Knowing Food: Sustainability Politics, Food Policy Councils and the Co-Production of Knowledge

Abstract

As one of the major causes of climate change, there is an urgent need for a fundamental transformation of the food system. Calls for greater sustainability underscore the importance of integrating civil society and the local knowledge of citizens in this transformation process. One increasingly relevant organisation that can actively engage a plurality of actors from across civil society is the Food Policy Council (FPC). In this paper, we explore the potential role of FPCs in sustainability politics to create an alternative food system, with a focus on the co-production of knowledge for policy-making. We propose that the co-production of knowledge requires knowledge inclusion, exchange and transmission, and we focus on the challenges that can arise for FPCs. Our paper shows that bottom-up emerging FPCs constitute a new form of alternative food organisation that can integrate and support the critical capacity of civil society in food system transformation, but also face potential struggles in the co-production of knowledge for sustainable food policy-making. The paper further highlights that co-producing knowledge in and for sustainability transformation is fundamentally a political process, with politics broadly conceived. It not only has relevance for the institutions of formal politics, but emerges in and is intrinsically linked to the grassroots collective action of contentious and prefigurative politics in civil society. FPCs (re)politicise food by combining these various kinds of sustainability politics, which constitutes their transformative potential.

Sustainable Water Management: Understanding the Socioeconomic and Cultural Dimensions

“…In addition to water reuse, other solutions employed to combat water scarcity encompass surface water transfer between basins and seawater desalination. These approaches have been successfully utilized in various countries worldwide, including Mediterranean nations such as Spain, Malta, Cyprus, France, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, and Israel, as well as other arid regions like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Australia, United States, Curacao, Mexico, Cape Verde, and South Africa [40][41][42].…”

Introduction: Sustainability, Democracy and the Dark Sides of Civil Society

“…Yet a common concern, appearing in several of the papers in this Special Issue, is the loss of 'critical edge' that may come with 'scaling up and out through networking and alliance-building' (Leach & Scoones, 2015, p. 133). For instance, Schiller-Merkens and Machin describe how Food Policy Councils have to decide whether to include public officials and members of local governments as members, which risks facilitating the disproportionate influence of authoritative discourses, or to remain radical and exclude those who might be able to help translate their proposals into policy (Schiller-Merkens & Machin, 2023). This issue is also highlighted by Motta who observes that while more established Brazilian NGOs more closely connected to the mining industry may 'flirt with the discourse of sustainable development' (Motta, 2023), they refrain from confronting potentially environmentally damaging strategies.…”

“…There is an important role for 'bottom-up' mobilisation, outside the formal political arena of the state, often led by local civil society groups occupying 'invited and existing spaces of participation' (Newell, 2008, p. 124). These groups might take new forms, as Simone Schiller-Merkens and Amanda Machin show in their contribution on Food Policy Councils as a novel type of alternative food organisation that is working to harness the critical capacity of civil society to make the global food system more sustainable (Schiller-Merkens & Machin, 2023). In short, a key location for the creative and democratic politics of sustainability, as we seek to illustrate in this Special Issue, is civil society.…”

“…As Joanna Flavell shows in her contribution, they can also work at the global level to allow women to make collective demands in relation to climate change that might otherwise go unheard (Flavell, 2023; see also Flavell, 2022). Civil society groups are potentially rich sources of imagination and knowledge (Leach & Scoones, 2015, p. 119; see also Schiller-Merkens & Machin, 2023). Helmut Anheier thus attends in his contribution in this Special Issue to the sustainability of civil society itself, which he regards as critical in ensuring the possibility of sustainable development (Anheier, 2023).…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Sustainable Food Consumption: Historical Evolution, Dominant Topics and Trends

“…Sustainable food consumption has multiple implications, including the consumption of organic food [50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58], the reduction of meat consumption and the choice of a plant-based diet [5,59,60], the purchase of locally grown and seasonal food [19] and the disposal aspects of food consumption [61,62]. Although some parts of society in some developed countries already had a positive attitude towards sustainable consumption, this study area remained a less studied segment, especially in developing countries [2,28].…”