Community development and community food in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom: The limitations of neoclassical economics

ABSTRACT

Community development in the UK has moved from private philanthropy in the early 20^th Century through welfarism to a ‘marketisation’ in the 21^st Century with both state contracts, and market-based performance measures. But neoclassical economics, on which such marketization is based, is an inadequate measure of community development practice as it does not accommodate a range of inequalities, spatial differences, changes over time, market failures and externalities, all of which are at the core of community food projects. Whilst community food projects address market failures, they can use innovative market mechanisms to “cushion” some of these neoclassical economics failings. A number of practical examples is offered, from Lincolnshire UK, of such innovations in relation to community food production, and environmental, food waste, and food poverty externalities.

KEYWORDS:

• community food projects
• neoclassical economics
• externalities
• market failure
• exchange innovations

Acknowledgement

Thanks go to two anonymous referees for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to Laura Stratford, a coordinator at the Lincolnshire Food Partnership, for the sharing of ideas. This paper was written with funding support from the UK National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise’s call for research and innovation projects (project RES/0576/7216), which ran in 2021. The author reports there are no competing interests to declare

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UK National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise [RES/0576/7216].