ABSTRACT
The alarming scale of food waste across the world makes this problem one of today’s most pressing global challenges. Approximately 30% of the food grown worldwide is wasted. Despite wide recognition, there is no single blueprint for policies to tackle the food waste problem; and individual national approaches vary significantly. In this chapter, we compare three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We study their national food waste reduction efforts through the lens of multi-level governance. Our emphasis is on actors and leading coalitions that have identified food waste as a political issue, and how they affected policies and governance frameworks to deliver concrete measures for reducing food waste. We further show the emergence of three different experimentalist approaches to reducing food waste and identify the civil society in Denmark, public policies in Sweden and industrial actors in Norway as the initial drivers of food waste reduction. We move from the analytical to the normative mode of multi-level governance to conclude that learning and collaboration between the three sectors (public agency, industry and civil society initiatives), at various levels and between countries, are important and necessary components for tackling the food waste challenge.
