Conference Agenda

The last twenty years has seen a resurgence in academic and applied interest in governing urban food systems. This interest is the result of the intersecting of a number of issues, including dissatisfaction with the food system and its economic, ecological and social distantiation/alienation; the rise of complex systems thinking; increased political power of local governments and particularly cities; and the emergence of novel co-governance approaches. By and large, emergent urban food governance has been informed by the increasing appreciation of urbanization and its impact on food security and food systems. This process has been coupled in some contexts by a wave of decentralization of powers from national to local government which has shifted attention of global development agencies and donors to urban realities, devolved austerity measures and/or contributed to the rise of cities as key powers in transforming the food systems. Historic urban food governance processes have shaped how food is produced, transformed, distributed, consumed and disposed around the globe. At the moment, the intersection between the food system and the urban is resulting in different forms of malnutrition. Indeed, the majority of overweight and obese adults and one in three stunted children live in urban areas. Furthermore, largely cities and towns are responsible for different forms of resource depletion and climate change. It is urgent to transform urban food systems.

The vision is to create urban food systems that are good for people, places and planet, and where future generations will be able to feed themselves with good food.

The transformation of urban food systems will look differently for each city, these pathways need to be developed by citizens and consider the following principles to support more equitable and effective urban food governance:

1. 1. Time matters Adopting both historical and future-focused perspectives supports planning for uncertain and evolving urban food.
2. 2. Place matters : Implementing a place-based approach to urban food governance optimises the relevance of proposed actions.
3. 3. Relations matter: Scales, spaces, and agencies of urban food governance are co-constituted through structural and fluid interactions.
4. 4. Diversity matters: Dynamic and diverse critical theories, frames, and practices can help deal with complexity and co-produce new political possibilities
5. 5. Power matters: Engaging with normative processes and values and making a commitment to fairness requires navigating uneven patterns and relations of power.

Breaking the linear produce, consume, dispose chain is frequently seen by both scholars and practitioners as a crucial step in the transition toward more sustainable food systems. Therefore, circularity is an increasingly popular concept when thinking about the future of food systems, resulting in numerous policy developments for more circular food systems. As the outcomes of food systems are very context dependent, there are different visions on how to organize this transition. Hence, there is a wide variety of (combinations of) tools and mechanisms through which governmental authorities attempt to steer actors in the food system to make it more circular. However, there is limited systematic knowledge on the full spectrum of circular policy instruments, as well as how these contribute to more circular food systems.

In order to improve our understanding on these different policy pathways envisioned by scholars and policymakers, we conduct a systematic literature review of academic publications on how policy instruments can contribute to more circular urban food systems. The literature review follows the protocol for Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), and coding of policy instruments is done using the software Atlas.ti. Following this review, we first provide an overview of the academic field, by looking at the number of publications, the distribution across academic fields, and geographies. Second, we synthesize which types of circular food policy instruments are proposed in the literature or implemented in practice; what their policy goals are; which aspects of food systems are prioritized; and how circularity in relation to these different instruments is appraised or evaluated.

The findings outline our current understanding about the different policy pathways toward a more circular food system by providing lessons and insights about how different circular food policy instruments work across levels and regions, and how they are embedded or related to other policies. Moreover, we conclude by discussing the wider trends that emerge from the current developments in circular food system policies. Thereby offering a systematic overview for both practitioners and scholars working toward a more circular food system.

The complexity of agro-food systems which characterised by globalisation processes, large geographical scales, opaque value chains, flows of resources, power and values in contexts of highly inequitable power relations which displace decision making far from communities and nation states where food systems originate and externalise negative socio-environmental impacts, with global calls to action on food security/environmental public goods suggests that deep, systemic changes are necessary with alternative transformation pathways which push back on globalised narratives of scarcity and crisis and which involve more autonomous and regenerative trajectories. Thus concepts embrace production to consumption, finance and investment, governance arrangements and power relations. However, understanding and consensus on how to achieve agro-food system transformations is lacking. Given this concept, the new [project name removed to anonymize] aims to generate evidence and tools to advance understanding on how to achieve transformative change in agro-food system to enhance biodiversity and equity outcomes and strengthen stakeholder transformative change capacity. [project name] targets telecoupled agrofood systems which drive land use change and create negative biodiversity and equity impacts, including in biodiversity-rich production locations in the Global South. In this paper we propose using socio-ecological / socio-technical systems as a lens to understand agrofood systems using telecoupling and relational theory, This critical interrogation will be conducted from different perspectives (disciplines, global north and south, indigenous....). As with critiques of globalisation theory, we will reflect on the ontology of societal and environmental change that underpins transformative change and which alternatives exist. Relationality theory calls for co-production of situated knowledge and recognizing different world views and relational values – but there are tensions (how to engage in an equitable, transdisciplinary way, without imposing categories; how to produce situated knowledges drawing on/generating plural forms of knowledge – while recognizing the nesting of living socio-natural systems, hegemonies (over ideas, land uses, purpose of economic exchange etc) and the role of distance / connection to place. This conceptualisation aims to pave the way for empirical work on leverage points for sustainable transformative change pathways, expanding the boundaries of current thinking about future agrofood systems, especially those with far-reaching values and economic rules shifts.

Modelled mitigation pathways based on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) rely on the rapid deployment of land-based mitigation measures to meet temperature goals of 1.5 and 2 degree Celsius. These modeling results have been a significant driving force behind the global climate policy, promoting the rapid implementation of land-based mitigation measures as a cost-effective solution that benefits not only climate change but also supports healthy diets and other sustainable development objectives. However, what is poorly understood in the policy uptake of these modelled outputs is the unequal distributional burden borne by the Global South to achieve the global climate targets. In this paper, we analyse the projected outcomes related to food security for different world regions from IAMs in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report's scenario database. We choose 1.5 and 2 degree scenarios that report results for a 10-region classification since this enables us to examine the differences between developing and developed regions with better precision. Applying this criteria we examine around 350 scenarios across 5 models. We find that the modelled mitigation pathways perpetuate an unequal world where food prices rise more for developing regions than for developed ones. Moreover, the per capita food demand especially demand from livestock products in developing regions remains well below developed countries even at the end of the 21st century. To achieve temperature targets, the scenarios appropriate large amounts of land in developing regions for afforestation and bioenergy crops, thereby increasing competition for land and negatively impacting food prices. These mechanisms contribute to a world where millions of people are at risk of hunger, even in 2050 and 2100, with some modelling studies suggesting implementing food aid programs for alleviating the situation. This IAM-generated imagination of an inequitable world raises serious questions about their policy relevance and uptake. Alternative imaginations which consider the distributional effects of land-based mitigation measures on different regions are essential to ensure that climate goals are achieved while prioritizing global equity and sustainability.