A processual approach to community agriculture: Between structuralist and individualist explanations

Abstract

Community agriculture describes the practice of land commoning for food production. Communitarian food systems are explained as determined by neoliberalisation for being either prompted by global processes of environmental degradation or dissolved in submerged networks of everyday politics. While consistent with neoliberal critiques, the article advocates for their historicization through a processual approach to community agriculture. The analysis builds on the historical-comparative scrutiny of land commoning in the Italian peninsula through the selection of secondary sources and draws a longue durée periodization from late antiquity to the present. Analytical results highlight three temporal macro-sequences of food transformations that contextualise structural and agential influences on communitarian food systems: delegation, privatisation, and commodification of food production. The historical trajectories of community agriculture in the Italian peninsula offer valuable insights into three key areas of debate and potential avenues for future research. The first concerns the divides between structure and agency, contentious and everyday politics; the article also contributes to classical analyses that emphasize the crucial role of food in capitalist development and finally, it advances the processual framework as an adaptable analytical tool.