Abstract
As the deleterious impacts of conventional food systems on areas including public health, environmental sustainability, and farmers’ livelihoods are progressively unveiled, citizen-led initiatives have ubiquitously sprouted, collectively building what is now known as the alternative food system. Despite recent academic interest in the role of alternative food initiatives in countering a narrow view of democracy based on market-based purchasing power, little attention has been paid to a specific democratizing feature that allows for collective expression beyond consumption, that of collective agency. This article argues that it is precisely by focusing on collective agency as the driving force for food systems’ change that we can recognize the diverse contributions of social innovations to the democratization of food systems. By engaging with the reasonings of consumer sovereignty proponents, building on academic literature on the concept of collective agency, and drawing from empirical work with over a hundred local social innovations of the global North, this article proposes an agency typology that allows for parsing out its different dimensions, highlighting social innovations’ key role as agency enablers and agents of change in the democratization of food systems.
Highlights
As the deleterious impacts of conventional food systems on areas including public health, environmental sustainability, and farmers’ livelihoods are progressively unveiled, citizen-led initiatives have ubiquitously sprouted, collectively building what is known as the alternative food system
I draw on the strategies described by these actors (“strategies” understood as organizational mechanisms put in place by social innovations to create a context where collective agency can be enabled and reproduced) to illustrate how social innovations enable this transition between dimensions
Actors in this study reported that enabling a transition from individual voluntary action (IVA) to cooperative agency requires the development of spaces where conversations about individual versus collective choices and coherence in areas beyond food can be held, so that senses of powerlessness can be addressed, as a member of a community garden expressed: “It’s very beautiful to see coherence as communicative channels: If you start with food, why not be coherent in energy, in finance, etc.?”
Summary
As the deleterious impacts of conventional food systems on areas including public health, environmental sustainability, and farmers’ livelihoods are progressively unveiled (see, e.g., De Schutter, 2014a; IPES-Food, 2017; Narula, 2013), citizen-led initiatives have ubiquitously sprouted, collectively building what is known as the alternative food system. This article illustrates how social innovations, by creating spaces “beyond the market” (cf Wittman, Dennis, & Pritchard, 2017), provide opportunities for citizens to transition from patterns of passive, individual consumption to evolving, complex forms of collective agency in the alternative food system. These experiences show that the democratization of the food system must involve enabling other means of collective expression and engagement beyond consumption. I conclude in Section 5 by resituating the proposed collective agency framework into a critique of consumer-focused food systems and by pointing at further questions about the role of public policy in supporting food democracy
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