Governing Agri-food Transitions: Food Democracy Principles and the Facilitative Governance of Social Innovations

The specific diseconomy of our broken food systems has perpetuated a state of suppressed agency wherein citizens are purposefully turned into mere passive consumers, while in parallel spreading the idea that, in democracy, consumer sovereignty and dollar voting are people's best voice. This logic has led to a situation of structural violence: privileged populations have profited from increased information access, expanded choices, and better quality and healthier foods, while disenfranchised communities subjugated to enduring gender, race, and class disparities remain imprisoned in a reality of poor information access, limited choices, and lower quality, frequently unhealthy foods. In recent years, socially innovative initiatives including farmers’ markets, public-access community gardens, or food-buying groups, have begun to expand traditional understandings of democracy, democracy in these cases being non-traditionally understood as the exercise of collective rights to self-determination. Empowering communities at the local level has been identified as the first step towards establishing sustainable food systems (UN Human Rights Council, 2014), and governments and authorities are becoming increasingly aware of the need to support and promote local social innovations to achieve that objective. If social innovations are key in achieving sustainability, critically examining them becomes a crucial democratic exercise, lest they remain ephemeral lifestyle choices of a privileged subset of society. Some of these initiatives, while well-intentioned, have been uncritical of power relations and existing disparities, unreachable to the broader population due to their insensitivity to recognition and redistribution struggles. Others, not so well-intentioned, have hoarded sustainability discourses and, with the connivance of governments and authorities, often misled well-intended eaters into supporting seemingly sustainable but inherently problematic practices. A third, important but under- recognized set of initiatives, have come from within communities themselves, designed to serve those very communities, often including core values like participation parity, endogenous leadership, and self-empowerment. In the last decade, food democracy has been defined in multiple ways. First, as opposed to “food control”, in the form of an inclusive approach to food policy and in terms of its bottom-up approach and of diversity of views and interests (Lang, 1999). Shiva (2003) also uses it in opposition to food dictatorship understood as the control by foreign transnational corporations through GM crops. Then, as an ideal method for ensuring participation in the food system (Hassanein, 2003), and in opposition to the corporatization of the organics' movement (Johnston & Baumann, 2009). Some authors have continued to frame the debate of food democracy in terms of localism (Brecher, Costello, & Smith, 2000; F. M. Lappé & Lappé, 2002; Thompson & Coskuner-Balli, 2007); while others touch much closer on core issues central to food democracy as understood in the present analysis, such as power relations: “A central concern is the problem of commodity fetishism or, put differently, a lack of transparency in the food system that obscures how relations of production are socially produced rather than naturally given.” (Johnston & Baumann, 2009, p. 110) Democracy has also been identified as one of the main features of food sovereignty (Jacobs, 2013; McMichael, 2013; Patel, 2009a; 2009b; Windfuhr & Jonsén, 2005), with research having looked into democratic attributes within food sovereignty practices at the local level (Wald, 2015). However, as a concept, democracy in the food system remains credulously presumed and generic at best, and problematically manipulable at worst. Despite the work of these authors, there is a lack of systematic analyses looking beyond simple definitions by opposition, mere calls for engagement/participation, or non-quantitative mileage definitions. While concepts like “localization”, “transparency”, or “alternativeness” have helped deepen the analysis of the agri-food system and its actors, isolated notions no longer serve scrutinize recent complex social dynamics, as they do not constitute a comprehensive framework through which to analyze the status of these niches of innovation in democratic terms. As a result of this conceptual gap, governance organizations involved in the agri-food system have been unable to identify key democratizing traits in these initiatives, inadequately addressing the divide between privileged and disenfranchised communities. The hypothesis of this paper is that food democracy is necessary because achieving sustainability involves conflicts over values. The first section of this paper proposes a characterization of food democracy, aiming to identify potential democracy principles for food initiatives, both in their internal and external dimensions. Going beyond conventional criteria of generic participation or transparency, our framework will also consider community-building, horizontal integration of the various actors in a territory, community leadership, ability to generate public debate, economic accessibility, outreach capacity, and empowerment through social action. The second section evaluates the contribution of these principles toward improving social learning processes regarding socio-ecological sustainability controversies in the field of sustainable food transitions. The third section applies this framework to 64 food-related initiatives interviewed in the EU (Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain.) As social demands for new forms of democracy increasingly regard socio-environmental governance processes, this research provides a framework to identify democratic attributes in food- related initiatives. These attributes can be key in the support, promotion, and facilitation of social innovations in the agri-food system. Social innovations, particularly in the food system, are transforming and creating new social relations, addressing unsatisfied human needs in the transition towards more sustainable and resilient systems, but to truly transform society and effect lasting change, they must be critical of power structures and radically democratic in essence. The hope of this research is to provide useful principles for the kind of necessary democratic conditions a food initiative must fulfill to be truly socially transformative