The Values Underpinning Iceland's Food System Risk Implications for Resilience Planning

The values underpinning Iceland's food system risk Implications for resilience planning by Holly Johanna Jacobson Bachelor of Science in Biology and Environmental Studies Bowdoin College 2011 Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER IN CITY PLANNING at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2016 © Holly Johanna Jacobson. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce istribute and to d publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Author: ________________________________________________________________________ Holly Johanna Jacobson Department of Urban Studies and Planning May 6, 2016 Certified by: ____________________________________________________________________ Janelle Knox-‐Hayes Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning Thesis Supervisor Accepted by: ___________________________________________________________________ P. Christopher Zegras Associate Professorof Urban Studies and Planning Chair, Master in City Planning Committee 1 The values underpinning Iceland's food system risk Implications for resilience planning by Holly Johanna Jacobson Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 6, 2016in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofMaster in City Planning ABSTRACT Some claim Iceland’s food security is in grave danger. Farms fear financial failure as they compete with cheaper imports; high import reliance renders the country vulnerable to natural, political, and financial volatility; climate changethreaten s to exacerbatethese food systemweaknesses . Yet Iceland has no contingency plan, and adaptation measures are absent from national climate change reports.While thisgap could be perceived asnegligence , to do so assumes a universalistic framework for risk and resilience—a trendcurrently seen in theglobal proliferation of formulaic, resiliency plans. E cological resilience is defined as the ability of a system to absorb disturbance so as to retainessentially the same function. In a social-‐ecological system, what defines that function? Who decides what is at risk? This thesisseeks to understandthe defining parameters behindrisk and resilience within Iceland’s social-‐ecological food system —a dynamic and evolvingset oftension s between human livelihoods, legal frameworks, biological cycling, and emotive response. Interviews, backed by risk theory and corroborated with survey data,uncover the tendency for risk to be framedin the context ofparticular value logics. Explored through factor analysis, the aggregate risk scale that focuses on agricultural vitality, for example, correlates with a value scale that embeds preparedness and self-‐sufficiency, but alsocultural heritage. These findingssuggest several implications: First, there is a need to go beyondeconomic valuationsin understanding risk. Moral, sentimental, and ideational values shape risk perception, and our current tools—such as discounting—cannot adequatelyconsider what a future community will value. Secondly, if a value at stake underpins how risk is defined, then, inversely,preserving that valuecan define resilience. In other words, value-‐based resilience offers a framework for definingfunction the resilience preserves. And yet finally, this logic highlights a powerful hazard in resilience planning—the risk of systematically establishing preference for certain values and perpetuating a dominant set of social, political, economic ideologies. Value -‐based resilience is thus a call to planners to recognize the vulnerability built into the plans we make. Key words:risk, resilience, values, food systems, food security, Iceland Thesis Supervisor: Janelle Knox-‐Hayes Title: Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So many thank yous are warranted. Thank you to Janelle Knox-‐Hayes for introducing me to Iceland, to grounded theory, to contextual embeddedness, to the notion of intersubjectively defined frames of thinking.It is an understatement to say that your research has guided, inspired, and offered a sense of purpose to this work. Your encouragement—often offered on cold, dark days in Reykjavik cafes—was always appreciated. Thank you to Sarah Slaughter for introducing me to resilience, its theory, and its practice. I welcome your provocation: the unconsidered repercussions of climate change, the systemic vulnerabilities, the levers for change, and the motivations for seeking resilience—for both this thesis and futureendeavors. Thank you to Mariana Arcaya fordance gui in quantitative methods, candid perspectives, and for last-‐minute statistics trouble-‐shooting. Thank you toRagnhildur Sigurðardóttir, Karl Benediktsson, Ólafur Dýrmundsson, Erna Bjarnadóttir, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, and Silja Bára Ómarsdóttir for immense and unduehelp with translations and access to resources, including articles, statistics, contact lists, and substantial amounts ofyour time. Along with these six, Ithank the rest of the individuals I interviewed foremboldening this work, passing along the survey,welcoming and me—physically into your homes , farms, greenhouses, and offices and figuratively into your perspectives around life andvisions for Iceland’s future. And lastly, thank you to my family and friends: To my parents, Jennifer O’Grady and Jake Jacobson, I thank you for listeningendless to chatter onregenerative ecosystems to risk theory and for embracing my enthusiasm, my confusions, and my hopes in the process; To my brother, Erik Jacobson, for keeping me looking forward and for joining me in the excitement of what Iceland has for us to discover; To Julie Coleman, whose friendship and support has kept me smiling in these past few months; To Hannah Payne and Ellen Morris, for solidarity, collective griping, couch work sessions, and celebration; And to Greg Talpey for being there, regardless. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE |10| ⋅ What this thesis is not ⋅ What this thesis aims to do I. INTRODUCTION |13| ⋅ Iceland: a landscape of risk or resilience? II. THEORY: IENT RESIL SOCIAL-‐ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS |14| ⋅ Social-‐ecological systems ⋅ Resilience III. ICELAND’S FOOD [SOC IAL-‐ECOLOGICAL] SYSTEM |19| ⋅ System overview ⋅ Networked vulnerabilities IV. FOOD SECURITY: A POLITICAL CONSTRUCT? |37| ⋅ Is food security a risk? ⋅ Is the perceived risk a political construct? V. THEORY: RISK AND RISK PERCEPTION |40| ⋅ The Risk Society ⋅ Risk as objective reality ⋅ Risk as a subjective construction ⋅ Risk: a realist-‐constructivist amalgamation VI. RESEARCH METHODS AND RESULTS |53| ⋅ Data Collection Part One | Interviews and Literature ⋅ Data Analysis and Results Part One | Interviews and Literature ⋅ Data Collection Part Two | Risk Perception and Values Survey ⋅ Data Analysis and Results Part Two | Risk Perception and Values Survey VII. DISCUSSION: RISKS AS DEFINED BY VALUE LOGICS |86| ⋅ The Icelandic food system risk psyche: validating the correlation withues val ⋅ Directionality of the correlation between risk and value logics ⋅ Summary of findings through the risk-‐value relationship in Iceland’s food system ⋅ The speculated origins of Icelandic values:A detour into political ecology ⋅ Implications for the risk-‐value relationship VIII. FROM RISK TO RESILIENCE |105| ⋅ Resilience as defined by values ⋅ Operationalizing this framework: Iceland’s food system ⋅ The substantial hazard of value-‐based resilience ⋅ Thinking of resilience as a system,values -‐based and evolutionary BIBLIOGRAPHY |116 | APPENDIX |130| 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Map of Iceland’s food system Figure 2. Map of Iceland’s topography and population densities Figure 3. Map of Iceland’s food system, incorporating the influence of risks Figure 4. Typo logies of worldviews along grid-‐group dimensions Figure 5. A framework for conceptualizing risk as a realist and constructivist amalgamation Figure 6. Coding methodology for linking constructs Figure 7. Demographic summary Figure 8. Map of Iceland postal codes (first digit), agricultural land use, and fishing ports and processing centers Figure 9. Evaluations of high to low risk for the ten risk constructs Figure 10. Evaluations of high to low risk for the ten value constructs Figure 11. Map of Iceland’s food system, incorporating the influence ofvalues LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Risk constructs Table 2. Value constructs Table 3. Summary of mean rankings for risks and values Table 4. Multivariate regression analysis assessing correlations between value and risk constructs Table 5. Multivariate regression analysis assessing correlations between risk and value scales Table . 6 Summary of twenty-‐five multivariate regression analyses assessing correlations between each of the risk or value scales against demographic parameters APPENDIX A. List of interviewees (anonymous) B. Survey instrument C. Distribution of highly ranked risks and values D. Multivariate regression of risks against demographics E. Multivariate regression of values against demographics 7 20˚ W 14˚ W Arctic Circle Ísafjörður 66˚ N Sauðárkrókur Akureyri Egilsstaðir Bogarnes Reykjavik 64˚ N Keflavik Selfoss PREFACE What this thesis is not At the World Health Summit in 1996, The World Health Organization defined food security as the following: When all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life. (World Health Organization, 2016) This globally

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