Redesign

Redesign (stage 3) strategies are based fully on the principles of the ecologies, particularly agroecology, organizational ecology, political ecology and social ecology, and are fully elaborated to address complexity (the earlier stages benefit from an understanding of complexity, but are not in themselves necessarily complex to execute).  They take longer to implement and demand fundamental changes in the use of human and physical resources. This final, or redesign stage, is unlikely to be achieved, however, until the first two stages have been attempted. Ideally, strategies should be selected from the first two stages for their ability to inform analysts about redesign (the most underdeveloped stage at this point) and to contribute toward a smooth evolution to the redesign stage.

The redesign stage brings us to full implementation of the right to food, food sovereignty, and a reintegration of humans with nature. While some European analysts have historically considered such shifts anti-modern, Duncan (1996) has argued that this is a misreading of European, particularly British history.  But capitalist and socialist countries mistakenly pursued trajectories of disengagement from ecological processes to their detriment.  In particular, they lost the plot on the centrality of an ecological approach to agriculture and its role in the economy.  It was not that ecological approaches were unknown in earlier periods, but certainly they were marginalized by the dominant approaches to modernity.  The Redesign proposals focus on returning food systems to a central place, as part of a shift to a post-capitalist society, one in which many currently privatized functions return to, or become, public ones.

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