Toward Greener Pastures: Digital Sustainability Pathways in the Agri-Food Industry

The agri-food industry is one of the largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. However, making progress toward “greener pastures” requires actors to coordinate emissions reduction across interdependent resources and activities organized in value chains of sequential production and exchange. Therefore, moving forward produces frictions when large-scale sustainability goals introduce new coordination demands that exceed what existing industry configurations can readily support. While information systems (IS) research increasingly highlights the promise of digital sustainability as the use of digital resources to improve environmental, social, and economic welfare, existing literature offers limited explanation of how this can be achieved at the industry level. Drawing on an interpretive case study of the European agri-food industry, we examine how digital resources are orchestrated in response to frictions between sustainability demands and industry coordination. We identify three pathways of digital sustainability: Substitution makes distributed expertise recombinable in the development of low-carbon alternatives, optimization synchronizes action across interdependent resource-intensive activities, and redistribution makes verified sustainability contributions visible and available for downstream compensation. We theorize digital sustainability as pathways of orchestrated response through which digital resources are configured to recombine knowledge, synchronize activity, and reallocate value, stabilizing coordination architectures for sustainability at the industry level that operate alongside existing value chains.