Re-scaling the politics of food: Place-based urban food governance in the UK

Abstract

Drawing upon Urban Political Ecology and recent developments around place-based approaches to food security, this article examines how various urban food coalitions in the United Kingdom (UK) are acting to influence their local food environment and forge more sustainable socio-ecological relations within a highly unequal, contested and multi-scalar governance and policy context. An exploratory qualitative case study approach was utilised, drawing on fifteen semi-structured interviews with food partnership coordinators and on secondary data, to examine the differential priorities, internal contestations and capacity of socio-spatial assemblages to reconfigure socioecological relations. Our analysis uncovers an emerging (uneven) geography of urban food governance in the UK, pointing to the role of micropolitics in constraining the transformative and emancipatory potential of food partnerships. On this basis, we argue for a critical geography of urban food governance that highlights the importance of the political and economic context and spatial imaginary in shaping the contingent and relational character of place-based food partnerships and their capacity to engender systemic change.