Livestock futures: worldviews, values, and the framing of sustainability pathways

Abstract

The livestock sector both drives and faces complex sustainability challenges associated with the production and consumption of animal-sourced foods, highlighting the need for system-wide transformation. Despite mounting evidence of impacts, political inertia and conflicting interpretations of sustainability have polarised debate and fragmented action, constraining how future pathways are imagined and pursued. This thesis examines how diverse perspectives shape understandings of sustainable livestock futures, linking research on worldviews, values and framing to show how future pathways are constructed, legitimised and contested.

The first study explores how environmental worldviews, values and demographics shape perspectives on the future of the livestock sector. Using mixed methods, it combines survey and interview data from 307 livestock representatives. Results reveal statistically significant variation in preferred sustainability pathways. Respondents with higher pro-environmental, ecocentric and relational worldviews and values favour behaviour-oriented solutions, while those with lower pro-environmental and higher techno-centric orientations prefer technological innovations to improve efficiency and maintain current consumption patterns. Results also highlight the need to recognise cultural and geographic nuance, as well as the gap between preferred and expected futures. This study advances understanding of how perspectives on livestock futures are formed, supporting the development of more holistic and pluralistic approaches to sustainable livestock futures.

The second study analyses academic discourse on sustainable livestock futures using topic modelling and framing analysis to identify thematic trends and regional distributions in global research. This approach offers a replicable way to navigate complex and contested debates. The analysis shows that literature remains dominated by techno-scientific and economic framings focused on emissions reduction, environmental management, productivity and efficiency. Such framings narrow interpretations of sustainability, often neglecting equity, justice and demand-side considerations. The study also highlights the strong influence of the US, UK and China, as well as certain funding bodies and journals that reinforce dominant narratives. Alternative framings and regionally tailored approaches remain underexplored and underfunded, revealing a structural imbalance in research priorities. The study calls for more inclusive and systemic approaches to better reflect the complexity of livestock transitions.

The third study focuses on the UK livestock sector, which faces a distinctive mix of socio-economic, political and environmental challenges. Addressing these complexities requires tools that help explore future pathways and understand the trade-offs they involve. The study develops the UK Livestock Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (UK-Livestock-SSPs) through an iterative, co-design process adapting the SSP framework to UK livestock contexts. Engaging actors from industry, policy, academia and civil society, the study produces five pathways supported by narratives, visual summaries and semi-quantitative trends that capture sector-specific dynamics. These pathways highlight the governance, societal and production drivers underpinning the range of plausible futures, uncertainties and trade-offs facing the sector. Visual and interactive methods enhanced engagement and reflection on values and priorities. The outputs provide a flexible framework for exploring alternative futures, with potential to inform future policy and research and to support integration into modelling frameworks to assess vulnerabilities and resilience strategies.

The fourth study examines how collective action frames and framing processes shape the construction, contestation and negotiation of meaning within two participatory co-design workshops for the UK-Livestock-SSPs, drawing on observational notes and post-workshop reflections. The results show that participants expressed a wide range of diagnostic and prognostic frames across social, economic, political and sustainability concerns, along with motivational frames linked to responsibility, pride, justice, collective agency and economic survival. The study also presents examples of frame amplification, contestation, alignment and reframing, highlighting both emerging shared priorities and tensions in visions of change. Overall, the study demonstrates the value of examining framing processes in participatory scenario co-design, showing how awareness of these interactional dynamics can deepen understanding of collective meaning-making and reveal how participation can both open up and constrain which futures gain legitimacy.

These studies provide an integrated understanding of how worldviews, values and framing shape perceptions of, and pathways towards, sustainable livestock futures. By moving across scales from individual perspectives and global academic discourses to sectoral scenario co-design and interactional framing dynamics, the thesis offers empirical evidence that livestock futures are inherently contested and value-laden, and that dominant framings can narrow the perceived problem-solution space. The thesis advances conceptual and methodological innovation by integrating worldviews, values, framing and futures thinking within a mixed-methods design, showing how sustainability problems and pathways are negotiated in practice. Overall, the research highlights the importance of holistic and pluralistic, framing‑aware approaches, with participatory, values‑led, and imaginative futures‑oriented methods helping to surface assumptions and widen the range of pathways considered.