Abstract
How do food movements prioritize and work to accomplish their varied and often conflicting social change goals at the city scale? Our study investigates the Denver food movement with a mixed methods social network analysis to understand how organizations navigate differences in power and influence vis-à-vis resource exchange. We refer to this uneven process with the analytical concept of “collaborative concession”. The strategic resource mobilization of money, land, and labor operates through certain collaborative niches, which constitute the priorities of the movement. Among these are poverty alleviation and local food production, which are facilitated by powerful development, education, and health organizations. Therefore, food movement networks do not offer organizations equal opportunity to carry out their priorities. Concession suggests that organizations need to lose something to gain something. Paradoxically, collaboration can produce a resource gain. Our findings provide new insights into the uneven process by which food movement organizations—and city-wide food movements overall—mobilize.
Highlights
Food movements in cities across the world organize around an array of food system problems to create change at a local level
The differences, while constraining, avail more participants in the movement to collectively act toward some end. This process operates in Denver through certain collaborative niches that represent the priorities of the food movement and how they relate to resource exchanges
Collaboration is a critical component of resource mobilization and social change in Denver’s food movement
Summary
Food movements in cities across the world organize around an array of food system problems to create change at a local level. The process of changing the food system is not value-neutral; hegemonic worldviews and political economies can blunt the potential of food activism [1,2]. Nor is said activism free from differences in power and privilege; the capacity to set agendas and capture resources flows often reflects entrenched social inequalities [3,4]. Given this context, our study asks and answers two questions. How do we understand the uneven networked process by which certain food movement priorities become codified? Second and relatedly, how do food movement organizations collaborate to achieve their goals as part of a larger movement?
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