Roxana Maria Triboi (p), Irina Rotaru, Adina Pasarel

Naomé Joët

In the evolving landscape of European Union (EU) food systems policy, cities and regions are increasingly pivotal in driving innovation. They are achieving this through collaborative partnerships among public authorities, local businesses, and community groups. The Thematic Food Partnership, integral to the Urban Agenda for the EU, plays a crucial role in supporting and enhancing these initiatives. However, a notable gap persists between high-level EU and national policies and grassroots innovations in food systems. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in EU policies to better appreciate and support the diversity of local food systems and the potential of relocalization and reterritorialization for more equitable and sustainable models.
The paper highlights the necessity of a robust multilevel governance framework within the EU, emphasizing the Thematic Food Partnership's potential to aid cities in developing comprehensive food policies. This partnership, distinct from the EU Food System Framework and the EU Food Policy Council (programmed for 2023 but still not started), fills a crucial gap with its focus on local initiatives and collaboration. Starting in January 2024, it comprises 19 diverse partners, including 10 cities, 3 metropolitan regions, 2 academic institutions, and other relevant actors coordinated by the City of Milan and the Lisbon Metropolitan Area.
The initiative aims to address knowledge, policy, and funding gaps at the EU level, facilitating multilevel policy coherence and empowering cities as catalysts for transformative change in food systems. The partnership underscores the importance of local municipalities and the city-region scale in developing tailored, integrated local policies. These policies aim to bridge the rural-urban divide, focusing on bioregional interactions and the role of local actor ecosystems.
As we anticipate the contributions of champion cities like Mouans-Sartoux, Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Ghent, known for their advanced local food policies, this partnership promises to provide a roadmap for sustainable, resilient, and equitable food systems across Europe. By aligning local innovations with broader EU objectives and leveraging the strengths of various stakeholders, the Food Thematic Partnership under the Urban Agenda is set to forge a path towards a more cohesive, resilient, and sustainable food landscape across Europe.

Yuna Chiffoleau (p), Chloé Mignot, Frédéric Wallet, Caroline Penicaud, Adeline Ugaglia, Grégori Akermann, Salma Loudiyi, Gwenaëlle Raton, Anne-Cécile Brit

Roxana Maria Triboi

Faced with climate change and the increase in food-related diseases, policy makers are looking for new levers to encourage more sustainable consumption behaviour and food systems. The reterritorialisation of food, mainly addressed through the development of short food chains and local food policies, is presented as a potential solution. However, ‘territorialised food systems’ (TFS) are still vague systems, in constant evolution, and on which quantitative data are still rare. The objective of the PLAT4TERFOOD project carried out in France (2023-2028) is to develop robust methods and adapted devices to produce new data allowing to better characterize these systems and to evaluate their impacts in the long term. The objective of this communication is to present the results of the DELPHI method used at the beginning of the project to both co-circumscribe TFS and co-define indicators for routine quantitative analysis of their contribution to sustainability. Experts from 4 activity sectors were asked to comment on an operational definition of TFS, to select impact indicators and to prioritise the key sustainability issues to be measured for TFS. Results are intended to facilitate the monitoring and steering of TFS, in particular in conjunction with local food policies that are developing in Western countries.

Claire Lamine (p), Danièle Magda, Karine Nunes, Claudia Schmitt, Michelle Miller, Sabrina Arcuri

Yuna Chiffoleau

This paper draws on the experience of the ATTER international research-action network on agroecological transitions at the level of territorial agrifood systems. This network brings together 19 organisations from research, teaching, civil society, local authorities and facilitation, in a system of exchanges and cross-analysis between 16 territories located in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the USA and Brazil. We rely here on 4 of these territorial case studies to demonstrate how the collective and transdisciplinary work on agrifood systems’ trajectories on the one hand, and on food governance on the other, allows to develop a transformative and critical perspective on the territorialisation and ecologisation of agrifood systems. The analysis of territorial agrifood systems’ trajectories allows to identify the processes that favour or impede transitions and thus understand the relative balance, over time, between the dynamics of “intensification” and ecologisation of these agrifood systems. The balance between public, private and collective action and the reconfigurations over time of power relations within these territorial agrifood systems appear as key elements. Complementarily, based on the analysis of territorial food governance instances that take the form of local food councils (present in three of our case studies), we show that governance instances that allow to collectively assess and discuss these key processes are necessary to combine a transformative/action-oriented and an analytical/critical perspective on transitions processes and thus thicken local food democracy.

Naomé Joët (p), Valérie Angeon , Hélène David-Benz, Sandrine Fréguin-Gresh

Claire Lamine

The conventional food system is nowadays widely contested as it faces numerous challenges. A structural change in production and consumption patterns, as well as in distribution channels, towards more just, healthy, and environmentally friendly systems is advocated. In this context, public food procurement is under scrutiny. School canteens are seen as a powerful lever for transforming the food system through scaling-up processes, provided that the enabling conditions (among others, local coordination processes) are sustained. We pay specific attention to the relationship between public buyers and producers, which is analyzed as a central node in the food catering provisioning system. To address this issue, we provide a theoretical framework that articulates the literature on public procurement and the transaction cost theory. The proposed framework allows us to study the relationship between buyers and suppliers in terms of governance and power relationships. To illustrate the usefulness of the framework, we discuss its application to the case of public food procurement in the Réunion island, a French overseas department, where the challenge of local food is paramount. We show the potential of the suggested framework to: analyze the network of actors involved in the provision of local food, to identify the obstacles they face and how they overcome them, and to understand to what extent these structures of governance favor (or not) innovations that foster changes that catalyze the transition towards sustainable food systems. We conclude with empirical perspectives on methodology.