Measuring Progress in Sustainable Food Cities: An Indicators Toolbox for Action

Abstract

Despite the growth of urban food policies across the globe, a key challenge remains around measuring the impact of these initiatives in building more sustainable and just cities. The literature identifies as the main barriers to progress food system assessments the lack of clear definitions of sustainability, insufficient data, the low applicability of global conceptualisations to local conditions and vice versa and low levels of actor involvement. We aim to address these gaps by co-developing a sustainability assessment framework to evaluate food systems performance in UK cities. The framework emerging from this collaborative process overcomes key limitations of previous exercises by providing a place-based and participative definition of sustainability aligned with global conceptualisations, building on the experiences and needs of a wide range of practitioners and taking a holistic but non-prescriptive approach to understanding food system outcomes. However, its application to the city of Cardiff reveals new challenges, mostly regarding the need to incorporate underrepresented stakeholders as well as account for multiscalar food system interdependencies and their positive but also negative impacts. Results show the need to embed critical perspectives in sustainable food assessments that actively expand their transformative capacity by developing further inclusive, participatory, place-based and whole-systems approaches.

Local food policies – their constraints and drivers: Insights from Portuguese Urban Agriculture initiatives

“…The concept of integrating food into urban planning is relatively new in the professional literature (APA, 2007;Cabannes et al, 2017;Zeeuw et al, 2000;London Assembly, Planning and Housing Committee (LA PHC, 2010); Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 1999). Today, however, the issues are on local government agendas (Brand, 2017;McClintock, 2010;Moragues-Faus and Marceau, 2019;Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015;Sonnino, 2009), and in policy making, with a landmark being the Milan Urban Food Pact Policy (MUFPP, 2015) enacted in 2015, and signed since then by more than 200 cities and local governments worldwide. Only two of them are in Portugal.…”

Towards a Reflexive Framework for Fostering Co—Learning and Improvement of Transdisciplinary Collaboration

“…Action-orientated approach [47,71] To what extent is an action-orientated approach prioritized in your team?…”

“…Creating a common vision, alignment of priorities/interests [9,[46][47][48]63,71,74,82]. Shared identity and values [66,83,84].…”

“…Comparability of results across regional/national/international contexts [71]. Transferability of results [43,47,111,112] To what extent can what you learned be applied in other contexts?…”

SHARE IT: Co-designing a sustainability impact assessment framework for urban food sharing initiatives

“…Some of these assessments focus on specific scales from the global, supranational and the national level (Chaudhary et al, 2018; FAO, 2013; Zurek et al, 2018). Others present more granular frameworks designed to examine food impacts across urban environments (Blay-Palmer et al, 2018; Moragues-Faus and Marceau, 2019) and others still have developed assessments for individual food businesses and products (Pelletier, 2015). However, while there are common drivers behind many of these assessment frameworks, the complexity of the food system means a one-size-fits-all approach is often inappropriate (Johnston et al, 2014).…”