Pathways to Change

How can we take action for change? There are actions for agricultural transformation that can work in short-term actions to match with political cycles with leaders who want to see results very quickly; but it’s important to have long-term strategies with policy changes to invest in. Each country needs to develop its own sustainable development path with specific action and outcomes at the national and sub-national scale, and there are four major steps in that. The first step is to set ambitious targets that are aligned with the SDGs, the second is to develop national roadmaps, the third step is to accelerate science and technology for problem solving, and the fourth step is to ensure good governance and monitoring.

This chapter focuses on roadmapping. One methodology used is backcasting, in which the desired future is defined, and then a pathway is modeled to reach it. This is explained with a case study of the Uruguayan livestock sector. Change needs to be planned at the right scale, with a longer-term vision in mind. We need to make the change concrete and actionable, and we need to engage stakeholder in setting the right targets and defining the appropriate ambitious pathways for change, and backcasting can be used as a tool for this. 

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