Aoife Behan
I’m a policy and intervention design specialist with over 20 years of experience working across food systems, public policy, and social change. Over the past decade, I’ve focused on food system transformation, particularly how policy processes shape and are shaped by the people working within them.
I work as a doctoral researcher at the Division of Global Agriculture and Food Systems at the University of Edinburgh. My research examines the key barriers, levers and incentives to food procurement to embed sustainable farming and consumption practices. I also teach on a number of postgraduate courses, including Food Policy, Making Science Relevant to Policy and Decision Making (which I currently lead), and guest lecture on Communicating with Policy Makers During Crises, which is part of the One Health risk communication and preparedness course.
My work is grounded in a systems view of agri-food transformation. I seek to understand how people, policies, practices, and paradigms interact across supply chains, institutions, and communities of practice. I’m especially interested in how change happens in complex systems and how to create more inclusive, adaptive, and evidence-informed approaches to governance.
Before moving into academia, I spent several years as Executive Director at Soil Association. There, I led complex change programmes that supported farmer-led innovation and helped embed healthier, more sustainable food in public sector settings. My work across the public and third sectors has focused on evidence-informed policymaking, strategic communications, social policy research, and systems change.
I hold an MSc in Social Policy and Planning from the London School of Economics, a Postgraduate Diploma in Management Studies, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Gastronomy and am currently undertaking a PhD in Agriculture and Food Systems. Throughout my career, I’ve been motivated by the belief that good policy isn’t just about good evidence, it is fundamentally about people, participation and power in all its forms.
Policies for a transition to agroecology by 2045 (Scotland)
The MacRobert Trust
Study Overview
This study tour explored how competing values, priorities, and narratives within agri-food systems shape both the policy challenges we perceive and the solutions we pursue. It argues that many of the major issues facing agrifood systems today, such as sustainability, health, equity, and productivity, are not only profoundly complex, they are politically contested. As such, they cannot be resolved through technical fixes or consensus-driven approaches alone.
Drawing on discussions with agrifood stakeholders, the report highlights the limitations of binary thinking (organic versus conventional, plant-based versus animal-based, local versus global) and how these frames can polarise debate and impede meaningful progress. It suggests that greater focus is needed on the processes through which problems are defined and on expanding opportunities for participation in policy design and decision-making.
Along with identifying key leverage points within the agrifood system, land access, meaningful livelihoods, and access to new markets, the report recommends a participatory framework to support more inclusive engagement with policy, particularly for those working within food and farming systems. Building on discussions throughout the study tour and drawing on concepts from implementation science and systems thinking, the report discusses how more adaptive, context-sensitive approaches may lead to better outcomes, even in the absence of complete consensus.
Rather than offering a singular solution, the study emphasises the need for ongoing and inclusive policy processes; ones that value lived experience, recognise diverse forms of knowledge, and support incremental but cumulative change across the agrifood system.