- Info
Food Democracy and Meta-Organizations (Eucor)
Summary
| How actors - including citizens, social movements, institutions, urban farmers, associations, consumer activists, agricultural producers, business foundations - are mobilizing and organizing to promote alternative agri-food models is an important recent question in the context of considerations of food democracy. Meta-organizations – such as food policy councils – serve as novel meeting places where actors may restore the social (responsibility, trust, fairness) and material links between producers and consumers as well as towards the environment. In those meta-organizations members seemingly exert the same rights (non-hierarchical) and take decisions collectively. Such relationships are quite unprecedented and deserve to be analyzed from several angles: i.e. organizationally, from a meta-organizations perspective (as meeting place for actors), and individually from an actor-focused view reflecting the daily practices, interests and needs of different actors with singular identities, political, ethical and spiritual commitments. In light of the need to approach organizational aspect of alternative agri-food systems from an interdisciplinary perspective, the project builds the basis for the creation of a consortium of researchers from Universities in the three countries of the Upper Rhine region, to respond to an INTEREG and ANR project contributing with applied research to the "food and food systems" axis (environmental sciences field) and "innovation/inequality, discrimination" (human and social sciences field). The core group composed of ten researchers from the four EUCOR universities will jointly work on the preparation of a multi-stakeholder INTERREG project on the transition toward a sustainable and socially just food system in the Upper-Rhine region. | | Project responsible / Principal supervisor: | Prof. Dr. Benno Pokorny | | Implementing person(s): | Dr. Sabine Reinecke | | Funding: | EUCOR | | Duration: | June 2020 to December 2021 | | Partner: | University of Basel, University of Strasbourg, Université de Haute Alsace |
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