ABSTRACT
While there is a growing body of literature on food sovereignty at a global level, much less is known about what food sovereignty movements look like in specific places and how their expression is largely shaped by local dynamics. This contribution provides a critical analysis of how a diverse range of intentions, strategies, tactics and discourses collide under the ‘big tent’ of food sovereignty in Canada. We look at how the concept and framework of food sovereignty has been incorporated in food policy agendas across diverse sectors of Canadian society. This analysis highlights both the challenges to conceptualizing food sovereignty and the tensions in defining inclusive policies that engage with food sovereignty at distinct, and often overlapping, scales. The ways different actors engage with food sovereignty in Canada requires re-thinking traditional and legal conceptions of sovereignty as more than the ability of a territorially bounded entity to exercise power through domination, a view that perhaps might be more theoretically relevant in national policies
The authors are grateful to Dawn Morrison and other members of the BCWorking Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty for ongoing conversations on the intersection between agrarian and indigenous visions of food sovereignty. We also thank Anelyse Weiler for research assistance and the two external reviewers for helpful suggestions to improve the paper.
