Introduction
Waste has been relatively neglected by legal academics.Footnote 1 This may be due to its complexity,Footnote 2 or perceptions of banality (‘eyes tend to glaze over at the mention of waste law’).Footnote 3 But this belies waste's scholarly and practical interest and importance. Waste is a fascinating topic of enormous significance. Inescapably bound up with issues of production and consumption, waste touches on almost every aspect of our daily lives, reaching into the core of contemporary business models and our global economic system's reliance on growth. Indeed, waste is always about more than just waste, exemplified by tensions between waste management (what we do with stuff once it becomes waste) and resource management (how do we manage stuff so as to prevent it becoming waste in the first place).Footnote 4 Waste also raises fundamental questions at the heart of environmental law: matters of value and distribution; the extent of individual and business responsibility; and the role of the state in addressing global problems.
Food waste is no exception: engaging, significant and, until recently, ignored by legal academics.Footnote 5 Few resources are as important as food. Its production, distribution and value are embedded within complex agri-food supply chains reaching beyond territorial boundaries. In addition to a waste of resources (land, soil, water, energy), food waste is also a climate problem. Were the 3.3 billion tonnes of global annual greenhouse gas emissions from food waste released by a single country, it would be the third largest emitter after China and the United States.Footnote 6 The tendency to focus on waste rather than resource management has also been problematic in the context of food, central in failures to capture the particularities of managing a precious and often perishable resource within supply chains punctuated by influential vested interests in maintaining systemic levels of overproduction.Footnote 7 With one-third of all food grown globally not eaten,Footnote 8 and approximately 821 million people undernourished worldwide,Footnote 9 food waste is not just a generic waste problem, but a specific resource challenge, subsumed within the complexities and power dynamics of the global food supply chain.
With the UK regarded as an international leader on tackling food waste,Footnote 10 England's fresh approach to food waste warrants particular scrutiny. Our Waste, Our Resources: A Strategy for England (the Strategy), published in December 2018, confirms food waste as an ongoing government priority but remarks that a ‘new approach is needed’.Footnote 11 It sets an aspirational target of eliminating food waste to landfill by 2030, and commits to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of halving per capita retail and consumer food waste, also by 2030.Footnote 12 The Strategy in some respects embodies an unexpected policy shift, at least when compared with the prior policy position, the 2013 Waste Prevention Programme for England (the Programme).Footnote 13 However, many of the particulars relevant to evaluating the contours of this shift will reside in forthcoming consultative and legislative detail. This paper therefore offers an early assessment by exploring how the Strategy ‘frames’ the problem of food waste, particularly in ways which are different compared to frames adopted under the Programme.
Problem frames matter. They allocate causal and reformatory responsibility, challenge or maintain existing power structures, and push certain values and actors forward and others into shadow. Moreover, problem frames in high-level policy have particular significance, not least because of policy's centrality in environmental law. But evaluating constructions of the complex, socio-political world is a difficult, profoundly subjective, exercise.Footnote 14 In view of this, and in response to calls for methodological clarity in maturing environmental legal scholarship,Footnote 15 this paper explicates the waste policy frames by identifying assumptions, hidden premises and normative conclusions, and explores how elaborated or restricted they are. In particular, we ask to what extent these frames are capable of accommodating accounts in the literature that food waste often arises from embedded, power-laden and structural factors across the supply chain which drive overproduction and overconsumption. While the Programme was restrictive, the Strategy is more elaborated, in three ways.
First, where the Programme subsumed food waste indiscriminately within generic approaches to waste, the Strategy constructs food waste as a specific challenge. Secondly, while the Programme constructed waste as an economic opportunity, so that waste prevention efforts can (must?) contribute to economic growth, the Strategy identifies growth as part of the problem. Gone is the focus on the ‘business case’ for waste prevention which, under the Programme, restricted contemplating what the Strategy explicitly acknowledges: the existence of excess quantities of food, and its structural causes. Thirdly, whereas the Programme hollowed out food waste prevention law and governance, and government ‘stepped back’ from food waste, under the Strategy, government appears to ‘step back in’, proposing a range of legislative measures, and seeking powers under the Agriculture Bill to address food waste caused by unfair trading practices (UTPs). This contrasts with previous proclamations that legislation to tackle food waste would be like ‘using a sledgehammer to crack a nut’.Footnote 16 In many ways, the Strategy ‘talks the talk’ of a more elaborated frame. It remains to be seen whether what follows will ‘walk the walk’. The Strategy's prescriptions do not always match its diagnosis of the problem: rather than stepping in to reduce overproduction, the burden of redistributing surplus food is shifted away from the state and retailers onto charities and farmers. Overproduction remains the ‘elephant in the room’, with responsibility for food waste not meaningfully distributed across the supply chain.
The paper begins by outlining the significance of frames in government policy and how we might evaluate them, before briefly situating high-level waste policy within the food waste scholarship. It then explores three overarching ways in which the Strategy is less restrictive than the Programme: first, by acknowledging food waste as a specific rather than generic waste problem; secondly, by reframing economic growth as part of the problem; and thirdly, by assuming a role for the state in the previously hollowed out law and regulation of food waste prevention.
1. Problem frames matter
A rich (and large) literature highlights how problems do not exist inherently ‘out there’ as social facts awaiting discovery, readily packaged for policy-makers to address.Footnote 17 Undesirable situations are instead actively converted – ‘framed’ – into understandable problems. The literature draws a distinction between ‘framing’ and ‘frames’. Framing is as an active and iterative process, where actors engage in the selection, interpretation, production and maintenance of meaning.Footnote 18 A frame is the substantive outcome of a framing process, providing a somewhat static, definitional interpretation of a particular situation allowing actors to make sense of complex realities.Footnote 19 A frame is a categorising or taxonomising structure, a central organising idea, narrative, or interpretive schema which allows actors to make sense of an ‘amorphous, ill-defined problematic situation’.Footnote 20 The framing process is an important locus of study in itself, and there are limitations to what might be revealed through analysis of resulting frames alone. As will be seen, however, frames adopted in high-level policy documents matter: they attribute causal and reformatory responsibility, and in doing so may exclude or marginalise important accounts of phenomena, as well as possible interventions, while protecting (or challenging) existing structural orders. This framing literature, briefly outlined below, is used later in the paper to unpack the Strategy's new approach to food waste.
At the heart of frames are causal narratives: ‘a package of ideas that includes, at least implicitly, an account of the causes and consequences of undesirable circumstances and a theory about how to improve them’.Footnote 21 Snow and Benford refer to this as ‘diagnostic’ and ‘prognostic’ attribution.Footnote 22 Diagnostic attribution involves identifying the causes of a problem. This informs and shapes prognostic attribution, which outlines the nature of possible ‘prescriptions’, or the range of viable solutions and interventions. Despite diagnostic attribution having ‘the most profound effect on where one ends up’, there is a tendency to decide on solutions prematurely, instead of allowing these to flow from careful problem definition;Footnote 23 what the literature calls ‘solution-mindedness’.Footnote 24 Through diagnostic and prognostic attribution, frames can highlight some aspects of the problem and throw others into shadow, and legitimate some solutions and actors, while neglecting, devaluing or excluding others.Footnote 25 As Rein and Schön note, ‘whatever is said of a thing, denies something else of it’,Footnote 26 identifying things as ‘this’, but not as ‘that’.Footnote 27 Furthermore, some frames are ‘consistently shut out’, particularly structural or other complex accounts of problems which identify economic or political systems as the causes of problems.Footnote 28 As will be seen, structural causes of overproduction and food waste, while in the Strategy's diagnostic frame, are somewhat excluded from its prognostic frame.
Frames can thus locate responsibility and burdens differently. They might protect an existing structural order, or challenge that status quo by redistributing power or reshaping authority relations.Footnote 29 Given that frames allocate causal and reformatory responsibility, counter-frames can and do arise.Footnote 30 Problem framing is thus often described as a dispute, battle or war between competing frames.Footnote 31 While a policy frame may be settled for many years, consensus can be challenged and undone: policy frames are ‘currents in the stream of political discourse’.Footnote 32 As will be seen, even the frame itself is a weapon of advocacy or rhetoric, where actors deliberately portray problems ‘in ways calculated to gain support for their side … while making it seem as though they are simply describing facts’.Footnote 33 Deborah Stone provides a vivid account:
Even when there is a strong statistical and logical link between a substance and a problem – such as between alcohol and car accidents, handguns and homicides, tobacco and cancer deaths, or cocaine and overdose deaths – there is still a range of places to locate control and impose sanctions … Finding the true or ultimate cause of harms in these policy areas is not what is at issue. Rather, the fight is about locating moral responsibility and real economic costs on a chain of possible causes.Footnote 34
Frames are thus more than expressions of empirical reality, and locating moral and economic responsibility is often more about the ‘political strength of different groups’ than it is about, say, causal logic or statistical proof.Footnote 35 At the very least, ‘negotiating among and between frames is likely to be shaped by structures of power and authority’,Footnote 36 so that framing is ‘subject to strong competitive forces’.Footnote 37 It is thus important to keep in mind when analysing policy that dominant frames may reflect the outcome of power dynamics, as opposed to widely accepted accounts of a problem.
In constructing the ‘complex and multidimensional socio-political world’ into identifiable problems,Footnote 38 frames are often informed by pre-existing values and ideologies.Footnote 39 There is thus some overlap with sense-making, where actors use pre-existing cognitive frameworks to understand new problems.Footnote 40 As Payne notes, ‘an actor is more likely to accept new claims if they are shown to be similar to already accepted ideas’.Footnote 41 A ‘resonant’ frame with ‘mobilising potency’ is often necessary for it to ‘take hold’.Footnote 42 Frames must not only ‘accommodate’ political realities, but ‘create’ those realities, by motivating and coordinating action.Footnote 43 Frames may therefore use conceptual hooks, draw on a repertoire of cultural resources, and model prior thought, so as to render a problem ‘sensible in terms of pre-existing thinking’.Footnote 44 Frames can thus be rhetorical and/or action-based.Footnote 45 Rhetorical frames feature a persuasive narrative to ‘win the allegiance of large groups of people’, whereas action frames may inform policy programmes and ‘determine the content of laws, regulations and procedures’.Footnote 46 So not only are frames potentially expressions of power, but they are subject to strategic forces, mediated by pre-existing ideologies and shaped by the need for a frame to take hold with constituents. As will be seen, the Strategy at first sight appears more action-based than rhetorical, but its promised sense of ‘action’ may obscure an ongoing reluctance to step in against the interests of powerful actors.
What is a ‘good’ problem definition, or the ‘best’ policy frame, and how do we know? With conflicting frames, we are faced not with disagreements that can be settled by appeal to established facts, but competing (even ideologically opposed) views of the world.Footnote 47 Frames can create multiple social realities, even when based upon the same evidence.Footnote 48 This will be familiar to environmental lawyers, as environmental problems are ‘complex, plagued with uncertainty, and extremely political’.Footnote 49 Liz Fisher views this through the lens of environmental problems as ‘hot situations’, where disputes are not ad hoc, but foundational, arising from potentially mutually incompatible understandings of the world informed by differing ideologies and values which are themselves not easily reconcilable.Footnote 50 In hot situations, where multiple frames apply, any frame is controversial, and what is ‘best’ is not ‘an objective criterion’, but shaped by a mixture of normative concerns and politics.Footnote 51
For scholars, this requires discerning a terrain between extreme positivism, where competing frames are ‘resolvable by reference to facts and logic’, and extreme relativism, where all frames are equally ‘acceptable or compelling’.Footnote 52 This terrain might lie in frame critical analysis and questioning.Footnote 53 This involves explication of conflicting frames, identifying taken-for-granted assumptions, hidden premises and normative conclusions.Footnote 54 Frame critical analysis asks whether frames imply or permit systematic analysis of alternatives, and which political values are moved forwards and backwards.Footnote 55 Is the frame ‘restricted, rigid and particularistic’, organised in a narrow band of ideas and providing a constricted range of definitions?Footnote 56 Or is the frame more ‘elaborated, flexible and elastic’, organised in terms of a wide range of ideas, and inclusive in its problem-solving approach?Footnote 57 Fisher similarly highlights scholarship's role in ‘rigorous description’ and ‘measured identification’ of frames, exploring whether mainstream accounts are too narrow, or practices are unrecognised.Footnote 58
Indeed, engaging in rigorous frame explication and measured, frame-critical analysis, is precisely the work required of mature environmental law scholarship.Footnote 59 And as discussed later in the paper, frame-criticality helps unpack England's approach to food waste.
2. Policy frames and distributed responsibility for food waste
This section briefly explains the significance of policy frames, particularly for lawyers, before situating them within food waste scholarship. Frames are generated in multiple, not necessarily governmental, fora, and at multiple levels.Footnote 60 Similarly, government frames can be found in numerous departments, policy contexts and outputs, which may not always cohere into a single narrative.Footnote 61 Policy thus sits within a broader political and institutional context.Footnote 62 Nonetheless, environmental policy, while not easy to define, is a worthy site of inquiry for lawyers.Footnote 63 It is pervasive in environmental law, defying attempts to disentangle law from policy.Footnote 64 High-level policy particularly acts as an action-based frame, guiding what is expected by numerous actors. When proposing legislative intervention, policy is also key to defining the ‘mischief’ of legislation. Policy frames thus shape the contours of legislative debate, but also the parameters of legislative opportunity: a governmental policy frame is not only central to defining legislative success or failure, but part of the story as to whether legislation is even on the table, and why (or why not).
Waste policy is no exception. The 2013 Programme has quasi-legal status beyond more ad hoc developments, given Waste Prevention Programmes are produced periodically pursuant to EU law.Footnote 65 The 2018 Strategy is not the new Waste Prevention Programme for England, and so is not quite a like-for-like comparison with the 2013 Programme. However, the Strategy is the most recent statement on waste,Footnote 66 and it will shape the Programme's forthcoming revision.Footnote 67 More broadly, waste policy is fundamental to implementing EU obligations on waste, and is thus partially constrained by law. While neither the Programme nor the Strategy legally bind successor governments,Footnote 68 high-level policy positions are more than frozen ‘frames of the moment’.Footnote 69 As will be seen, they cast a shadow on future framing, providing some lock-in, even if policy changes quickly.
Frame critical analysis of waste policy is particularly pertinent given the scholarship's concern that food waste has been narrowly framed as a ‘problem and possibility’ of consumer behaviour.Footnote 70 Such accounts focus predominately on individual notions of responsibility for food thrown away by households.Footnote 71 A rich body of literature provides sociological and structure-sensitive counter-frames to such narratives, highlighting how, even when consumers do throw away food, it does not follow that they are singularly responsible for it.Footnote 72 Instead, broader structures drive individual food wasting practices: barriers to local and daily shopping; imperatives around healthy eating; food safety and hygiene; and the challenges of feeding a (sometimes fussy) family.Footnote 73 Framing food waste as a problem of individual behaviour thus ‘underestimates the extent to which individuals’ autonomous action is constrained by infrastructures and socio-technical systems’.Footnote 74
Consumer-centric frames also marginalise the role retailers play in driving post-retail ‘downstream’ and pre-retail ‘upstream’ food waste. Retailers shape how and where consumers shop, what they buy, and in what quantities, in ways which may be profitable for retailers but generate food waste through incentivised over purchasing, such as through large portion sizes, or 3-for-2 and ‘buy one get one free’ (BOGOF) offers.Footnote 75 Similarly, focusing on households tends to go hand-in-hand with paying less attention to food wasted upstream, and the ways waste is built into the system through normalised overproduction.Footnote 76 A preoccupation with consumer behaviour is thus not necessarily misdirected but disproportionate in terms of consumers’ relative responsibility and because waste occurs elsewhere in the supply chain. Indeed, the literature displays how retailers drive overproduction (and waste) within their supply chains, including on farms, particularly through UTPs made possible by supermarkets’ dominant positions and market concentration.Footnote 77 Food waste is therefore underpinned by vested economic interests in levels of overproduction and overconsumption which go beyond the need for surplus ‘give’. Therein lies the paradoxical coexistence of abundance, waste, overconsumption and hunger: food is produced in excess of what is needed to feed the global population, but while one-third of all food produced is wasted and two billion people are overnourished, over 800 million people are hungry.Footnote 78 Research highlighting the relationship between climates of fear among producers, food abundance, poverty and waste, thus provide structural and power-sensitive counternarratives to ‘consumer blame’. Instead, food waste is symptomatic of systemic issues, including power asymmetries, the allocation of risks in the global economy, and a broken food system.Footnote 79
In response, an emergent sense of ‘distributed responsibility’ has reportedly arisen, within which retailers accept some responsibility for food waste's causes and solutions.Footnote 80 This consensus embodies a ‘widespread recognition’ that food waste is systemic, requiring ‘collaboration between actors across the food chain’.Footnote 81 This consensus resonates somewhat with critiques of food waste framed as an individualised consumer problem, but to what extent is distributed responsibility reflected in policy? Informed by the literature, frame critical analysis reveals limitations in England's fresh approach to food waste, to which we now turn.
3. Food waste frames in the Strategy
While ‘distributed responsibility’ for food waste was not reflected in the 2013 Programme, it has gained some purchase in the 2018 Strategy, with frame critical analysis revealing a shift towards a more elaborated and sophisticated frame. This is seen in three main ways: first, by acknowledging food waste as a specific rather than generic waste problem; secondly, by reframing economic growth as part of the problem, rather than the goal; and thirdly, by assuming a role for law and regulation. However, whether the Strategy moves to a whole-systems, resource management frame is unclear. Furthermore, rather than reducing surplus, the Strategy shifts the burden of redistribution away from the state and retailers onto charities and farmers, in turn revealing a mismatch between its prognostic and diagnostic frame.
(a) Food waste as a specific (rather than generic) waste problem
Food waste receives special treatment in the new Strategy by way of its own chapter,Footnote 82 in contrast to the Programme, which framed food waste as a generic waste problem. Whether the Strategy moves towards a resource management frame is harder to assess. As will be explained, fragmented approaches may restrict consideration of the special resource implications of food, although the commitment to impact-based targets is significant.
Understanding food waste as a generic waste problem is a familiar framing approach, using pre-existing frameworks to understand ‘new’ problems. Bardwell notes the tendency to construct environmental problems (here, food waste) as ‘like’ others (waste), to be solved by analogy.Footnote 83 However, scholarship highlights how generic waste approaches can be restrictive. Framing waste as a waste management problem (what we do with stuff once it becomes waste), rather than a resource management problem (how do we produce and manage resources to prevent them from becoming waste), has led to end-of-pipe approaches which tackle the symptoms, not the causes, of waste, and shift blame to those at the end of the chain (especially consumers).Footnote 84 Similarly, generic waste management approaches fail to accommodate the distinct challenges arising from food, a resource which is profoundly important to humanity and central to everyday life, but also often perishable.Footnote 85 Important accounts of the problem, and the ethicality of the material produced, are liable to be excluded when food waste is framed like any other waste problem.
The Programme outlined food as a ‘priority material’, indicating that food waste needed urgent (not special) attention.Footnote 86 The sheer number and breadth of priority materials leads one to question what analytical work was done by singling out so many.Footnote 87 After briefly listing pre-existing interventions (discussed below),Footnote 88 food waste was then dotted around the Programme in ways which implied the generalisability of waste prevention approaches, as opposed to the distinct challenges of food (‘many of the actions outlined are relevant across sectors and materials’).Footnote 89 The Programme thus made no overt or implied acknowledgement that food might be different. Furthermore, apparent business cases for waste prevention (discussed further, below) were exemplified by a number of resource-efficient business models.Footnote 90 However, these made little sense applied to food. Keeping food for longer, repairing, borrowing and hiring food, or buying it second-hand, are either nonsensical in the context of perishables, or involve logistical and temporal challenges which undermine the ease of solutions.Footnote 91 The indiscriminate application of generic approaches to specific waste problems displays the problems created by a restrictive frame.
By contrast, the new Strategy's food waste chapter pays lip service to treating food waste as a specific rather than generic problem. The likely reason for this is the obligation, pursuant to the revised Waste Framework Directive, to adopt food waste prevention plans.Footnote 92 The result is a more holistic account, with food waste measures grouped together and subdivided by reference to the different challenges that upstream/business and downstream/consumer food waste pose. In doing so, the chapter begins to enable a whole-system approach more in keeping with a resource management frame. This was more difficult in the Programme's ‘priority materials’ approach, where thinking was structured around what different actors across multiple sectors could do to address various types of waste,Footnote 93 rather than what might be done by relevant actors to address a specific challenge.
However, a fragmented approach, without efforts to join-up thinking, restricts the Strategy's resource-based appreciation of the problem. The leading diagram in the Strategy's food waste chapter displays the problems of not doing so.Footnote 94 The figure depicts the sector-specific contributions to the UK's 10.2 million tonnes of post-farmgate food waste in 2015: households 7.1m tonnes (pictured: house), manufacturing 1.85m (factory), hospitality and food services 1m (hotel), and retail 0.2m (supermarket trolley). This has the problematic tendency to conflate where food waste occurs with its causes, obscuring the structural context of (for example) household food waste.Footnote 95 Quite remarkably, this visual frame omits how food is (for now) grown or reared on farms, excluding the agricultural sector and the estimated 3.6m tonnes of food wasted on farms.Footnote 96 This is partly a function of using the post-farmgate data, preferred due to nervousness about on-farm estimates.Footnote 97 But the data gap is partly due to the focus on consumer waste, together with retailers’ resistance to reporting.Footnote 98 An image which ignores the agricultural context is thus neither a neutral, nor complete, frame. This would be more significant were powers not being sought to tackle on-farm food waste, but fragmented approaches with divergent frames across a complex and interrelated supply could impede success and restrict a resource management approach (all discussed below).
Another example is the Strategy's commitment to consult on mandating separate food waste collection from 2023 onwards.Footnote 99 This is found in Chapter 3 on waste management (not Chapter 5, on food waste).Footnote 100 This is a natural result of the Strategy's structure, which looks sequentially at product life stages (production, consumption, end of life/waste management, in Chapters 1–3, respectively) followed by special topics waste crime (Chapter 4) and then food waste. This is not problematic in itself; the framing literature suggests that problems have to be broken down. But in the face of fragmentation, efforts must be made to join up thinking. This involves reflecting on how downstream policies affect upstream behaviour, and vice versa. Separate food waste collection aims to support diverting the inedible fractions of food, like coffee grounds and fruit stones, from landfill, in particular to anaerobic digestion (AD), an energy recovery process where bio-material is broken down to produce renewable biogas and fertiliser. However, AD subsidies, combined with minimal support for food redistribution, incentivise the removal of edible food from the supply chain; food which ought to be redistributed early enough to feed people gets sent instead to AD.Footnote 101 Nonetheless, the Strategy makes no mention of the relationship between food redistribution, subsidies for AD, and mandatory separate waste collection. While the food waste chapter documents new support for redistribution (discussed below), it is disappointing to see these issues siphoned off into separate chapters, and the relationship between them not explicitly recognised. More broadly, this shows how past frames, rather than being frozen frames of the moment, can cast long shadows, and the manifestations of a previously restrictive frame can be difficult to unpick: with a waste management frame, AD is a beast which we must now continue to feed. This all casts doubt on the Strategy's ambition, and highlights its restrictiveness, evidenced particularly by the headline but non-binding waste management target of eliminating food waste sent to landfill by 2030, likely (but perhaps not desirably) to be achieved through AD. The Strategy does not fully embrace a more elaborated resource management frame.
The Strategy's commitment to move away from weight-based to impact-based (including carbon emissions) targets and reporting is more in keeping with a resource-based frame.Footnote 102 Indeed, this is central to the ‘fundamental shift’ away from a focus on waste, towards a focus on resources.Footnote 103 This proposal is buried in the final chapter on monitoring,Footnote 104 and is not food-specific, but it may be especially important in the context of food. Food is a relatively light material with high environmental impact, so that measuring tonnage masks impacts, particularly given the embedded carbon costs of food waste (a fifth of UK carbon emissions are associated with food and drink, especially production).Footnote 105 Nonetheless, a resource frame means ensuring food is eaten, and climate imperatives ought not to mask broader distributional challenges in the context of food. Renewable energy subsides for AD amount to a codified preference for profitable waste management over charitable food redistribution.Footnote 106 It is thus significant that social and economic indicators are also on the agenda.Footnote 107
The food waste chapter is, at a general level, a noteworthy frame shift, but it is not without restrictions. Whether this moves towards a more elaborated resource approach is more difficult to assess. As discussed in the following sections, there are additional tells in the Strategy's understanding of the causes of food waste and its solutions.
(b) Broadening the diagnostic frame: beyond waste as an economic opportunity
The 2018 Strategy is broader in its account of the causes of food waste, adopting a less restrictive diagnostic frame than the 2013 Programme. We see this through three interconnected themes. First, the Programme framed waste as an economic opportunity, so that waste prevention can (must?) contribute to economic growth, whereas the Strategy positions growth as part of the problem. Secondly, with a move away from the focus on business cases for waste prevention, the Strategy acknowledges what the Programme actively ignores: the existence, and structural causes, of excess quantities of food. Thirdly, this permits the Strategy's inclusion of a broader range of actors and values which the Programme's restricted approach threw into shadow.
(i) Growth: from goal to problem
The Programme's overriding conceptualisation of waste was not so much as an economic problem, but as an economic opportunity, so that waste prevention can (must?) contribute to economic growth: ‘A key priority for the Government is to boost growth in the economy whilst continuing to improve the environment… Moving towards a more resource efficient, circular economy offers scope for innovation, sustainable growth and saving money, as well as reducing the impact on the environment’.Footnote 108 Where the Programme thus framed growth as the goal of waste prevention, the Strategy frames growth as part of the problem:
[O]ur growth over many decades has been over-reliant on exploiting finite natural resources whose depletion inevitably leaves future generations poorer … Material resources are at the heart of our economy, and we consume them in large quantities. They allow us to meet our basic human needs as well as generate economic growth and social value. But our use of resources is unsustainable.Footnote 109
We see more nuanced manifestations of this frame-shift in the contrast between natural capital and resource efficiency. Within the Strategy's overarching natural capital approach, waste is framed primarily as an economic, social and environmental risk, reflected in the exploitation of depleting stock of finite natural capital and its underlying economic and social value.Footnote 110 If not aiming towards the total maintenance of resources, it looks towards not taking them for granted, by contemplating moving away from models of exploitation: ‘Natural capital is one of our most valuable assets. The air we breathe, the water we drink the land we live on, and the stock of material resources we use in our daily lives are at the heart of our economy, our society and our way of life. We must not take these for granted’.Footnote 111
Risk and conservation under natural capital should be contrasted with the Programme's focus on economic opportunities in using resources efficiently:
Resource efficiency means using the Earth's limited resources in a sustainable manner while minimising negative impacts on the environment … A resource efficient economy is one where fewer resources are used to produce more, making the most of those resources by … extracting maximum value from them while in use, then recovering and regenerating products and materials at the end of each service life. (emphasis added)Footnote 112
Here, the exploitation or use (rather than conservation) of limited (not finite) resources was front and centre. Even though the Programme acknowledged the need to use fewer resources, the emphasis was still on producing more, displaying the importance of production and consumption to growth.
A body of critical literature provides scepticism as to whether less, no, or negative growth are contemplatable within natural capital approaches.Footnote 113 Natural capital may simply be waste as an economic opportunity repackaged, with the frame-shift more apparent than real. However, this coincides with the Strategy's departure from the Programme's restrictive, business case-approach to diagnosing the causes of waste, where waste prevention win-win opportunities are not seen or grasped.
(ii) From business cases to structural overproduction?
Within the growth-orientated frame, the Programme constructs barriers to waste prevention in business case terms, as a result excluding broader accounts of the causes of food waste. Waste was an economic externality, not fully priced in the market because: (i) the business cases for waste prevention are either unknown or underestimated, or exist in the medium to long-term, rather than short-term; or (ii) the financial benefits of waste prevention are split across a number of actors within the supply chain.Footnote 114 The Programme also recast informational and behavioural challenges in business case terms, receiving a coat of win-win gloss when characterised, respectively, as occurring because the financial benefits are ‘unknown’, or ‘the long-term … benefits are underestimated, the risks overestimated, and upfront costs ignored over long-term benefits’.Footnote 115
The Programme thus framed waste diagnostically as arising from slightly (rather than fundamentally) misaligned incentives, or informational (as opposed to power) asymmetries. The Programme's prognostic attribution (discussed further, below) was also constructed in similar terms, where the business case for waste prevention acted as the conceptual hook, or rhetorical device, through which waste prevention as an economic opportunity would be operationalised. Because ‘waste costs money’, reducing waste ‘can help save businesses money’; like ‘sustainable economic growth and environmental improvement’, they can ‘go hand in hand’ and ‘are not mutually exclusive’.Footnote 116 As explained above, these examples made little sense applied to food. And when the Programme did give examples of food waste prevention win-wins, they were opportunities for consumers which may not translate into financial gains for businesses.Footnote 117 This is because it largely goes against retailers’ business models to encourage consumers to buy less.Footnote 118 Indeed, the Programme walked a fine line between pointing to financial gains for consumers while never explicitly mentioning the importance of encouraging people to buy less food, presumably because the growth goal restricted contemplation of hitting retailer profits. This was potentially implicit in the Programme's plea that consumers ‘meal plan’,Footnote 119 but this is subtle. Read with the broader context of economic opportunity, there was little scope for contemplating the possibility of consuming or buying less, especially when waste prevention was characterised in terms of ‘how products are designed and manufactured, what we buy, how we use and maintain products, and what we do when we have finished with them’ (emphasis added).Footnote 120 Not whether we produce, or whether we buy.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Programme made no mention of normalised and systematic overproduction. Indeed, the business case, as the central rhetorical weapon in the frame, actively restricted this. As the scholarship shows, business case logic – the idea that behaving responsibly pays (and is even easy) – preserves and reinforces the status quo, so that questions about the fundamentals of a particular industry model remain unasked, and structural changes are difficult to contemplate.Footnote 121 Reflection on overproduction and prevailing power structures is actively excluded by diagnostic framing shaped by business cases. Indeed, it is telling that an intervention to tackle supply chain power imbalances, in place at the time of the Programme's writing, was not even mentioned. The Groceries Supply Code of Practice (the Code), now enforced by the Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA, discussed below), requires retailers to deal with suppliers fairly, and seeks to tackle the adverse effects on competition arising from the structure of the food supply chain.Footnote 122 Any role the Code might play in food waste reduction is thus tangential to its primary aims, but its exclusion from the Programme displays the restricted diagnostic frame: food waste as a side effect of power imbalances is actively excluded, with the business case frame obscuring complex structure-sensitive accounts of food waste in the literature, and failing to contemplate the existence of overproduction as problematic.
Significantly, the new Strategy explicitly acknowledges surplus in the system as a problem: ‘Growing excess food that no one eats damages the Earth's ecosystems’.Footnote 123 Admitting, even in passing, that there is excess in the system, and that this is problematic, is an immediately broader and more sophisticated diagnostic frame. Structural causes can at least get a look in, with the Strategy recognising that food waste sometimes arises from UTPs made possible by imbalances of power.Footnote 124 Similarly, the Strategy frames household food waste not as an individualised consumer behaviour problem, but potentially as a retailer problem, with (as discussed below) businesses constructed as the primary target of policies addressing household food waste.Footnote 125 This implicitly acknowledges that consumer practice takes place within a structural context. While the Programme did highlight the role retailers may play in reducing household food waste,Footnote 126 structural causes were then forgotten when the Programme highlighted how consumers might better manage their food consumption practices.Footnote 127 The Strategy is thus comparatively more elaborated in its account of the causes of the problem: open to the existence of overproduction and overconsumption and its structural causes. Given that the framing literature suggests structural accounts are often excluded, it is perhaps remarkable that they have found their way in.
(iii) Beyond economic actors and values
The Programme's frame also pushed certain actors and values into the background, in ways which were more restrictive than the Strategy. Businesses, and business interests, were foregrounded in the Programme, as were actors (re)constructed in economic terms. The Programme put emphasis on resource efficiency as a contributor to growth, partly because it saw businesses as dependent on resources, so that resource inefficiency was a threat to competitiveness: ‘Our economy and businesses depend on global trade and resources … using resources more efficiently will put us in a strong position to win the global race’.Footnote 128 When speaking to other constituents, the Programme recast them economically, advising civil society, for example, to ‘think like a business’.Footnote 129 Similarly, win-wins around household food waste reduction in the Programme (above) spoke to people just as consumers (rather than also as citizens). The Programme thus pushed certain reasons for acting out of contemplation, and in turn excluded important alternative practices (or downplayed their importance, by prioritising commercial value).Footnote 130 The food sharing platform OLIO, for example, explicitly does not have a ‘business model’ (or at least not yet).Footnote 131 Food redistribution charities such as FareShare produce social good beyond the nutritional and financial benefits of redistributed food, where communal meals create communities and reduce loneliness.Footnote 132 The restrictiveness of a frame which prioritises economic values and actors is emphasised by the literature, such as critiques of ‘green consumerism’ (emphasising consumption rather than non-consumption) or the limitations of seeking environmental change through the market.Footnote 133
The new Strategy is, in the framing language, comparatively elaborated, with both economic growth and social value (not just economic value) relevant, as seen in the quotes above, and the inclusion of future generations brings inter-generational equity into the picture.Footnote 134 This also informs different approaches to the reasons for, and goals of, state intervention. Under the Programme, government would intervene only to correct ‘market failures’, with its role limited to setting ‘the conditions and guidelines that allow the market, businesses, local authorities and people to … propel us towards a more … sustainable economy’.Footnote 135 In contrast, under the Strategy, state interventions would instead need to adhere to at least one of five principles, the first of which is to allow people ‘to do the right thing’,Footnote 136 rather than just save (or make) money. The Strategy talks of ‘citizen’ (rather than just consumer) action on food waste, thus speaking to people's values (not just their pockets).Footnote 137 This boundary-work is familiar from the literature, where frames can identify problems as ‘this’, but ‘not that’. The Strategy is more elaborated: ‘this’, but ‘also this’.
These might seem like linguistic subtleties but these shifts may signal a move away from market-dominated approaches with a distinct ideological heritage. Indeed, problem frames are ‘currents in the stream of political discourse’. Of course, while natural capital may be ‘economic opportunity’ in new clothes, the broader diagnostic frame explored above has led to changes in the assumed responsibility of the state for addressing food waste. However, while the Strategy has much by way of contemplated action, there remains an ongoing reluctance to intervene against powerful interests. As discussed below, where business cases in the Programme underpinned a preference for government ‘stepping back’, their absence in the Strategy paves the way for government ‘stepping back in’. But not against supermarkets, and not against overproduction.
(c) Broadening the prognostic frame: government ‘steps back in’?
Central to the waste policies are familiar but fundamental debates about the role of the state in addressing environmental and other social problems.Footnote 138 As discussed below, the 2013 Programme adopted a clear line of diagnostic and prognostic framing, where waste as an economic opportunity, exemplified by business cases for waste prevention, limited the need for government intervention. More cynically, this frame barely disguised a broader economic agenda seeking to shift responsibility for all sorts of problems away from the state. In this hollowed out governance space, distributed (and outsourced) responsibility for all was more akin to a vacuum of responsibility for none. In the 2018 Strategy, government purports to ‘step back in’, and unlike the Programme, acknowledges retailer-driven overproduction as part of the problem. But the Strategy's broader diagnostic frame is not matched by its prescriptions, with a focus on redistributing rather reducing surplus, and responsibility shifted away from the state and retailers on to charities and farmers. So while the ‘elephant’ of overproduction was not even allowed ‘in the room’ under the Programme, under the Strategy, the elephant has been granted admittance but (as the metaphorical idiom provides) it is still being ignored.
(i) Government ‘steps back’: vacuum of responsibility under the Programme
It is widely acknowledged that responsibility for addressing food waste should be spread (‘distributed’) across the supply chain, with interventions at multiple levels by a range of actors. The Programme was thus largely uncontroversial in declaring that ‘everyone’ has ‘a part to play’ in waste prevention.Footnote 139 But the Programme then declared that ‘no single actor has overall responsibility or oversight’,Footnote 140 and that a more sustainable economy ‘can and should be delivered with limited government intervention as industry responds to the clear business case for action’ (emphasis added).Footnote 141 This underpinned Defra's later statement that it would ‘step back’ from waste,Footnote 142 with the Minister recently describing food waste legislation as ‘using a sledgehammer to crack a nut’.Footnote 143
The Programme displayed a clear line of diagnostic and prognostic thought. Waste as an economic opportunity, exemplified by business cases for waste prevention, limited the need for government intervention. More cynically, it is unclear whether minimal government intervention flowed from the problem definition of waste as an economic opportunity, or whether small-state ‘solution-mindedness’ was the real goal which (reverse) engineered the problem's definition. Was a limited role for the state the (ideological) tail wagging the dog? Central to shifting responsibility away from the state was the business case which, as a central rhetorical device, displays how frames are as much weapons of advocacy as they are reflections of empirical realities.Footnote 144 High-level policy frames inevitably form part of broader political agendas, and the framing literature is clear that pre-existing ideologies shape problem definition. In this sense, the Programme was perhaps not really about waste at all, but a broader concern to drive economic growth through a (mostly) non-interventionist state, (largely) irrespective of policy area. Either way, this shrunk government responsibility for particular aspects of waste (food waste prevention) on the basis of a restrictive diagnostic account as to the causes of food waste. In doing so, it excluded the systematic consideration of alternatives, removing from contemplation legislative measures which long featured on campaigners’ wish lists.Footnote 145
The Programme's role for government in encouraging and supporting action through collaborative approachesFootnote 146 resulted in the relative hollowing out of food waste prevention law and regulation. The limited exception is the Groceries Code. As above, any role the Code might play in food waste is tangential to its primary aims. However, the GCA's ability to intervene in the monopolistic conditions which allow for UTPs has been noted as capable of supporting the reduction of on-farm food waste, notably in respect of demand forecasting.Footnote 147 But the Code is not mentioned in the Programme, confirming the restrictiveness of its diagnostic and prognostic frames. Otherwise, food waste prevention has largely been outsourced to WRAP (the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a charity which receives most of its income from central government and devolved administrations).Footnote 148 WRAP administers perhaps the most high-profile food waste intervention, Love Food Hate Waste (a consumer information campaign),Footnote 149 as well as voluntary agreements, such as the Courtauld Commitments with food retailers and businesses.Footnote 150 These agreements include relatively unambitious non-binding targets, with Courtauld 2025 aiming to reduce per capita UK food waste by 20% between 2015 and 2025.Footnote 151 However, voluntary approaches rely overwhelmingly on business cases which, as explained above, are not necessarily contrary to structures that drive overproduction. Indeed, literature highlights the limits of the ‘market for virtue’, providing scepticism as to the ability of voluntary, collaborative and market-orientated approaches to dismantle vested interests in ongoing levels of overproduction and waste.Footnote 152 The Programme's prognostic frame was therefore highly restricted by actively excluding legislative interventions.
Read with the Programme's removal of oversight for anyone (including government), this casts doubt on the meaningfulness of ‘distributed responsibility’. As Swaffield et al show, the perceived business case for tackling food waste was central to supermarkets accepting some responsibility.Footnote 153 But limited retailer responsibility under business case approaches, combined with no single actor having overall oversight, is more akin to a vacuum of responsibility. In the same way that accountability to all is accountability to none, distributed responsibility for all is responsibility for none. This somewhat empty prognostic frame may (in framing language) have ‘resonated’ or ‘taken hold’ with powerful actors precisely because it helps them escape meaningful reformatory responsibility for food waste. At the same time, the rhetoric of ‘stepping back’ obscured how government was (and still is) subsidising AD, and thus responsive to the needs of for-profit waste management and a broader bias towards energy.Footnote 154 Saying government had ‘stepped back’ was thus disingenuous. Rather, government had stepped back from legislating on certain aspects of waste, merely supporting collaborative and voluntary approaches to addressing retailers and waste prevention, while supporting economic interests in food waste management by legislating for AD subsidies. This false dichotomy between ‘stepping back’ and ‘stepping back in’ is, as explained below, not entirely absent in the Strategy's mismatched prognostic and diagnostic frames.
(ii) Government ‘steps back in’ under the Strategy?
Government purportedly ‘stepping back’ from waste under the Programme was heavily criticised by the House of Commons Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee, who argued that Defra should take the ‘lead role and responsibility’ for waste policy.Footnote 155 It is therefore notable that, where the 2013 Programme started from a position of limited-to-no role for the state, the 2018 Strategy acknowledges the need to actively ‘provide’ incentives for waste prevention, ‘through regulatory or economic instruments if necessary and appropriate’.Footnote 156 Legislative proposals on the table under the Strategy, when they were previously off the table under the Programme, is an ostensibly significant frame shift. However, rather than seeking to reduce surplus, these proposals shift the burden of redistribution onto charities and farmers, and even the taxpayer and consumers. The Strategy thus displays a restrictive prognostic frame which does not match its own more elaborated diagnosis. This is seen in three main respects: first, the centrality of redistribution to the Strategy's overall approach, and related problems with the waste hierarchy; secondly, a fragmented approach to regulating on-farm food waste and UTPs; and thirdly, the continued outsourcing, and limited distribution, of responsibility for downstream food waste.
Redistribution and the waste hierarchy
Food redistribution is central to the Strategy's action on upstream food waste.Footnote 157 It outlines measures to support charitable redistribution of surplus food, but also recasts potentially broader interventions in terms of the narrower supportive role they might play for redistribution. A £15m pilot food redistribution fund, open and administered by WRAP just prior to the Strategy's launch, supports, for example, redistribution hubs and gleaning networks.Footnote 158 The Strategy also pledges to consult on surplus food donation and redistribution obligations for food businesses, similar to those adopted in France,Footnote 159 but recently rejected in England.Footnote 160 Combined, these measures seek to avoid diverting edible food to AD, although the Strategy makes no mention of the subsidies incentivising this.Footnote 161 In assessing whether the fund ‘levels’ the economic playing field between charitable redistribution and AD subsidies,Footnote 162 one might compare the £15m redistribution fund with the reported £160m supporting AD.Footnote 163
The redistribution of surplus food does not necessarily address overproduction, and may simply support the dispersal, rather than reduction, of excess in the system. Food waste prevention targets and mandatory reporting obligations, on which the Strategy also promises to consult,Footnote 164 may assist in ensuring that redistribution obligations do not become alternative means of dealing with unmitigated quantities of surplus. But as the Strategy states, ‘our priority is to stop surplus food from becoming waste’,Footnote 165 (rather than to minimise surplus itself). This reveals the restrictions of the Strategy's prognostic frame. The diagnosis identifies excess as part of the causes of food waste, but redistribution addresses its symptoms, not causes. Indeed, three years after certain French retailers were required to enter into donation agreements with redistribution organisations, the measures, while increasing the amounts of food donated (not all of which is eventually eaten), have failed to address the underlying problem of overproduction, and may, perversely, have lessened the incentive to do so.Footnote 166
Additionally, this narrow prognostic frame of intervention shifts responsibility for food waste away from businesses and the state, confirms the burden already on charities for redirecting donated food, and makes new asks of the taxpayer. The £15 million redistribution fund, by making it easier for retailers to deal with their waste, partly amounts to a transfer of public money (via charities and redistribution) to supermarkets, which some might see as an indirect form of ‘corporate welfare’.Footnote 167 For those seeing the causes of hunger residing in poverty, inequality and a state which is responsive to corporate rather than social needs, this may seem misplaced. Indeed, if redistribution becomes more than a temporary stop-gap to the coexistence of surplus, hunger and waste, and the Strategy's proposed legal obligations institutionalise redistribution as a solution to ‘food poverty’, then this may divert attention away from the role of the state in addressing the causes of both poverty and surplus.Footnote 168 While the language and rhetoric of the Strategy's diagnostic frame is thus much less overtly business-oriented than the Programme, there is much within its prognostic frame to appeal to retailers and, notwithstanding the promised sense of government intervention, proponents of a small(er) state. The Strategy's focus on charitable redistribution may reflect the interests of, or have greater ‘mobilising potency’ with supermarkets, than those seeking more large-scale reimaginations of the food system.Footnote 169
Similar criticisms apply to the Strategy's pledge to review business implementation of guidance on applying the waste hierarchy. The hierarchy is a legal obligation, originating in EU law, which requires those generating waste to take reasonable measures to prioritise waste prevention.Footnote 170 This can be complied with by distributing food surplus for human consumption or feeding it to animals, before managing food waste by sending it for AD or incineration, or to landfill. The hierarchy's application to food is thus relatively straightforward, and so the guidance is unsurprisingly somewhat anodyne and prosaic.Footnote 171 A guidance implementation review is thus no substitute for actual enforcement of the hierarchy, the lack of which has been noted.Footnote 172 In fact, continued lack of enforcement would represent an ongoing absence of the state. Furthermore, the so-called ‘constructive ambiguity’ of the waste hierarchy was documented as key to creating the moral and economic imperative underpinning consensus around ‘distributed responsibility’ for food waste.Footnote 173 Curiously, the presentation of data underpinning this finding gives no indication that relevant actors appreciate how the hierarchy is a legal obligation, not just a non-legal imperative.Footnote 174 A focus on guidance, rather than enforcement, may perpetuate collective ignorance or amnesia in some quarters as to the hierarchy's legal status.
Of course, supporting compliance is an established strategy before escalating enforcement.Footnote 175 To that end, mandatory food waste reporting and prevention targets, on which the Strategy also promises to consult, may further support compliance with the waste hierarchy.Footnote 176 In accordance with meta-regulatory approaches, reporting obligations and targets can generate information for designing solutions and ‘irritate’ businesses into action,Footnote 177 and transparency has long been seen as a way to leverage retailers’ poor performance on food waste.Footnote 178 However, as argued elsewhere, the framing effect of the hierarchy can actually divert attention away from overproduction,Footnote 179 further evidenced by the Strategy so explicitly tagging implementation of the hierarchy to redistributing rather than reducing surplus: ‘we expect more surplus food to be redistributed as a result’.Footnote 180 Enforcing the hierarchy is thus no panacea, and may simply legitimate, rather than challenge, the overproduction of surplus. We might, therefore, query to what extent this really represents the state ‘stepping back in’, highlighting the potential for a mismatch between rhetorical frames and meaningful action, while simultaneously pushing the problem of surplus to the background.
On-farm food waste and UTP powers in the Agriculture Bill
Significantly, the Agriculture Bill 2017–19 would provide powers to address UTPs which, as the Strategy states, ‘are often the cause of viable produce going to waste’, particularly on farms.Footnote 181 The powers apply to agreements between first purchasers, such as processors and distributers, and agricultural producers, usually smaller farmers particularly vulnerable to UTPs.Footnote 182 The Secretary of State would be able to introduce statutory codes of conduct, and specify the content of contractual terms often associated with driving overproduction and waste. Powers to fund producer groups pursuing joint business models, such as short supply chains and alternative markets, would additionally support producers in selling surplus elsewhere.Footnote 183
These fair dealing powers are sought explicitly to inter alia address the (conservatively estimated) 3.6m tonnes of food wasted annually on farms, and the Strategy acknowledges the structural power imbalances within which incentives to overproduce are embedded.Footnote 184 For example, farmers routinely overproduce as a deliberate strategy to avoid being unable to meet orders (or last minute increases), and potential delisting by a purchaser as a result.Footnote 185 This overproduction can be wasteful when (contractually permissible) last minute quantity reductions or cancellations leave insufficient time for producers to find alternative buyers, or if producers are prohibited from selling surplus elsewhere.Footnote 186 Unfairness can also arise when producers are forced to bear the financial costs of this surplus/waste. Powers to define the content of contacts, which more powerful market actors such as processors, distributors and retailers are presently able to impose on smaller suppliers,Footnote 187 thus have the potential to tackle overproduction and waste by minimising the financial and contractual risks of underproduction.
The Strategy is thus less restrictive than the Programme in its diagnostic framing, which framed food waste as arising from slightly (rather than fundamentally) misaligned incentives, or informational (as opposed to power) asymmetries. However, the Strategy casts these powers as seeking to distribute rather than reduce surplus, by making it easier for producers to find alternative outlets for produce, the present difficulties of which mean ‘perfectly good food never even reaches the shop shelf’.Footnote 188 If overproduction is in the prognostic frame (or the goal of intervention), it is subtle. While use of these powers may thus reduce the financial and contractual risks farmers face by not overproducing, the explicit framing of these powers is to make it easier for producers (not retailers) to bear the burden of surplus, rather than seeing that level of surplus reduced.
That being said, these measures are more interventionist than voluntary agreements and arguably have the potential to realign power relations. While contractual regulation might not be a substitute for hierarchical manifestations of the state, at least when enforcement is through private law,Footnote 189 the Bill includes powers to establish a public enforcement regime, probably administered by the Rural Payments Agency (RPA).Footnote 190 Specifying the terms of contracts, with credible enforcement by a public body, is very much the state stepping back in.Footnote 191
That the powers are sought within the context of upstream agricultural policy does begin to situate food waste within farm-to-fork thinking.Footnote 192 However, the manner of implementation is not the whole-systems approach expected by a fully elaborated resource management frame. The new RPA regime will sit alongside the Code, which protects direct suppliers of the UK's 10 major supermarkets from UTPs. Farmers tend to be indirect suppliers, so that most of them are not covered by the Code.Footnote 193 The new powers thus create a separate regime covering agreements between first purchasers of agricultural products (not usually supermarkets) and producers (farmers).Footnote 194 This fragmented approach was criticised by the House of Commons EFRA Committee, who ‘saw no reason’ for ‘two separate processes and enforcement bodies’.Footnote 195
As a result, those major retailers most heavily implicated in driving overproduction escape direct legal responsibility for food wasted on farms and by other indirect suppliers. Given that the literature is clear that frames are often (as above) about the ‘political strength of different groups’, it may be no coincidence that some of the most powerful actors are largely untouched by legal responsibility for food waste along the supply chain. Indeed, the Strategy actively confirms support for ongoing ‘collaborative’ (voluntary) action to address retailer responsibility for food waste under Courtauld 2025.Footnote 196 Responsibility is thus more distributed in the Strategy's prognostic frame than the Programme's, with new obligations on first purchasers. But responsibility for retailers remains limited, raising questions as to whether an ‘extended producer responsibility’ regime for food waste is warranted.Footnote 197 At the same time, the Strategy's otherwise more interventionist frame works mostly within the status quo: supermarket dominance is relatively unchallenged, in turn pushing into the background alternative visions of the food system, such as locally-based food economies and shorter supply chains.Footnote 198
Interestingly, the Agriculture Bill extends the geographical reach of these obligations in ways which are consistent with an elaborated resource management approach. Powers to regulate contract terms extend to agreements between producers outside of the UK and UK-based first purchasers.Footnote 199 It is curious that this garners no attention in the Strategy, particularly given the entire chapter on international leadership.Footnote 200 However, extending the geographical remit of regulation may just add to the challenges of fragmentation. Multiple interventions (the ongoing presence of waste law, especially the waste hierarchy, new powers under the Agriculture Bill, voluntary agreements, and the Code) come with a variety of respective regulators (the Environment Agency, the RPA, WRAP and the GCA), with different responsible government departments and sub-teams (waste and agriculture teams within Defra, and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). With this comes a proliferation of frames across departments, policy domains, regulators, and time, which may not cohere into a coherent narrative. Indeed, the challenge of a more elaborate frame is the management of an ever-changing and unwieldy beast.Footnote 201 Furthermore, a fragmented landscape, as Parker and Johnson note, creates opportunities for law and regulation ‘to be shaped by short-term political interests and not by social and ecological realities’.Footnote 202 How these regimes are to coexist in an increasingly crowded and fragmented regulatory space is unclear,Footnote 203 and they may be vulnerable to interests, such as those of retailers, preferring more restricted food waste frames. These tasks seem beyond what is achievable by the Strategy's Food Surplus and Waste Champion, whose remit (on paper) is limited to awareness-raising.Footnote 204
Downstream food waste
The Strategy's approach to downstream food waste, concerning consumers and households, though relatively brief, raises similar issues as to the relationship between the causes of the problem (diagnostic framing) and the scope of interventions (prognostic framing). Measures outlined which seek to make it ‘easier for people to waste less food’ include working with industry on labelling and packaging; monitoring implementation of best practice by retailers and brands; and supporting work to prevent citizen food waste.Footnote 205 Actions on household food waste by businesses are coordinated primarily by WRAP. WRAP has significant and valuable expertise, but it does not have the hierarchical or cross-policy clout which may be necessary to tackle retailer incentives to drive overconsumption and address downstream food waste. WRAP's best practice guidance on when to use best before dates,Footnote 206 for example, is incapable of addressing the very distribution of power within the legal frameworks on food labelling.Footnote 207 Yet the allocation of responsibilities within that regime allows food businesses considerable scope in addressing the tensions between profit, safety and waste, in ways which benefit them reputationally and financially but to the detriment of food waste imperatives.Footnote 208 Labelling guidance is therefore no panacea, and the preference for outsourcing from government may restrict the systematic consideration of alternative (potentially legislative) approaches.Footnote 209 Meanwhile, the focus on labelling may actively shift the burden of food waste away from retailers and back on to the consumer,Footnote 210 in ways which are not in keeping with a meaningful distribution of responsibility. Again, the broader diagnostic attribution provided by the Strategy, which admits the role of structures in consumer food waste, is (mis)matched with a narrower prognostic frame which is hollowed out, and shifts burdens to consumers.
Conclusion
Frame critical analysis of the Strategy reveals a significant shift in England's approach to food waste. Special treatment is a noteworthy departure from restrictively framing food waste as a generic waste problem, although the importance of some interventions, such as impact-based reporting and the global reach of UTP powers, has been downplayed. Moving away from framing growth as the goal, to framing growth as part of the problem, has also opened up space for contemplating governmental intervention.
However, the Strategy's focus on farmers and charities redistributing (rather than reducing) surplus fails to respond to its own elaborated account of the causes of food waste, which acknowledges structural overproduction and overconsumption. Shifting responsibility away from retailers and the state echoes how frames can reflect the outcome of power dynamics and reinforce a system's status quo. Furthermore, the potential disconnect between rhetorical framing and practical action is almost obscured by the Strategy's more inclusive language, its acknowledgement of surplus as problematic, and its promised sense of intervention. Promises to consult on food waste legislation are not promises to legislate. The continued reliance on guidance, collaborative/voluntary strategies and WRAP, together with the fragmented approach to UTPs, indicate a reluctance to step in where it may be needed most: against the interests of major retailers through direct legal responsibility for food waste.
In addition, if powers under the Agriculture Bill are used, and legislation on targets, reporting and mandatory donation come to fruition, the previously hollowed out governance of food waste will be populated by increasing levels and layers of legal and regulatory complexity, all informed by different frames from different political eras. This is typical of environmental law, but it raises familiar challenges which require not only government oversight and coordination, but a scholarly reengagement with waste. Otherwise, the fresh impetus to address food waste as more than a generic waste problem could result in fragmented rather than distributed forms of responsibility for managing a particularly precious resource.
