The terms ‘regenerative agriculture’ and ‘nature-based solutions’ have gained prominence in policy and funding spaces related to food systems. Global policy fora like the UN Food Systems Summit and the UN climate and biodiversity conferences have recently used these terms as bywords for sustainable development. They add to a collection of terms and ideas that claim to present sustainable solutions for food systems, including agroecology, climate-smart agriculture, sustainable intensification, conservation agriculture, zero-carbon agriculture, permaculture, biodynamic farming, organic agriculture, holistic resource management, and so on. Although there is broad agreement about the need to transform food systems and make them more sustainable, there are different interpretations about what that means in practice, and there is growing competition between different approaches and terminology. This study was motivated by concerns that a narrow set of actors is driving debates and shaping policy processes related to the sustainable transformation of food systems. More specifically, there are concerns that the mainstreaming of agroecology—a concept that has long combined ecological and social aspects— and its amalgamation with other ideas linked to the sustainability discourse, result in emptying the concept of its social and political underpinnings. This study aims to identify and critically analyze competing framings and narratives connected to agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and nature-based solutions in agriculture and food. It investigates how and why these terms have been taken up in recent global policy spaces and funding streams. The analysis is guided by a perspective centred on the knowledge politics of sustainability, which combines an emphasis on discourse—exploring how meaning is created, by whom, and whether it is disputed—with a focus on power dynamics—understanding whose knowledge counts, why, and to what effect. This study focuses on three global policy spaces and 16 private and public funding providers connected to sustainability and food systems. The global policy spaces are the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 (UNFSS), the UN Climate Change Conference in 2021 (COP26), and Part One of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity COP15 in 2021 (CBD). The choice of spaces reflects the fact that climate and biodiversity conferences increasingly address food systems, with nature-based solutions being systematically referenced. All three are high-level summit events with extensive lead-in processes and negotiations that took place over the course of 2021-2022. Also, these spaces have been criticized for being exclusive and more favorable to the ideas of corporate actors and this calls for further investigation. The 16 funding sources comprise agrifood corporations, philanthropies, international development donors, and public funders of research and innovation. The study also includes a bibliometric analysis that gauges the significance of the three co