Introduction

Landscape ecologies and food production and consumption remain major concerns across global ecosystems. This book assembles research from world-leading scholars to explore these issues from an institutionalist perspective that builds directly on the established French Regulation School and Conventions Theory approach to agri-food governance, through novel empirical and theoretical contributions to contemporary questions of food, agriculture and ecology. Going beyond classical French Regulation Theory, with its focus on national ‘regimes of accumulation’ and ‘modes of regulation’, this volume addresses transnational ecological issues that are novel expressions of the global agri-food economy in order to open up new conceptual spaces and theoretical understandings of these issues. Through novel empirical cases and theorisation – namely through engagements with modern economic sociology, political and ecological economy and institutional economics – this book extends institutional approaches and Regulation Theory to capture contemporary changes, impacts and outcomes of global capitalist agri-food and ecological development.