Table 3.

Stakeholder power categories, including phosphorus examples.

Power type	Description	Phosphorus examples
Economic or market power	Purchasing power (demand) or economies of scale to supply a good or service; market power (potential for collusion or cartel) and trade power (subject to few tariff and non-tariff barriers)	Farmer fertiliser purchase power; China’s market power as a key global phosphate producer (evidenced in 2008 when China imposed 135 % export tariff contributed to price spike and farmer riots); Trade power with institutional backing to allow for quick adjustments to national food and fertiliser trade flows, including establishment of strategic P reserve; The scale of economic power can be shifted from oligopoly of global producers to localised phosphorus sources (E.g. In the fictitious dystopian future of URINETOWN, all toilets have been privatised due to repeated drought, urinating in public is punished by gross penalties, and the sanitation company own your pee (Kotis and Hollman, 2001))
Knowledge power	Production, exchange, brokering, translation of knowledge	Fertiliser marketing consultancies (e.g. CRU) that produce/sell important market data, kept behind an expensive paywall.
Latent or potential power	Potential power to influence future events, systems or scenarios but not presently	Wastewater treatment plants can be described as ‘sitting on a gold mine’ due to the phosphorus content of wastewater, which may become expensive in the future as it becomes scarcer. Large consumers of ‘clean green’ energy from local bioenergy, can potentially drive/stimulate phosphorus recovery in the future.
Weltanschauunga power	Inherent power associated with different worldviews	Improving economic productivity (e.g. phosphorus efficiency) is a more dominant paradigm than say the right to food or changing diets.
Post-human power	Power of non-human objects or forces	Phosphate rock is a much more ‘powerful’ phosphorus entity than say phosphorus sourced from human excreta.
Persuasive power	People/groups that may hold little practical power but manage to influence situations in a positive or negative direction through persuasiveness.	Some members of the phosphorus research community who are very eloquent and persuasive.
Convening power	Persons or groups who due to their position/status can bring together key people/groups for action	Instigators of regional or national phosphorus platform.
Antagonistic power dynamic	“when one type of power resists or prevents another”b	Some fertiliser companies that are resistant to change/innovation and seek to maintain status quo.
Synergistic power dynamic	“when different types of power mutually enforce and enable each other”c	Entrepreneurs co-recovering bioenergy from digestion of organic wastes for sale, which also facilitates the co-recovery of phosphorus by-products.
Accommodating d power (dynamic)	not synergistic / mutually reinforcing, but able to coexist through negotiation	Parliaments that set food, agriculture, trade or other policy through deliberative legislative means.
Ambivalent & ‘blackbox’ power	Power held by an actor that is unknown or unforeseeable until it appears in given moment (hence black box)	UK pro-Brexit voters were not expected to win, but did, the results of which are likely to have a profound impact on UK food and agriculture.

^aGerman for ‘worldview’, from Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland and Poulter, 2006).

^bAvelino and Rotmans (2011).

^cAvelino and Rotmans (2011).

^dIntention of ‘seeking system accommodations’ from Midgley’s (2003) Critical Systems Thinking.