Grassroots Initiatives as Sustainability Transition Pioneers: Implications and Lessons for Urban Food Systems

Abstract

Abstract:This review explores the current evidence on the role and success factors of grassroots initiatives in sustainability transitions, with special attention given to social innovations and the transformation of urban food systems, a field that is still rather scantly dealt with in literature compared to technological innovations in other sectors such as energy. In addition to their contributions to get the necessary transformation towards sustainable futures off the ground, the preconditions for grassroots initiatives to thrive are presented-as well as limitations regarding their possibilities and the challenges they face. Increasingly, the importance of civil society and social movements in facilitating societal transformation is recognized by both researchers and policy makers. Within their radical niches, grassroots initiatives do not have to adhere to the logics of the wider systems in which they are embedded. This allows them to experiment with diverse solutions to sustainability challenges such as local food security and sovereignty. By means of democratic, inclusive and participatory processes, they create new pathways and pilot a change of course. Nevertheless, upscaling often comes at the loss of the transformative potential of grassroots initiatives.

Exploring the Role of Community Self-Organisation in the Creation and Creative Dissolution of a Community Food Initiative

“…To start with the relevance of free café in the context of the wider debate on food regimes and movements, our observations resonate with different components of the dominant food regime and food movement frameworks reported in earlier studies [38]. Drawing on the analysis of the data and active engagement in the field, it is not difficult to see how community food initiatives, such as the Free Café, contribute to the corporatisation and commodification of surplus food [2]. We identified multiple similar initiatives focusing on the prevention of food waste in a regional, national and international context.…”

“…This article explores the role of community self-organisation when considering community food sharing initiatives. While queries for understanding activism within food systems [1,2] and food sharing practices [3][4][5] are well-established, the rhetoric of community self-organisation within community food initiatives is relatively scarce. Over the last few decades, the literature addressing processes of civic engagement within the broader strand of community action and grassroots initiatives has been growing.…”

Agri-Food Markets towards Sustainable Patterns

“…On the other hand, research regarding the role of agents (e.g., social movements and the civil society, industries and firms) is still marginal, which corroborates the criticism that the research field understates the role of agency in sustainability transitions processes [158,[176][177][178][179]. In particular, it is difficult to explicate that the role of the social movements and civil society is not satisfactorily dealt with in the research field although community and grassroots initiatives represent the milestone of alternative agri-food systems and networks [180][181][182].…”

Change Agents’ Perspectives on Spatial–Relational Proximities and Urban Food Niches

“…Although publications concerning sustainability transitions in agriculture are increasing [6,[15][16][17][18][19], only a few publications address agro-food systems [9,10,[20][21][22] and much less address them in an urban context [23][24][25]. Even less publications focus on food niches in urban agro-food systems [5,12,26,27]. However, urban agro-food systems gain more attention with an unbroken trend of urbanization and a worldwide growing demand for the re-localization of the agro-food system [2].…”

“…Sustainability transitions are defined as "long-term, multi-dimensional and fundamental transformation processes through which established socio-technical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption" [4] (p. 956). Long-term, multi-dimensional, and sustaining innovations are the key to this transition [5,6]. Geels [7] stressed, in his keynote speech at the International Sustainability Transitions Conference in Ottawa in 2019, that the agro-food sector's sustainability transition has not gotten off to a running start, with its alternative innovations being not sufficiently established yet.…”