ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, numerous studies have documented the successes and limitations of place-based initiatives that aim to promote healthy, equitable, and sustainable food systems. This research has also investigated the ways that these initiatives have become part of broad-based networks that connect a range of actors across sector, scale, and place. However, little attention has been given to how these different initiatives and networks engage with the state in an effort to impact food policy while adhering to goals of health, equity, and sustainability. In response, this chapter explores the intersections between food systems governance and social movement mobilization, examining the role of policy-making process and the efforts of non-profit organizations and grassroots coalitions to promote empowerment, community development, and broader food systems transformation. Specifically, we ask how social movements can advance food policy, while also modelling alternative food futures through processes of policy development. We pay particular attention to the complex ways in which these aims coexist, teasing out the tensions, possibilities, and the overall complexity of their interactions. Reflecting on a series of engagements in Canada, we argue that by prefiguring collaborative processes of engagement, critical inquiry, action, and reflexivity, social movement networks have the ability to strengthen relationships, analysis, and collective strategies for change.
