Three Horizons was used to develop a successful multimillion research bid to the UKRI Transforming UK Food Systems programme for transforming the Yorkshire food system.
Summary of Use:
University of York is the lead organisation. Lead sponsors of Three Horizons projects are the academic principal investigators.
Three Horizons was used to develop a successful multimillion research bid – FixOurFood – to the UKRI Transforming UK Food Systems programme for a £6M five-year research programme. 3H was used to understand how transformation to a regenerative food system in Yorkshire could be supported. 3H was also used to decide on the strategic focus of the programme before it was operational.
FixOurFood used Three Horizons in a series of surveys and workshops with expert stakeholders (researchers and practitioners) in the Yorkshire food system to understand how transformation to a regenerative food system could be supported in Yorkshire. This process captured c. 1400 individual insights from 113 different experts from 55 organisations about challenges in the present, desired future food systems and how transformation could be supported.
Three Horizons is also used for convening workshops to develop alignment and actions as the project progresses.
Use Experience:
Provided structure for the bid and a foundation for workshops throughout the project. Use of the framework was included in the bid as a way of providing structure for the journey of transformation.
We found Three Horizons to be a simple but powerful framework for structuring our workshops, surveys and conversations. People seemed to grasp it intuitively. When participants struggled it was usually because we were adding too much complexity (e.g. doing system mapping and causal loop diagrams). It was also challenging to get participants to think really radically in the third horizon, and to avoid rather human-centric perspectives (e.g. remembering to think about the wellbeing of wider nature). Using frameworks and tools relating to regenerative systems throughout 3H processes (e.g. see Future Stewards resources) could potentially help participants to develop ambitious and imaginative H3 visions.
We clustered H2 into several key ‘domains of action’, based on where there was pre-existing momentum in the food system. However, in hindsight we would have made sure our H2 points were as far as possible focused on real and specific actors and activities in the food system rather than more generic points. We would also recommend being careful to separate pre-existing innovations from innovations that need to happen (although both are important).
We found that using an ‘offers and requests’ exercise to encourage consideration of the interdependence between our H2 action domains went down well with participants.
Find out more:
Program overview: https://fixourfood.org/programme-overview/
Pamphlet describing results of the Three Horizons process: https://fixourfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Transforming-the-Yorkshire-food-system-for-people-and-planet.pdf
#Food #Education #Farming
