Sustaining trajectories towards Sustainability: dynamics and diversity in UK communal growing activities

Civil society is a critical arena both for exploring Sustainability itself and for sustaining trajectories towards it through innovation, experimentation and debate. Innovations can be mould breaking and can challenge local institutions. Concurrently, initiatives may be fragile due to the development of new working relationships, reliance on voluntary labour and goodwill, and dependence on grant funding. Here we examine different aspects of what it takes to sustain grassroots trajectories for ‘communal growing’, given the pressures that groups and intermediary organisations practicing and supporting this activity experience, and the consequential need to build qualities like ‘resilience’. Attending carefully to the definition of this otherwise slippery concept, a particular focus is given to how contrasting aspects of temporality and agency lead to divergent constructions of ‘resilience’ and strategies for sustaining growing. We draw on fieldwork that explores the practice and support of communal growing in East Sussex, England, and directly associated activities at a national level. We find important interdependencies between communal growing projects and the intermediary organisations supporting them. Additionally there is huge diversity within and between both projects and the organisations that support them, including with respect to the ends to which growing is seen as a means. These ends link growing initiatives – both antagonistically and synergistically – to food, education and health systems. This diversity can be seen positively as: a source of innovation; facilitating the open and bottom up nature of growing; and, enabling the securing of greater financial support for the endeavour. What is less clear is how this plays into framing and configuring communal growing specifically in relation to achieving a more Sustainable and localised food system. We discuss the conceptual and methodological implications of these empirically derived observations with regards future research on grassroots innovations

Food security in a two-speed economy: Horticultural production in Western Australia

Western Australia has experienced sustained economic and population growth over the last decade due to the prolonged resources boom, making it one of the wealthiest places in the world. However, despite the enviable international livability status, there is evidence that the Western Australian economy and community more generally has become increasingly polarized by the resources boom. The gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is widening depending upon peoples’ access to the wealth generated by the resources boom.The increase in population has put unprecedented pressure on the housing industry and community infrastructure. Consequently, productive agricultural land with accessible water supply has increasingly been developed in the capital city Perth and many regional towns in response to the rapacious appetite for land suitable for single, detached residential housing estates. The availability of fertile lands for horticultural production in relatively close proximity to urban centres is increasingly scarce. Further, food is no longer cheap for a variety of reasons including expensive land, transportation costs and adverse climatic conditions. As a consequence, the cost of living in Perth, and more especially regional Western Australia, far exceeds that of any other State in Australia.This chapter will consider the cost of food, the potential consequences of increased food miles and the public policy responses to the provision of food and food supply chains in Western Australia. This discussion will be within the context of the current ‘two-speed economy’ that is increasingly evident. The chapter concludes with consideration for future opportunities derived from the production of food when the resources finally run out