Realising local food policies: a comparison between Toronto and the Brussels-Capital Region’s stories through the lenses of reflexivity and co-learning

ABSTRACT

This paper revisits the development of Toronto and Brussels’ local food policies by analysing reflexivity and co-learning as important dimensions within a Hybrid Governance Approach (HGA); it approaches the interaction between four forms of governance (bottom-up, networked, state, market-led) and the tensions between them as hybrid dynamics. Within this approach, reflexivity refers to the positionality of agents, i.e. to the ways local food actors embody as well as reflect on and reconsider their principles and practices through time. Closely related to reflexivity, co-learning involves agential interactions to co-construct enabling food policy delivery systems. The HGA is mobilised to understand the ways in which reflexive capacities, as well as co-learning, take place in the two cases and how they lay the basis of particular modes of (de)institutionalisation. Learning from the two cases’ trajectories, this paper highlights: (a) the role of key governance tensions as triggers as well as breeding grounds for reflexivity and co-learning outcomes; (b) the challenges of food movement actors to surmount or valorise key tensions in order to build accountable modes of food policy delivery through time; (c) the struggles to build legitimacy and accountability in local food movements through the development of bottom-linked organisations and governance modes.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflexivity
• co-learning
• Hybrid governance approach
• local food policies
• Toronto
• the Brussels-Capital Region

Acknowledgements

The author’s deep gratitude to all the food movement actors encountered during her fieldwork in Brussels and in Toronto, for contributing to this work with their time and passionate socio-political engagement. Warm thanks to Prof. Frank Moulaert and the anonymous reviewers for the constructive insights and remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Alessandra Manganelli is currently Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Hafencity Universität Hamburg. In 2019 she obtained a Ph.D. from the Universities of KULeuven (Department of Architecture) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Department of Geography), awarded by the Flemish Research Foundation FWO. She has expertise and interest in local food movements, land accessibility governance for urban-peri-urban agriculture, urban food systems’ policies and planning. She holds inter-disciplinary skills covering the fields of social innovation, governance and social movements’ research, political economy and ecology and urban planning.

Notes

1 In this paper, ‘state’ refers to the hierarchical and multi-level governmental and administrative apparatus, encompassing public authorities run by elected officials as well as the administrative machinery responsible for the delivery of policies, programmes and services.

2 Emblematic is the ways Debbie Field, who became Executive Director of FoodShare around the year 1992, re-framed the mission of FoodShare as not an anti-hunger organisation, but as a community food security organisation that understands anti-poverty, thus putting in the foreground the food system and its connection with community development as a primary concern over a charitable approach to hunger (interview with Debbie Field; see also Koç et al., 2008).

3 Certain actors forming loose coalitions began to denounce the distortions of industrialised food systems and started to plea for more self-reliant, proximity food systems, linking closer the urban and the rural. Interviewees underline in particular the leading figures of Brewster Kneen, sheep farmer and intellectual from Nova Scotia, moved at that time to Toronto, with his wife Cathleen Kneen, as key advocates of the sustainable food systems strand of the nascent food movement.

4 See City of Toronto Act, 1997 (Bill 103), http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&BillID=1489&isCurrent=false&ParlSessionID=361&detailPage=bills_detail_the_bill (accessed on September 19, 2018).

5 See https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cuizine/2012-v3-n2-cuizine0288/1012459ar/ (accessed on September 19, 2018)

6 This is visible, for instance, in the setup of a ‘Recession Relief Coalition’ gathering anti-hunger and anti-poverty actors undertaking an inquiry around hunger in Ontario directed to the attention of local and provincial governments (see https://rnao.ca/sites/rnao-ca/files/Hunger_Crisis_Report.pdf) (accessed on October 3, 2019).

7 The BCR’s food policy process was not affected either by the impact of the crisis. Indeed, as the food movement mainly started from environmental and food sovereignty concerns, issues of food insecurity and poverty were not major concerns among actors of the Brussels’ food policy arena, at least until the current stage.

8 The yearly food strategy updates, available online, give an overview of programmes and projects supported by the Toronto food strategy and their evolution through time.

9 In force between the years 2010 and 2014, the AEE programme was a consortium between the Ministries of Environment, Economy and Employment of the BCR whose purpose is to understand how environmentally sustainable practices in key sectors (e.g. sustainable construction, water, resources - waste, and, later, food) can be vehicles of employment for the Region (see, for instance, https://environnement.brussels/sites/default/files/user_files/rap_aee-cd_rapport_pluriannuel_2014_fr.pdf - accessed on September 15, 2018). From the fieldwork emerges that the legitimacy of sustainable food as a programmatic axe of the AEE was neither immediately nor easily recognised by the other two Ministries.

10 It is, however, worth it to be mentioned that the participation of the IBGE to the European multi city project ‘URBAct' (2012–2015) on Sustainable Food as a leading partner, had also a relevant role in laying the basis of the strategy and its participatory processes (see http://urbact.eu/sustainable-food-urban-communities, accessed on September 13, 2018).

11 These new regional elections also brought a reconfiguration of competences in the Regional Ministry of the Environment, which is now Ministry of ‘Housing, Quality of Life, Environment and Energy’.

12 For an overview of the Food Strategy’s axes see:

https://environnement.brussels/thematiques/alimentation/action-de-la-region/strategie-good-food-vers-un-systeme-alimentaire-plus (accessed on September 15, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flemish Research Agency FWO (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) [grant number 11ZY317N].