1989-2022)

LCA = Life cycle assessments

Env. Footprint = environmental, ecological, water footprints

C footprint = Carbon footprint

MFA = material and/or energy flow analyses

Four database searches were applied to provide an overview of different flow methods (without aiming for exhaustivity):

TITLE-ABS-KEY( ( agrifood OR agricult* OR agrofood OR farm* OR "food system*" ) AND ( "life cycle assessment" OR "life cycle analysis" ) )

TITLE-ABS-KEY( ( agrifood OR agricult* OR agrofood OR farm* OR "food system*" ) AND ( "environmental footprint" OR "ecological footprint" OR "water footprint" ) )

TITLE-ABS-KEY( ( agrifood OR agricult* OR agrofood OR farm* OR "food system*" ) AND ( "carbon footprint" ) )

TITLE-ABS-KEY( ( agrifood OR agricult* OR agrofood OR farm* OR "food system*" ) AND ( "material flow analysis" OR "energy flow analysis" OR "social metabolism" ) )
## 2. THE SHORTCOMINGS OF FLOW APPROACHES – A NARROW AND DECONTEXTUALIZED MODEL OF ACTIVITIES AND ACTORS

### 2.1. Contested reductions: provisioning rather than production; quantity rather than quality; orders of magnitude rather than contextualized analyses

Flow approaches, by their nature, spotlight quantities of matter and energy that move from one physical compartment to another. In the case of agrifood systems, one main concern that flow approaches address is the provisioning of the different parts of the food production chain to ensure food security, a question that garnered renewed attention in the context of Covid-19 (Kumar et al. 2020; Rivera-Ferre et al. 2021; Weersink et al. 2021). Another focal point is the supply of energy from agricultural products, co-products and wastes, which has increased in the context of the energy transition (Guo et al. 2019). Flow approaches are expected to quantify the matter available for these non-food functions, reveal trade-offs between food, fiber and energy flows, and aid decisions about creating biorefineries for instance. However, this accounting lens shadows other aspects that must be considered when implementing changes in value chains, especially when these changes imply large built infrastructures and new processes (Carraresi et al. 2018). We regret that socio-technical systems of production, which are much broader than provisioning flows alone, and flow qualities (in contrast to flow quantities) too often remain under the radar. A production system embeds technologies and techniques, processes, work organizations, and infrastructures that are connected in complex way. These socio-technical connections create context-specific dynamics (Hansen and Coenen 2015), historical dependencies and lock-in effects, limiting the possibilities for innovations to emerge and spread (Geels 2005) and reducing the relevance of one-fits-all recommendations. Without a more comprehensive view of production systems and their local anchoring, many forces (e.g. technological choices, the nature of processes) and considerations driving flows of matter and energy may be neglected.

**Box 1: Reductionist approaches to food and energy systems in the Brussels Region**
The political agreement on "burden sharing" between the Belgian regions set a target for energy production from renewable sources at 0.073 Mtoe (or 849 GWh) for the Brussels-Capital Region in 2020. This is one of the reasons given by the Brussels Government for creating a regional biogas plant (Government of the Brussels-Capital Region, 2019) – a technological choice oriented towards energy production, and economic profitability that barely considered other relevant fields: quality of outputs, autonomy of actors, and the reduction of flow intensity. This choice also risks generating multi-scale tensions between actors who want to implement socio-ecological innovations. For example, green waste (including shredded material) produced in the Brussels Region is increasingly considered a resource for many local stakeholders who need it to supply their activities (composts from citizen neighborhoods of about 10t/year/unit, municipal composts of several hundred tons per year per unit, urban entrepreneurs who collect biowaste by electric bicycle and compost it in meso composts of tens of tons per year per unit, etc.). The macro technological choice to install a biogas plant could therefore absorb most of the available green waste streams, to the detriment of socio-ecological practices in use at lower scales (micro, meso). Focusing the management of biowaste on energy supply needs, without a concerted, multi-actor platform allowing for an equitable distribution of flows, and without attention to the quality of outputs (industrial digestate vs. composts from a variety of treatment practices), therefore would seem problematic. This issue concerns a treatment facility handling approximately 50,000 tons of organic waste per year, which will produce several thousand tons of digestate to be applied on agricultural land in Brussels and its hinterland. Other similar dynamics, focused solely on economic pragmatism, are underway in Belgium and involve particularly large quantities of sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants, which are extensively used in agriculture and are contaminated with PFAS. In 2023, nearly 120,000 tons of sludge were spread on fields in Wallonia. Here again, the quality of the outputs was overlooked in favor of a reductionist industrial logic of the circular economy.

Such a gap appears, for instance, when comparing end-of-life processes for food waste – industrial anaerobic digestion versus nearby composting – in an urban region. A rough comparison would favor the former, based either on available flow quantities (see Box 1) or on environmental impacts measured through conventional LCA (Le Pera et al. 2022). However, the two processes are actually difficult to compare because they serve not only waste management but also other
functions: energy generation from anaerobic digestion, and societal functions (social links, community empowerment) in the case of nearby composting (Lehec, 2020). In addition, the two options rely on very different socio-technical rationales (economy of scale versus reduction of waste collection), which raises questions about the relevance of a comparison that is solely quantitative. Assessing the local desirability of each option through this single lens could even be counterproductive (Box 1).

## 2.2 A view “from the inside”, masking extraction and disposal functions

Although the decreasing stocks of usable resources and the increasing quantity of waste have been alerted by scholars for at least half a century (Boulding 1966), the study of agrifood systems through material flows does not easily integrate considerations of upstream resource extraction and downstream disposal or 'sink' functions (burial, emission, discharge, export). This knowledge gap has been undertaken by Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), which provided references about the environmental performance of different farming systems (Siqueira and Duru 2016) and diets (Clark and Tilman 2017). However, the range of environmental issues raised by agri-food systems makes LCA results still very partial.

In agrifood systems, the relative contribution to greenhouse gas emissions of pre- and post-production activities has been increasing, compared to that of farm activities (Tubiello et al. 2021). Other major environmental problems result from upstream and downstream flows of the food system (extraction and disposal). A well-known example is the impact of deforestation and social conflicts associated with agribusiness economy, in which soybean is a major input (Sauer 2018). Other issues, such as water contamination, are also gaining attention, but mostly at the watershed scale (e.g., eutrophication), rather than across longer distances (e.g., sargassum accumulation, Djakouré et al. 2017). The processes of collection, sorting, digestion, and composting or incineration of biowaste, associated with downstream flows, also involve the production of various pollutants: not only nitrogen and carbon emissions but also micropollutants such as microplastics (Weithmann et al. 2018) and heavy metals (Zheng et al. 2022), which remain under the radar.

LCA provides insights into a wide range of negative externalities. However, despite advances, they still face the problem of the relevance of “characterization factors” (used to translate a flow into an impact), especially when the impact is place-dependent (Bellekom et al. 2006). Jeswani et
al. (2010) have identified the need to broaden and deepen the LCA approaches to consider more
than the environmental impacts of a techno-system. These methodological developments focus not
only on the articulation with other dimensions of sustainability (economic and social) but also on
the integration of temporal and spatial information. Around the same time, Reap et al. (2008a,
2008b) have already highlighted unresolved issues through all LCA steps, emphasizing the need
to integrate spatially explicit information, particularly for the characterization factors. In 2010, the
guidelines of LCA practices were published by the European Commission (Wolf et al. 2011). Even
though this handbook details many rules for consistent LCA practices, it appears insufficient, and
therefore research in LCA for different economic sectors continues. For instance, there have been
attempts to use spatialization to spotlight areas that are highly resource intensive or specifically
sensitive to an environmental impact (Aissani 2019). However, this spatialization approach in
LCA is not yet generalized and is heavily dependent on expert practices (Loiseau et al. 2018).

More importantly, the paradigms developed to analyze and assess agrifood systems offer a view
'from the inside', allowing for the diagnosis of the efficiency, resource intensity, or autonomy of
farming and food systems (Renner et al. 2020). Although highly informative, these analyses are
not designed to identify the costs borne by the spaces and actors outside agricultural production or
consumption basins. For example, the dependence of specialized agrifood systems on imported
fertilizers (for crops) and nitrogen-rich feed (for livestock) is a matter of concern (Le Noë et al.
2019), but the focus is on the economic and agronomic vulnerability of the agricultural production,
especially in the global North. Likewise, many studies characterize the outsourcing or linearity of
a system in terms of nutrients, raw materials, energy and/or water (for example Billen et al. 2014),
but fail to provide any specifications on the geography of these relations of dependence. In short,
informing extraction and disposal functions is constrained by the limited capacity of available
methods and databases to spatialize flows; however, these blind spots are, as the above-mentioned
references show, also symptomatic of a Western-centered and productivity-driven knowledge base
on agrifood systems. This contrasts with the concerns raised by research conducted in African
cities, for instance resiliience of urban food systems, infrastructure deficiencies, and the
distribution of added value (Alarcon et al. 2017; Karg et al. 2016).

## 2.3. *Governance and justice issues reachable only within reduced perimeters*
Reorganizing activities to close nutrient loops and redistribute values and burdens requires new modalities for coordinating people, nature, activities, and technologies. To our knowledge, attempts to characterize the governance of flows are generally implemented at local or national scales (Moraine et al. 2016; Kahiluoto et al. 2015), rather than at a global scale, across large and loose webs of actors. Examples of flow approaches used as tools to collectively redesign agrifood systems are exceptions; and when they do exist, experiments on them are conducted within reduced geographical perimeters (Gabriel et al. 2020). Consequently, a large portion of distribution and equity issues raised by the global geography of flows remains out of reach. For instance, places that accumulate functions of extraction and disposal remain weakly identified (Bahers et al. 2020), despite evidence that they bear violent conflicts and injustices (Temper et al. 2015). This raises the issue of recognition for the people and ecosystems that carry most of the burden of agrifood systems. Geographical accumulation can additionally compound with time lags. For instance, if compost made from urban organic waste is sold to peri-urban farmers, micropollutants can accumulate over the long run in vulnerable peripheral areas. Moreover, agrifood systems are much larger than their organic fraction and generate macroplastics, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), among other pollutants of low biodegradability, through transportation, distribution, storage, and cooking, for example. This creates considerable issues of intergenerational injustice. After distribution and recognition, the last dimension of environmental justice that scholars generally consider (Schlosberg 2004) – participation – is not specifically linked to flow approaches. However, it can be at stake if engineering tools such as flow assessments are used as authoritative arguments (termed ‘technologies of hubris’ by Jasanoff 2003) rather than as partial insights.

## 2.4 Little capacity to support systemic transformations

Innovations often occur in niches, carried out by actors who are experimenting with and testing new options that are, by definition, evolving (Geels 2005; Schot and Geels 2011). This implies a lack of stabilized knowledge, data, and references on innovations (Morel et al. 2020). Moreover, this lack is compounded by the fact that academic research and funding are mostly locked into supporting the improvement of dominant mainstream technologies and systems, rather than focusing on radically alternative ones (Meynard et al. 2018) or on exnovation—that is, bans,
destabilization, and shutdowns of certain technologies and innovations (David 2017; Fossati et al. 2022). This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to assess the extent to which, and the conditions under which, the wide diversity of technological and organizational alternatives could contribute to enhancing the sustainability of agrifood systems. For example, relevant data on alternative farming practices, as well as food, water and waste technologies, are not commonly found in flow inventory databases (van der Werf et al. 2020).

The types of metrics and indicators used in flow approaches also determine the comparisons between different technological and organizational options. For example, LCAs do not account well for some key concerns linked to agrifood systems, such as soil degradation and biodiversity (van der Werf et al. 2020). Moreover, LCA is based on a decoupling rationale (the decoupling between environmental impacts and growth domestic product) (Vadén et al. 2020) but is not suited to other types of transformation, such as degrowth or absolute sustainability. In a decoupling logic, the central expectation for agriculture is its productivity, and environmental impact is commonly expressed per unit of product. This approach thus favors input-intensive production systems and land-sparing logics, since environmental impacts are mathematically diluted by higher levels of production (van der Werf et al. 2020). As our experience shows, proponents of productivist agriculture can even instrumentalize flow approach results to gain political support. At the very least, biases linked to the limits of available knowledge and the choice of productivity-centered functional units can, by accumulation, reinforce societal and political belief in business-as-usual transition trajectories (van der Werf et al. 2020).

# 3. RESEARCH DIRECTIONS TO CONNECT FLOW APPROACHES WITH A SYSTEMIC AND TRANSFORMATIVE GOAL

Based on the above-mentioned limitations, we argue that a research effort needs to be made towards extending “flow approaches” and reconnecting them with systems thinking (Fig. 2).

## 3.1. Extending the perimeter of flows and issues under consideration
We argue that three interrelated subjects need to be considered simultaneously: improving our understanding of extraction and disposal functions, the spatialization of flows, and the integration of environmental justice issues (Schlosberg 2004; Walker 2009; Coolsaet 2020). Furthering research effort in these three domains is certainly a prerequisite for increasing the capacity of flow approaches to support fair and sustainable transitions in agrifood systems.

A growing body of research on food supply chains uses the concept of foodsheds 'to describe the linkages between food-producing and food-consuming regions at different scales' (Schreiber et al. 2021). Works on local or regional self-sufficiency (e.g., Metropolitan Foodshed and Self-sufficiency Scenario, Zasada et al. 2019) show that these foodsheds go beyond regional and national borders. However, while these types of models focused on production and consumption certainly do integrate environmental resources as limiting factors (soil fertility, altitude and rainfall), they do not consider the environmental footprint of inputs (energy, machinery, animal and plant seeds and fertilizers). This extension of the assessment would certainly reveal much wider extraction and supply sheds, including for alternative and local supply chains (Schott 2019). In fact, addressing the entire agrifood chain implies analyzing upstream flows and paying very close attention to the socio-ecological impacts of inputs. Some studies have attempted to explore these upstream flows. They have, for instance, pointed out the contradictions in agrifood systems' relocation projects in the case of market gardening (Guillemin 2020: pp. 282-291) and the agri-energy bioeconomy (Marty et al. 2021). They have shown that farming systems relying on imported inputs have significant environmental and geopolitical implications that need to be documented. Examples from the studies mentioned above include dehydrated legume fodders in the Aube département in France that require South African coal, or a market gardening system relying on a drip irrigation system produced in a territory under disputed occupation. Extraction is indeed a function in agri-food systems that is highly sensitive to geopolitical and environmental conflicts, due to the spatial concentration of certain resources. There is a research front here that could identify influences in the agrarian extractivism literature (McKay et al. 2021), which studies the extractivist principles of agribusiness models, and in methods coupling multi-regional input-output analysis with LCA or other footprint assessments (Papangelou et al. 2021).

Another blind spot that has been emphasized is the downstream flows of the agrifood system, linked to its losses and to waste. Identifying 'disposal sheds' would be valuable for locating the impacts of agricultural production and food consumption. It seems particularly important to
identify and locate value-chain components that drive polluting emissions and downstream flows
and wastes. Certain components of agrifood systems, particularly distribution and logistics, might
appear especially impactful (Tubiello et al. 2021), since they are energy intensive and heavily rely
on the petrochemicals industry (e.g., plastic food containers). The development of new metrics,
such as value-added-based responsibility (Piñero et al. 2019) could improve such reporting, and
help highlight levers of change, including exnovation, outside the strict perimeters of production
and consumption.

More easily attainable advances may be on the organic portion of agrifood flows. At the local level, there is room for redesigning systems, since organic matter and nutrients are both a source of pollution and a resource, and waste flows do not operate over very long distances.

At the metropolitan scale, the disposal function is concretely disconnected from agricultural production and could increasingly be analyzed and co-designed in an integrated approach that reconnects production, waste management and water management (De Muynck et al. 2019). Many innovative systems for ‘closing loops’ are underway, and the refinement and contextualization of flow methods and databases, coupled with participatory approaches, could support such advances (De Muynck and Nalpas 2021). On a wider scale, the challenge is to redistribute the nutrient load across space and biophysical compartments, which would in this case require policy instruments of a legal or regulatory nature (e.g., rights to nutrients, Kahiluoto et al. 2015).

## 3.2. Accounting for the complexities of real ecosystems, human practices and organizations

The various functions that constitute agrifood systems, as well as other socioecological systems – extracting, producing, consuming and disposing of waste – are all interdependent. We can easily assume that the more we consume, the more we produce, extract resources, and generate waste and pollution. However, these different functions are not related in a strictly linear way. For instance, farming systems relying on agroecological approaches (e.g., integrated crop-livestock systems, agroforestry, permaculture, etc.) can achieve high levels of production with limited use of external inputs, as they tend to close nutrient cycles at the farm level (Sileshi et al. 2020; Morel and Léger 2016). At the same time, highly efficient production processes, supposedly low in resource use and waste, can lead to increases in demand and consumption through rebound effects (Horvath et al. 2019), ultimately resulting in a larger environmental footprint. Understanding these
complex relationships is key to activating virtuous levers of change and avoiding maladaptation. Complex systems thinking, and especially the focus on the interactions it induces (dependencies, interdependencies, positive and negative feedback loops, emergencies), could be a way to reflect on the relationships between extracting, producing, consuming and disposal functions. Frameworks such as social-ecological metabolisms (Giampietro et al. 2009) or multi-level transitions to a circular economy (Iacovidou et al. 2021) pave the way for such analysis, though key sociotechnical interactions underlying flows of matter and energy remain under-investigated. In this regard, pioneering practices and on-the-ground assessments (for instance, the reuse of human excreta or treated water in agri-food systems, see Starck et al. 2024 and Hristov et al., 2021, respectively) are invaluable sources of knowledge.

Reconnecting flows with the activities, infrastructures, and processes that originate, direct or drive them also requires contextualization. Identifying drivers (Papangelou et al. 2023), whether they act as levers or brakes, can help characterize links between the context and the dynamic evolution of a system. In agrifood systems, local conditions both drive and constrain opportunities for change. Therefore, it is essential to account for the physical systems and ecosystems supporting food production, as well as the institutions organizing resource-users-waste relationships. Social-ecological (Himanen et al. 2016) and socio-technical (Ceschin and Gaziulusoy 2016) systems approaches should thus be more explicitly incorporated into flow approaches and guide the evolution of assessment methods towards a more comprehensive reflection on the diversity of agrifood systems.

Whether it is for modeling the system, its function(s), or its impacts, we advocate for a shift from modeling that is intended to be as 'objective' as possible (i.e., detached from any other consideration and therefore out of context) to 'pluralistic' and 'situated' modeling. Objective modeling aims to represent a system unambiguously in space and time, whereas 'pluralistic' modeling seeks to represent a socio-technical system with an inherently ambiguous inscription in time and space. Such a precautionary approach to modeling (Allain and Salliou 2022) could promote reflection on the framing biases introduced by conventional life-cycle, footprint or sociometabolic frameworks. Rather than producing abstract assessments of processes, products, diets, or farming systems, these methods, within transdisciplinary and action-research frameworks, could support the emergence, assessment, and implementation of alternative and locally-informed agrifood systems.
To implement this pluralistic approach, it is necessary to have the capacity to navigate between different methodologies, the many existing tools, various databases, and conceptual frameworks, and to bring them into dialogue. This pluralistic approach may seem overly ambitious, as it requires a large amount of data. To overcome this significant challenge and apply this approach when it is necessary and feasible, flow and impact assessment practitioners could apply pluralistic modeling to a specific meso-scale case study. In line with this topic, Gutowski (2018) questions the role of human behavior (interactions between human-being and industrial or agricultural activities and processes) in system modeling for LCA studies. He proposes to 'put people back at the center' in order to consider the potential contribution of this kind of interactions to LCA results and their use in a decision-making process. In other words, the issue is to recognize that socio-technical system are more than just techno-system; they also include know-how, power structures and governance processes. Going further, integrating plural value judgments into modeling could pave the way for greater stakeholder participation and self-reflection, both in formulating model assumptions and interpreting assessment results (Nathan and Coles 2020).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2: Research fronts to foster the use of flow approaches for agrifood systems' transformations**</figcaption></figure>
4. CONCLUSION

The major changes in the ways we produce, distribute, transform, consume, and dispose of agricultural products (not only food, but also feeds, fuels and waste) contributing to making social-ecological systems increasingly complex and ‘wicked’. These changes disconnect causes from effects, and pressures from impacts both in time and space. Flow approaches provide a framework with the valuable merit of revealing some of these blurred links, thereby highlighting the extent of the “great acceleration” (Görg et al. 2020) in the consumption of material, water, nutrient and energy consumption, as well as the increase in waste and pollution production over the past few decades. However, the insights gained from LCA, social metabolism, and environmental footprints, among other flow methods, are insufficient to induce collective action. In fact, there are serious doubts about whether increasing knowledge actually supports transformative changes. Once considered a disruptive tool calling for a great transformation (Krausmann et al. 2008; Allaire and Daviron 2017) of our economies, and particularly of agrifood systems, flow methods have actually mainstreamed and downscaled in their application. This has sometimes led to oversimplifications or even instrumentalization. Some may view them as part of a ‘great derangement’ (Nightingale et al. 2020): a dualistic worldview that endorse technological fixes, such as intensive farming models or industrial waste management systems.

We therefore advance that an emerging scientific frontier lies not only in methodological sophistication but, more importantly, in the capacity to hybridize flow approach results with other forms of knowledge to support agrifood systems transformation. We believe that the research fields of environmental justice, socio-technical transitions, and agroecology can provide important insights. Environmental justice principles add considerations of recognition and distribution to flow approaches: they can help generate socially and politically meaningful insights, and reveal trade-offs that need to be navigated. By considering the entirety of socio-technical systems, including the imaginaries they sustain, we can also help to shift from an engineering view of innovations to a more systemic one. This shift is necessary to anticipate sustainability lock-ins and avoid over-simplistic technological choices that can commit communities to undesirable long-term consequences. Agroecology, which links practice and knowledge, offers complementary avenues for redesigning value chains and reclosing biogeochemical cycles. There is certainly unexplored potential at the intersection of problem-solving endeavors and critical perspectives (Chevalier
2019) that flow approaches could explore. The capacity of flow assessment tools to raise awareness of the environmental impact of agrifood systems holds great potential for fostering public participation and democratizing environmental decision-making. However, the downside of this public visibility is that these assessment tools can also be used as authoritative arguments to shut down debates on social-ecological issues, such as agrifood system transformation. We argue that a 'flow approach literacy' should be developed at the science-policy interface, aiming to empower people and broaden the scope of meaningful social-ecological transformations.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to the various participants to and coordinators of the MOSAIC project seminars; presentations and discussions offered a fertile ground for elaborating this reflection. We are particularly indebted to Anne Trémier and Rémi Lombard-Latune, who were involved in the initial stages of this writing. We also thank Rachel Boutrou who was in charge of facilitating the week-long interdisciplinary workshop that set the stage for this paper, and, at the other end of the process, to Liz Carey-Libbrecht who corrected the written form of the manuscript.

**DECLARATION OF INTEREST:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

## FUNDING INFORMATION

This paper benefited from the funding support of INRAE metaprogram BETTER.

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