Where is urban food policy in Switzerland? A frame analysis

Abstract

Food is increasingly included on the urban agenda in many countries, and comprehensive food policies have been developed in several cities, but the development of articulate urban food policies is still in its infancy in Switzerland. The goal of this paper is to explore the ways in which food is framed in official policies in Switzerland and thereby gain a better understanding of the potential for the development of urban food policies. The analysis is based on a case study approach focusing on the formal frames of food: reconstructed from official policy documents on agriculture, food, health, environment, and planning, at the federal and the local level. The results show that 'urban food' is not a major topic in most policy documents and that the dominant frame of food is economic. There is a clear distinction between the rural and the urban, and there were no frames integrating (rural) food production and (urban) consumption, across the city's departments, or between the local and the federal level. We can conclude that there is not yet a comprehensive urban food policy in Switzerland. The analysis further allows the nomination of two possible pathways to guide the development of coherent and integrative urban food policies.

A comparative assessment of local municipal food policy integration in the Netherlands

“…Although few similar studies on food challenges in policy documents have been performed so far, these insights correspond with earlier observations about food policy in Switzerland. In Switzerland, food was found not to be a major topic in most of the potentially relevant local policy documents, indicating that food is not integrated well in municipalities' main local policy documents (Moschitz 2017).…”

“…Firstly, health is a well-established local jurisdiction and urban agriculture is one of the traditional urban food issues (Sonnino 2009). Public health and local food production are hence found to be prominent issues in many integrated food policy frameworks (Moschitz 2017). There are also explanations as to why certain issues were not addressed.…”

“…Sonnino (2009) gives two reasons why municipalities do not address agricultural issues (other than urban agriculture and local food): first, agriculture is usually seen as an issue that needs to be addressed at higher (national and supranational) governance levelsin policies such as the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)and, second, the conventional definition of 'urban' as 'non-agricultural' has conceptually distanced food as an urban issue (Pothukuchi and Kaufman 1999;Sonnino 2009). Others have also found this rural-urban divide tendency (Sonnino 2009) in which food production and urban areas are still widely framed as separate spheres (Mendes 2007;Moschitz 2017). Urban areas are conceived of as 'productive and dynamic places of economic development, innovation, and culture' whereas rural areas are places of 'food production, landscape preservation, and energy production' (Moschitz 2017, 9).…”

Framing a Sustainable Local Food System—How Smaller Cities in Southern Germany Are Facing a New Policy Issue

“…In contrast, Moschitz uses a slightly different approach. In her paper she aims "to explore the ways in which food is framed in official policies in Switzerland and thereby gain a better understanding of the potential for the development of urban food policies" [6] (p. 180). Using the frame approach for the analysis of documents, Moschitz focuses on the status quo.…”

“…Given that many Germans live in small-and medium-sized cities [5] (p. 2), such as the analysed cases, A-Town and B-Town, it is important to understand framing and policymaking relating to sustainability in these settings (small cities are defined as mostly smaller than 20,000 inhabitants while medium-sized cities are defined as cities with less than 100,000 inhabitants). The underlying assumption is that policymaking is influenced by how actors who are implicitly or explicitly involved in the process frame the issue at hand [6] (p. 182). Frame analysis of local food systems in Germany and Europe has not often been done so far.…”