Transformative changes in agriculture at multiple scales are needed to ensure sustainability, i.e. achieving food security while fostering social justice and environmental integrity. These transformations go beyond technological fixes and require fundamental changes in cognitive, relational, structural and functional aspects of agricultural systems. However, research on agricultural transformations fails to engage deeply with underlying social aspects such as differing perceptions of sustainability, uncertainties and ambiguities, politics of knowledge, power imbalances and deficits in democracy. In this paper, we suggest that conflict is one manifestation of such underlying social aspects. We present an original conceptualization and analytical framework, wherein conflict is recognized as an important motor for redistribution of power and leverage for social learning thatif addressed through a conflict transformation processcould potentially create a step-change in agricultural transformation towards greater sustainability. Our analysis, building on an extensive literature review and empirical case studies from around the world, suggests a novel approach to guide future transdisciplinary research that can support agricultural transformations towards sustainability.
For the last decade, urban actors around the globe have been struggling to adapt to a post-crisis and austerity context through increasing social mobilization and experimentation, calling for an urban democracy renewal and challenging established neoliberal urban regimes and governance systems. This has triggered social innovations, in which novel collaborative formulas have been envisioned and implemented. In particular, civil-public collaborations (CPCs) have come to the fore as an empowering alternative to the well-established private–public partnerships (PPP). This article examines the conditions of possibility, enabling mechanisms and constraints for the emergence of innovative multi-actor collaborations (IMACs). For this aim, we developed a three-fold analytical framework combining social innovation, public governance, and urban regime theory. We applied this framework to the case of the so-called “government of change” in Madrid between 2015 and 2019. After exploring the pre-2015 context, the institutional innovations implemented once Ahora Madrid accessed the local government, and the post-2019 context, it points to the preconditions that allowed experimentation with IMAC, identifies the institutional mechanisms and governance innovations that support their emergence, and assesses to what extent and how power to act was created and used to accomplish urban regime change.
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