What are the impacts and implications of alternative food practices in a post-neoliberal transition?

Working Group 2: What are the impacts and implications of alternative food practices in a post-neoliberal transition?

Co-conveners:  Damian Maye [1], Jessica Duncan [2],

1: University of Gloucestershire; 2: Wageningen University, Netherlands

Resistance to the neoliberal food system is made visible through a multitude of innovative practices that serve to undermine, reinforce or provide alternatives to the status quo. More specifically, new governance arrangements aimed at supporting sustainable and just food systems are being imagined and tested by new and increasingly diverse alliances of actors. Within these new arrangements, actors previously on the margins are claiming a central place in governance debates while simultaneously expanding their scope. Actors engaged in these innovative food practices are dealing with complex and interrelated questions of culture, health, sustainability, trust, ethics, values, and solidarity. To address these shifts there have been attempts to design new models of assessment to better capture changing values and objectives. Novel niche practices related to the production, distribution and consumption of food are similarly being advanced and re-imagined with the potential to support or weaken a post-neoliberal transition. Moreover, consideration of these practices highlights multiple and competing pathways for transition. Working Group 2a brings together a diverse set of concrete cases and proposals for new theoretical frameworks that consider pathways, implications and impacts of practices aimed at shifting the food system towards one that is more just and sustainable. ​