The Food Socioscope: a new instrument to better understand transitions towards greater sustainability.

The Food Socioscope project consists of two parts, both devoted to better understand systemic transition towards greater sustainability in the domain of food. One part -data collection and community directory- is a participatory endeavour to foster and support building a growing community of practitioners who manage various initiatives promoting greater food sustainability (e.g. companies, NGOs, public authorities, advocacy groups, associations). Practitioners contribute to existing or emerging communities of knowledge and practice (CKP), fostering know-how exchanges and collective intelligence. Towards this end, the Food Socioscope has set up a dedicated directory (the Food Socioscope Netboard) which publishes online the main characteristics of these initiatives to facilitate exchange.   The second part of the project is devoted to a major research effort based on the collection of qualitative data that try to capture what happens 'on the ground', from micro to macro. It involves practitioners who respond to in-depth field interviews, following a carefully tested protocol that will allow a rigorous comparison of data.   The data collected in the first part of the Food Socioscope are fed into the research project and form the basis for a better understanding of systemic changes towards greater food sustainability, ranging from primary production to transport, storage, retail, preparation, consumption, waste management, including the supporting infrastructure and organizational set-ups. By starting from initiatives on the micro level and how they are embedded in the wider economic, administrative, political and cultural context, the aim is to understand the mechanisms of transition towards greater sustainability, including the barriers and conditions of success.   To process, code and analyse the data, which comes in massive amounts of text, speech and image, we use AI models, network analysis and other quantitative methods.  Leveraging the size and diversity of the sample (600 in-depth initiatives in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia), the project aims not only to shed light on the mechanisms of societal transition, but to develop a new instrument for the social sciences that will permit, supported by AI-based modelling and analysis, to scale up considerably qualitative research to reach a systemic level. Eventually, the instrument will lend itself to address research questions also in other domains of interest.   This research project and related results were made possible with the support of the NOMIS Foundation.  In this paper we present the research questions which we seek to address; the structure of the two parts of the Socioscope; an overview of the methods used for data collection and analysis; a brief overview of some preliminary insights from the first hundred cases regarding the role of regulation and local governance, the asymmetry of social contracts and the practioners' motivation, among them many features that usually are not accounted for by classic economics.