PhD Assessing Social Sustainability in Short Food Supply Chains

Are you interested in how law and policy can make agri-food systems fairer and more socially sustainable? Do you enjoy combining legal analysis with empirical research and engaging with farmers and other food-system actors? Join the Law Group at Wageningen University & Research as a PhD candidate in the Horizon Europe project SOCIAL AGRI.

Social issues such as working conditions, farmer wellbeing, migrant worker integration and gender equality remain insufficiently captured in EU agricultural data and policy frameworks. This makes social costs and inequalities difficult to assess and address. SOCIAL AGRI aims to close this gap by collecting evidence on social conditions in agriculture, assessing their economic implications, and translating the findings into practical legal and policy instruments to make social sustainability a measurable and actionable dimension of European agricultural policy.

You will contribute to this objective through an in-depth socio-legal study of short food supply chains (SFSCs) in the Netherlands. You will investigate how different SFSC models operate, how EU and Dutch law and policy shape their development, and how their organisation affects social sustainability, including working conditions, inclusion, community relationships and the distribution of value.

Combining legal analysis with empirical research, you will use methods such as semi-structured interviews and stakeholder engagement activities, depending on the research design. You will identify legal and regulatory barriers to socially sustainable practices and explore how law and policy could better support their development.

Working with other project partners, you will also contribute to developing and assessing SOCIAL AGRI’s social-sustainability indicators. Your findings will inform the project’s comparative analysis and help translate evidence on social performance into feasible policy recommendations and legal instruments, including potential regulatory approaches and contractual provisions.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Develop and carry out a PhD research plan aligned with SOCIAL AGRI, with a clear focus on the Dutch short food supply chain case study and its contribution to the project’s evidence-to-policy pathway.
• Analyse relevant EU and Dutch legal and policy frameworks affecting short food supply chains and social sustainability in agriculture.
• Collect and analyse empirical evidence on the social conditions and relationships within Dutch short food supply chains, using appropriate qualitative methods.
• Contribute to the development actionable legal and policy instruments, including policy recommendations and model regulatory or contractual provisions, in collaboration with the wider consortium and relevant stakeholders, and of social-sustainability indicators.
• Contribute to comparative research, collaboration and dissemination within SOCIAL AGRI, interdisciplinary teamwork, project meetings, workshops and academic publications, while actively participating in the academic life of the Law Group.

You will work here
The research is embedded within the chair Law Group.The Law Group is a vibrant, dynamic, intercultural research community that is closely integrated into the Department of Social Sciences. It has a critical, socio-legal orientation, and excels in interdisciplinary research. It collaborates closely with a range of global partners. The focus of the group’s work is detailed in its most recent Chair Plan.

You will work under the supervision of Dr Mirta Alessandrini, who is responsible for the SOCIAL AGRI Dutch case study, Dr Edwin Albals, and Dr Inga Winkler. You will also collaborate with colleagues and researchers from the wider SOCIAL AGRI consortium.