Harvesting Futures

This chapter examines how participants in Greece’s agrifood system, including producers, cooperative representatives, agronomists and researchers, processors and retailers, and public officials, perceive sustainability and operationalize it in their future orientation under the 2023–2027 CAP. It uses the voices expressed during a stakeholder workshop, a structured pathway-selection exercise, several focus groups and targeted interviews to find common and contested views and visions on the interface of quality improvement, EU policy compliance, and selective digitalization. Across groups, “doing sustainability” is largely operationalized through measurable standards and traceability that promise auditability and market access, while participants flag advisory gaps, uneven certification/data costs, and the limits of one-size-fits-all prescriptions. The analysis surfaces mechanism-level constraints, such as weak cooperatives, thin extension services, fragmented landholdings, and skills limitations, that shape adoption and reproduce lock-ins/lock-outs. However, rather than a single pathway, actors articulate pragmatic mixes that combine practice improvement and locally bounded experimentation. The chapter brings together these situational diagnoses into a problem framing based on stakeholders that helps evaluate policy options and makes it clear what implementation problems need to be solved for more inclusive and long-lasting sustainability transitions.