Civil society roles in transition: towards sustainable food?

Civil society organisations (CSOs) are often conspicuously absent in policy discussions and strategic planning about food security and the environmental sustainability of food systems. However, findings from a recent study of UK-based CSOs indicate that these groups make a variety of important contributions towards innovation in both policy and practice. This briefing paper draws attention to the disconnection between the narrowly constrained treatment of CSOs within policy circles, and the broad range of different ways that they actually engage with and influence policy and market conditions. Its purpose is to provoke new ways of thinking about civil society and provide CSOs with a new logic (and evidence) to underpin their efforts to leverage resources. Key messages are as follows: - UK-based CSOs have historically made significant contributions to the innovation trajectories of our food and agriculture systems - In contrast to markets, which tend towards homogeneity and are fuelled by competition, characteristics of civil society that crucially underpin these contributions are diversity and collaboration - Policy ignorance of civil society – its purposes, how it operates and its contributions to the development of agro-food systems – must be addressed, e.g. by incentivising and creating spaces for exchange of ideas and practices between CSOs, policy-makers and academics - Established ways of engaging CSOs in the governance of agro-food systems must be re-thought and more appropriate modes and levels of intervention in and support for civil society must be sough

Climate Justice and Women's Rights: A Guide to Supporting Grassroots Women's Action

This Guide emerged from a "Summit on Women and Climate" in Bali, Indonesia, and aims to increase timely and appropriate funding for worldwide climate action initiatives led by women and their communities. The Guide is not a comprehensive resource on climate change or women's rights. Instead, it addresses an urgent need within the funding community and offers concrete, practical guidance that: Orients grantmakers to the importance of funding at the intersection of climate justice and women's rights.Draws lessons from specific examples of funding for women's climate change initiatives.Provides guidance on how funders can collaborate to direct timely and appropriate funding to women and their communities.Advocates for bringing women's voices into climate change policy discussions.Highlights the strong impact that small (less than $10,000) to medium-sized ($10,000-$50,000) grants can make in women-organized efforts to address climate change at the community level, across geographic boundaries and in global climate policy. Grassroots women's climate activism is becoming increasingly critical to women's collective and individual rights, freedom and survival

Envisioning a Future for Ethiopian Small Farmer Involvement in Development and Food Security

In this paper I attempt to answer the question of how small-scale Ethiopian farmers can best participate in, contribute to and benefit from the development process. In addition, I seek to clarify the implications and potential nature of local food systems and their ability to achieve greater food security through small farmer involvement. Modern development ideology often focuses on large scale projects and export-led growth, ignoring the importance of smallholder farmers and rural vitality. These farmers are increasingly marginalized through this process. In Ethiopia 85% of the population is employed in the agricultural sector, the majority being small farmers that live in remote regions. It is crucial that effective techniques are applied which enable these farmers to play a central role in the development process, guaranteeing the sustainable growth of Ethiopia’s economy as well as greater food security. Given the recent volatility of global food markets and the severity of local droughts, effective solutions are more urgent than ever

No. 02: Approaching Sustainable Urban Development in China through a Food System Planning Lens

After more than two decades of rapid urbanization, Chinese cities now face severe sustainability chal- lenges in terms of balancing economic viability, social justice, and environmental protection goals. While various types of planning have long been adopted to cope with these challenges, food as a centrepiece of daily life and of social and economic activity in cities has rarely been considered as a focus of urban planning in China, despite a lot of recent attention to food waste and food safety concerns. China’s food policy is largely fragmented in terms of its multiple regulatory agencies and diverse policy goals. Amid this complexity, there has been little attention to using the food system as a lens to understand and tackle the various social, economic health and environmental challenges in cities. This discussion paper argues for the integration of food issues into urban planning in Chinese cities. Drawing on survey data and specific observations from Nanjing, it shows that China’s urban planning has inadvertently addressed a number of important aspects of sustainable food systems. The paper provides a preliminary analysis of various priorities for food system planning and identifies strengths and challenges in terms of achieving sustainability goals in Chinese cities. The analysis highlights various priorities for future urban food policy making including fostering the development of diverse food procurement channels and short food supply chains, strengthening the role of the informal food sector for urban food security, promoting healthy, sustainable diets and ethical consumption, and reducing food waste

The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity

Community Self-Organisation from a Social-Ecological Perspective: ‘Burlang Yatra’ and Revival of Millets in Odisha (India)

In this paper, I focus on the revival of an Indigenous community seed festival known locally as Burlang Yatra (‘Indigenous Biodiversity Festival’) in the district of Kandhamal in Odisha (India). This annual event brings together millet farmers to share knowledge and practices, including exchange of Indigenous heirloom seeds. Such community seed festivals remain largely underappreciated (and underexplored). Investigating Burlang Yatra through a social-ecological lens allowed for a greater understanding of its capacity to build and strengthen relationships, adaptation, and responsibility, three key principles that together link the social and the ecological in a dynamic sense. These principles, driven by intergenerational participation and interaction as well as social learning, can be seen as fostering ‘social-ecological memory’ of millet-based biodiverse farming. The festival’s persistence and revival illustrate a form of grassroots self-organising that draws on values of an Indigenous knowledge system. Within a restorative context, it has the capacity to repair and restore cultural and ecological relationships that the community has with their own foods and practices. This paper offers a new understanding of community self-organising from a social-ecological perspective and particularly in a marginalised context as supporting the revitalisation of Indigenous food systems

Goodbye to Projects? Working paper 1: Annotated bibliography on livelihood approaches and development interventions.

YesThis paper is one in a series of working papers prepared under a research project on Goodbye to Projects? The Institutional Impacts of a Livelihood Approach on Projects and Project Cycle Management. This is a collaborative project between the Bradford Centre for International Centre for Development (BCID) with the Economic and Policy Research Centre (EPRC), Uganda; Khanya ¿ managing rural change, South Africa; and, the Institute for Development Management (IDM), Tanzania. The project is supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) under their Economic and Social Research Programme (ESCOR).Department for International Developmen

Wealth, Poverty and Sustainable Development

An analysis of the underlying causes of environment destruction debunks the idea that the poor are the principal cause of environmental degradation in present-day societies. The paper also identifies some of the major areas of economic theory and institutional biases in market economies that generate obstacles to the 'proper' functioning of markets. As a result, even the more advanced prescriptions of modern environmental economics are incapable of explaining the deepening of social and economic polarization and the worsening of the environmental conditions in which poor people must exist. The paper ends with a proposal for overcoming this growing crisis through local participation and action.political ecology; sustainability; polarization; heterodox economics; development alternatives