Defining Regeneration within China’s Agrifood System: Institutional Frames and Practitioners’ Perspectives

In the past two decades, the concept of sustainability and its dominant develop-mental paradigm have been widely criticized for failing to halt environmental and social degradation. As a response, regeneration or ‘regenerative sustainabil-ity’ has emerged as an alternative paradigm, advocating holistic, process-ori-ented, and place-based approaches that support the thriving of socio-ecological systems.Agrifood systems, which strongly affect ecosystems and are closely linked to is-sues of social justice, are among the sectors where regeneration is urgently needed. Yet the concepts of regeneration and regenerative practices have al-ready been defined in academic debates and have also been co-opted by indus-trial agriculture to reinforce eco-modernist narratives. This raises important questions about how regeneration can be defined from the bottom up in ways that reflect its emphasis on place-based approaches,and how such a context-spe-cific definition can be meaningfully situated within the Chinese agrifood land-scape.This contribution addresses these questions by presenting the results of a partic-ipatory online workshop that brought together practitioners from different fields within China’s agrifood system. Through collaborative activities, partici-pants identified drivers, practices, and outcomes of regeneration and co-created a working definition that can serve as a foundation for further socio-ecological research.