Social justice-oriented narratives in European urban food strategies: Bringing forward redistribution, recognition and representation

Abstract

More and more cities develop urban food strategies (UFSs) to guide their efforts and practices towards more sustainable food systems. An emerging theme shaping these food policy endeavours, especially prominent in North and South America, concerns the enhancement of social justice within food systems. To operationalise this theme in a European urban food governance context we adopt Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice: economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation. In this paper, we discuss the findings of an exploratory document analysis of the social justice-oriented ambitions, motivations, current practices and policy trajectories articulated in sixteen European UFSs. We reflect on the food-related resource allocations, value patterns and decision rules these cities propose to alter and the target groups they propose to support, empower or include. Overall, we find that UFSs make little explicit reference to social justice and justice-oriented food concepts, such as food security, food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty. Nevertheless, the identified resources, services and target groups indicate that the three dimensions of Fraser are at the heart of many of the measures described. We argue that implicit, fragmentary and unspecified adoption of social justice in European UFSs is problematic, as it may hold back public consciousness, debate and collective action regarding food system inequalities and may be easily disregarded in policy budgeting, implementation and evaluation trajectories. As a path forward, we present our plans for the RE-ADJUSTool that would enable UFS stakeholders to reflect on how their UFS can incorporate social justice and who to involve in this pursuit.

Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

“…Many articles referred to "food justice" [261][262][263][264][265][266][267] or "food dignity" [268,269]. Food justice is an evolving concept that puts social justice at the center of the debate on achieving sustainable food systems [264].…”

“…The concept of justice is similar to fairness, which is associated with many alternative food networks and supply chains such as Fairtrade [245,246]. Other scholars addressed the concepts of "food democracy" [261,262,268,[270][271][272][273][274][275][276] or "food sovereignty" [261,[277][278][279][280][281][282][283], which are strongly linked to the way the food system is governed and managed and the inclusion of the different concerned stakeholders in the process of decision making about the future of agri-food systems, especially at the local level. Food democracy is a process that puts people at the center of and gives them a voice in and control over the transition towards more sustainable agri-food systems [270,271].…”

“…Democratizing the food system is, at the same time, an outcome of and a prerequisite for the empowerment of the different actors involved [274]. Despite the increasing interests in these social aspects of the agri-food systems, referring to urban food strategies (UFSs) in Europe, Smaal et al [261] found that "UFSs make little explicit reference to social justice and justice-oriented food concepts, such as food security, food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty".…”

“…Articles dealing with policies in the agri-food systems either analyzed the current state of play or focused on policies needed to foster transitions towards sustainable agrifood systems at different levels e.g., regional (European Union), national (e.g., Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, USA), or local (e.g., city, city-region, etc.). In this context, more and more studies have dealt with urban food systems and their transition towards sustainability [261,[340][341][342][343][344][345][346][347]. However, the empirical findings of Doernberg et al [341] from German cities showed that "urban food policy activities are still very fragmented and often based on individual initiatives", as well as the lack of "integrated urban food policies and their implementation through urban food strategies".…”

“…Most studies on urban food systems have focused on developed and industrialized countries. Meanwhile, different types of policy documents have been analyzed e.g., strategies [261,341,[348][349][350][351][352], action plans [349], agendas [353], guidelines [354][355][356], standards [357], etc. The analyzed policies and policy documents deal, inter alia, with food and nutrition security [235,349,350,358,359], sustainable and healthy diets [354,360,361], non-communicable diseases [354,362], biodiversity [349,363], organic farming [364], etc.…”