Gardening from the ground up: a review of grassroots governance and management of domestic gardening in Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Canadian urban agriculture movement marks a change in urban land-use policies that includes a greater diversity of gardeners as views on sustainable agriculture promotes local food movements. Benefits of urban agriculture are well documented in the social science, environmental and health literature. Much of the literature on urban food-gardens in Canada focuses on community gardens and school gardens and gardening programmes, while there has been little attempt to gather and synthesise this research with a focus on the governance and management of grassroots urban agri-food organisations. We have undertaken through a systematic scoping review to reveal the extent of the current body of knowledge surrounding urban grassroots agri-food organisations in Canada, as well as governance and management paradigms and challenges. Of the Canadian studies, 15 were qualitative case studies (surveys, observations, etc.), 11 were exploration/analysis papers (analysis of primary research collected elsewhere), one was a literature review and 1 was a quantitative analysis. Significant challenges in grassroots food-gardening are explored. We found that for greater success of urban agriculture, municipal policymakers need to intentionally and radically shift policy to plan for and integrate urban agriculture networks into the urban environment without taking over the networks themselves. We also find that there is a lack of broad research into the influence of gender dynamics on the organisation and management of urban agriculture or community gardens.