Global governance has become a popular term for institutions, organizations, rules, norms, and methods to guide and facilitate action. While ambitions for problem-solving and development may be high, enforcement mechanisms are few.
One example that illustrates many global governance dilemmas is food security: We live in a world with enough food for everyone if production, distribution, and allocation are distributed fairly and justly. Although the international community has worked for global food security for eight decades, the goal seems far off. The crises of recent decades have made us aware of the need for self-sufficiency, shorter value chains, the value of independent suppliers of food to the markets, and the importance of sustaining small food producers.
At the same time, we observe that the concentration of power in the system accelerates with support in the same crisis scenario. National policies enable the exploitation of people and resources internationally to gain access to inputs such as feed, or cheap precarious labor for seasonal work and also overlook the extreme concentration of power in supply chains and food trade.
Other examples are the governance of oceans, energy sufficiency, and climate change – which are societal challenges that cannot be resolved at the national level only. Indeed, food systems are inextricably linked to other systems in society that provide the energy, biodiversity, transport and water needed to ensure that food can be eaten.
The challenge of this complex situation is that globally, there is little agreement on how the production, distribution and allocation of the resources needed to create food can be governed – or even if it should be governed.
Thus, while much research provides statistics and metrics that tell us about food availability and food insecurity, less knowledge is produced or disseminated on how food system governance failures are produced, maintained through different forms of organization, and justified.
This summer school critically engages in how global governance systems influencing food might more efficiently address sustainability pathways that protect social and biophysical environments in the Anthropocene, for the health and wellbeing of the present and future generations.
Who is governing global food systems? What levels of organization are emerging? What can we learnfrom different schools of thought in the social sciences? How can we know that we are on a better track?
We welcome theoretical, conceptual, and empirical papers that engage in the concepts of food system governance, institutions, collective action, private / public collaboration at different levels of governance, forms of organization, science-policy interfaces, epistemic communities, and knowledge construction.
This summer school is being organized in collaboration with the Research Committee for the Sociology of Agriculture and Food (RC40), the Research Committee for Sociology of Organizations (RC17) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and the European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS). With financial support from the European Union through its HorizonEurope funded FOODPathS project (under grant agreement No 101059497), the Economics and Social Sciences Department of the French Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and the Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris (CUNP), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Organizers: Hilde Bjørkhaug, NTNU, Allison Loconto, LISIS
Senior Mentors [tbc]: Bruce Muirhead (Canada), Nadine Arnold (Switzerland), Sergio Schneider (Brazil), Jess Duncan (The Netherlands), Paul Stock (US), Rachel Bezner-Kerr (US)