Sustainable Food System AssessmentSustainable Food System Assessment provides both practical and theoretical insights about the growing interest in and response to measuring food system sustainability. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, this book shares lessons learned, explores intended and actual project outcomes, and highlights points of conceptual and methodological convergence.Interest in assessing food system sustainability is growing, as evidenced by the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the importance food systems initiatives have taken in serving as a lever for attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This book opens by looking at the conceptual considerations of food systems indicators, including the place-based dimensions of food systems indicators and how measurements are implicated in sense-making and visioning processes. Chapters in the second part cover operationalizing metrics, including the development of food systems indicator frameworks, degrees of indicator complexities, and practical constraints to assessment. The fi nal part focuses on the outcomes of assessment projects, including impacts on food policy and communities involved, highlighting the importance of building connections between sustainable food systems initiatives.The global coverage and multi-scalar perspectives, including both conceptual and practical aspects, make this a key resource for academics and practitioners across planning, geography, urban studies, food studies, and research methods. It will also be of interest to government offi cials and those working within NGOs.

Sustainable Food System AssessmentSustainable Food System Assessment provides both practical and theoretical insights about the growing interest in and response to measuring food system sustainability. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, this book shares lessons learned, explores intended and actual project outcomes, and highlights points of conceptual and methodological convergence.Interest in assessing food system sustainability is growing, as evidenced by the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the importance food systems initiatives have taken in serving as a lever for attaining the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This book opens by looking at the conceptual considerations of food systems indicators, including the place-based dimensions of food systems indicators and how measurements are implicated in sense-making and visioning processes. Chapters in the second part cover operationalizing metrics, including the development of food systems indicator frameworks, degrees of indicator complexities, and practical constraints to assessment. The fi nal part focuses on the outcomes of assessment projects, including impacts on food policy and communities involved, highlighting the importance of building connections between sustainable food systems initiatives.The global coverage and multi-scalar perspectives, including both conceptual and practical aspects, make this a key resource for academics and practitioners across planning, geography, urban studies, food studies, and research methods. It will also be of interest to government offi cials and those working within NGOs.

20 an implicit positive causal relationship between urban innovations and sustainability, most of these relationships remain undocumented and unclear. Among them, for example, is the idea that local food trade is inherently environmentally friendly (Katz, 2010) or socially just. Yet many works show the complexity and relative truth of this assertion (Born & Purcell, 2006; Desrochers & Shimizu, 2008). Some of these innovations may also have negative impacts on social issues. Slocum et al. (2016) pointed out how, in spite of the will to create and inhabit more equitable food spaces, the food movement often fails to lead to food justice, instead reinforcing existing race, class, and gender inequalities (Clancy, 1994; Freidberg, 2003). In a nutshell, urban food innovations do not necessarily address sustainability issues. Additionally, existing initiatives that focus on indicators, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, privilege technocratic approaches and data, while case-study analyses can be limiting in terms of their transferability (see Chapters 1 & 12, this volume). Within this context, understanding how to move towards increasingly sustainable city region food systems is a challenge. The research programme URBAL (Urban-driven Innovations for Sustainable Food Systems) (2018-2020), funded by Agropolis Fondation (France), Fondation Daniel & Nina Carasso (France/ Spain), and Fundazione Cariplo (Italy), and coordinated by CIRAD (France) and the Laurier Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada), seeks to build and test a participatory methodology to identify and map the impact pathways of urban-driven innovations on all the dimensions of food systems sustainability. By testing this methodology through various case studies internationally-Urban Food Innovation Labs (UFILs), including sites in the Global South and North-this project aims to provide decision makers with information on how innovations can contribute to, or work against, building more sustainable food systems, thus assisting them to determine which actions should or should not be taken (see Chapters 3 & 9, this volume). This chapter presents the general framework for the URBAL project as well as the main interwoven considerations and approaches that are the backbone of the methodology. Please note that this is an ongoing project and that it has evolved since the chapter has been written. We will point out some changes in the methodology as the chapter proceeds. How to assess the impact of urban-driven innovations on the sustainability of food systems? The main objective of the URBAL project is to provide urban policymakers, urban innovators, and funders with a low-cost, easy-to-implement, and context-adaptable methodology that can be used as a robust tool to make the impact pathways of innovations on all the dimensions of the sustainability of food systems more explicit. Its purpose is not to provide evaluation per

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