Governing local and regional food systems for resilience - accounting for multi-agency interactions in practice

Abstract

Definitions and frameworks for governing food systems point to the highly complex nature of holistically governing food-related activities from production through to consumption, and from local to global scales. Beyond this, there remains a shortage of insights into the practical dimensions of implementing holistic food system governance in practice. This study provides such an on-the-ground perspective, employing ethnographic methods to explore food governance implementation efforts by public and private actors and food practitioners in a case study in Sweden. The study draws on the conceptual lens of resilience to explore these efforts, placing focus on the way 1) food practitioners enact resilience capacities while filtering (i.e. persisting with, adapting, transforming) their practices during governance change processes, and 2) public and private actors govern for resilience by facilitating practitioner capacities to work with change. Insights drawn from the study illustrate the value of bringing together theory and concepts from social-ecological resilience and a practice perspective to study change for integrated food system governance. In particular, a focus on capacities for resilience enacted in practice highlights the importance of paying attention to interacting social, ecological and material conditions in considering potential pathways for food system governance implementation.