Territoriality, environment and hybrid governance tensions in alternative food networks: Cases of small-scale viticulture in Chile (original) (raw)
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Socio-political dynamics of alternative food networks: a hybrid governance approach
Territory, Politics, Governance, 2019
Alternative food networks (AFNs) encounter governance challenges stemming from their own organizational growth pains and their search for cultivable land, but also from their confrontation with urban planning policy and state structures whose affinity with urban agriculture is on average quite low. The agro-food literature does not sufficiently account for the governance complexity of AFNs. As AFNs develop, different governance tensions arise both within their organization as well as in the institutionalization processes in which they are embedded. This theoretical paper makes use of a redefined concept of hybrid governancedifferent from that in neo-institutional economics (NIE)to elucidate the governance dynamics of AFNs. Finding inspiration in three strands of theory belonging to the 'institutional turn in social science', it redefines hybrid governance as a dialectical nexus of four basic forms of governance (solidarity based, networked, hierarchical, market stirred) reproducing three types of governance tensions (organizational, resource oriented, institutional). Using hybrid governance as an analytical mirror, the paper examines to what extent the agro-food literature has addressed the complexity of AFNs' governance and how its analysis can be improved.
Local Environment, 2018
This paper applies the concept of Hybrid Governance to the analysis of the GASAP (Groupe d'Achats Solidaires de l'Agriculture Paysanne), a solidarity based producers-consumers network established in Brussels in 2006. The Hybrid Governance concept allows to capture the role of key governance tensions in driving the self-organization, scaling out and self-reflexive dynamics of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs). The approach provides a multifaceted and sound socio-political account of the ways AFNs arise, self-organize, associate and build networks in the pursuit of their food allocation objectives, often facing a contradictory socio-institutional environment. Three types of governance tensions, i.e. organizational, resource, and institutional, as well as the interactions among them, are analysed throughout the life-course of the GASAP network. The analysis identifies three phases in the GASAP's life-course, showing how governance tensions and their interrelations arise and play a critical role in conditioning the overall development of the organization through time. The paper concludes with highlighting prospective values of the hybrid governance approach for the analysis of alternative food networks in general. These values relate to: the role of the hybrid approach in illuminating on key drivers behind the scaling out of AFNs; the hybrid governance as a tool to conceptualise and sustain the self-reflexive capacity of local food initiatives; the ways by which this approach unravels challenges to build cooperative alliances and networks among a diversity of agents in the food arena.
In exploring the social wild of agrofood movements in Ecuador as examples of self-organization (i.e., locally distributed and resolved development), this article departs from a preoccupation with innovation by means of design and the use of scaling as a metaphor for describing research contributions in agriculture and food. The case material highlights that much development is contingent, unpredictable, and unmanageable as well as unbound to fixed spaces or places. In their study of people’s daily practice, the authors do not find clear boundaries between dichotomies of internal–external, lay–expert, traditional–modern, or local–global organization, but heterogeneous blends of each. For the purposes of sustainable development, this highlights the need for attention to be paid to relationships (social, material, and biological embedding), adaptation (the capacity to innovate), and responsibility (adherence to norms of sustainability). Far from romanticizing self-organization, the authors acknowledge that people and their institutions share varying degrees of complicity for the goods as well as the bads of their economic activity, such as mass soil degradation, agrobiodiversity loss, and poisoning by pesticides. Nevertheless, even under highly difficult conditions, certain actors effectively bypass the limitations of formal institutions in forging a socio-technical course of action (i.e., policy) for relatively healthy living and being. As such, the authors have come to appreciate self-organization as a neglected, if paradoxical, resource for policy transition towards more sustainable agriculture and food.
Towards an Integrated Framework for the Governance of a Territorialised Agroecological Transition
Agroecological Transitions: From Theory to Practice in Local Participatory Design, 2019
This chapter aims to further our understanding of the governance mechanisms that might best support a territorialised agroecological transition (TAET). The challenge of governance is to coordinate the actions of a multitude of actors and to integrate different dimensions of agroecology. This challenge is portrayed as important in the sustainable agri-food systems literature, which seeks a convergence of governance approaches pertaining to either a Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) or a Socio-Technical Systems (STS)-oriented conception. Starting from a representation of the territory that combines these two approaches, we emphasize the importance of reflexive governance for collectively constructing a shared space of values and knowledge between actors. Case studies of eco-innovative food and energy projects in rural areas of Gers and Aveyron in France illustrate various governance mechanisms. Even if there are high expectations pertaining to the territory as a place for articulating public, market, and civil society actors around a shared vision of sustainable agri-food systems, there is still a long way to go before local governance of the transition becomes a reality, including from a long-term perspective.
2019
This dissertation focuses on the governance of alternative food networks (AFNs). The aim is to identify, conceptualize and empirically investigate the critical governance tensions conditioning the genesis and the life-course of alternative food initiatives. To this purpose this dissertation develops a Hybrid Governance Approach (HGA) which identifies three types of governance tensions - i.e. organizational, resource and institutional - and analyses the interrelations among them in different case-studies of local food initiatives in the Brussels-Capital Region. An international case study - Toronto - is investigated to learn from similarities and differences in the ways local food networks experience and address governance tensions in the two city-regions' food policy trajectories. The empirical findings of this dissertation help to unravel the contradictions and dilemmas that AFNs face in their dynamic reproduction. The need to cope with their own spatial-material growth, to sec...
Territorialising Local Food Systems for an Agroecological Transition in Latin America
Land
An agroecological transition can enhance resilience by several means, e.g., managing ecological relationships through agroecosystems, enhancing farmers’ knowledge of natural resources, recycling those resources, maintaining biodiversity, and thus, flexibly adapting to environmental stresses. However, the hegemonic agri-food system has been continuing its capitalist transition, thereby undermining agroecological methods and deterritorialising social bonds. Facing this pervasive threat, an agroecological transition needs a greater convergence between agroecological production and a solidarity economy (economia solidaria or EcoSol in Latin America). Their convergence can be called EcoSol-agroecology, based on short food supply chains (called circuitos cortos there). These efforts develop territorial markets, generate more stable livelihoods, and thus keep producers on the land. In our study, each research team collaborated with an EcoSol-agroecology network to develop Participatory Act...
2020
This article offers comparative insight into alternative food networks, based on French and Brazilian case studies. Looking at a series of initiatives, such as producer–consumer networks (Ecovida in Southern Brazil, AMAP in France), collective producer shops, farmers' markets, and school provisioning schemes, we analyse the modes of coordination and decision-making that are articulated and the roles of the different actors involved. We show that the growing role of consumers and producers in these food networks, not only as individuals but also as citizens often involved in civil society organizations, can directly influence changes in public policy and the forms of agriculture practised, thereby leading to a better integration of the civic and social dimensions of food production and distribution. In both countries alternative food networks have strongly contributed to the legitimization of agro-ecology, although this is framed significantly by national specificities surroundin...
Agriculture and Human Values
Social Ecological System (SES) research highlights the importance of understanding the potential of collective actions, among other factors, when it comes to influencing the transformative (re)configuration of agri-food systems in response to global change. Such a response may result in different desired outcomes for those actors who promote collective action, one such outcome being food sovereignty. In this study, we used an SES framework to describe the configuration of local agri-food systems in Andean Ecuador in order to understand which components of the SES interact, and how they support outcomes linked to five food sovereignty goals. Through a survey administered to mestizo and indigenous peasants, we analyze the key role played by the Agroecological Network of Loja (RAL) in transforming the local agri-food system through the implementation of a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS). This study demonstrates that participation in the RAL and PGS increases farmers’ adoption of a...
Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements
Agroecology is in fashion, and now constitutes a territory in dispute between social movements and institutionality. This new conjuncture offers a constellation of opportunities that social movements can avail themselves of to promote changes in the food system. Yet there is an enormous risk that agroecology will be co-opted, institutionalized, colonized and stripped of its political content. In this paper, we analyze this quandary in terms of political ecology: will agroecology end up as merely offering a few more tools for the toolbox of industrial agriculture, to fine tune an agribusiness system that is being restructured in the midst of a civilizational crisis or, alternatively, will it be strengthened as a politically mobilizing option for building alternatives to development? We interpret the contemporary dispute over agroecology through the lenses of contested material and immaterial territories, political ecology, and the first and second contradictions of capital. Popular pressure has caused many multilateral institutions, governments, universities and research centers, some NGOs [non-governmental organizations], corporations and others, to finally recognize 'agroecology'. However, they have tried to redefine it as a narrow set of technologies, to offer some tools that appear to ease the sustainability crisis of industrial food production, while the existing structures of power remain unchallenged. This co-optation of agroecology to fine-tune the industrial food system, while paying lip service to the environmental discourse, has various names, including 'climate smart agriculture', 'sustainable-' or 'ecological-intensification', industrial monoculture production of 'organic' food, etc. For us, these are not agroecology: we reject them, and we will fight to expose and block this insidious appropriation of agroecology. The real solutions to the crises of the climate, malnutrition, etc., will not come from conforming to the industrial model. We must transform it and build our own local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production by peasants, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, urban farmers, etc. We cannot allow agroecology to be a tool of the industrial food production model: we see it as the essential alternative to that model, and as the means of transforming how we produce and consume food into something better for humanity and our Mother Earth.
2012
Many initiatives are launched by the civil society in order to change farming practices; in particular through the construction of territorial sustainable agri-food systems. The aim of this paper is to understand how such initiatives can change farming systems. With this aim, we will focus on a group of residents from a periurban area of Paris, who created an AMAP with a conventional cereal farmer and developed a project of short supply chain for local catering, which involved other farmers. With this case-study, we will show how non-agricultural stakeholders can facilitate changes in farming practices and contribute to the ecologization of agriculture in their "territoire".