Integrated Food Policy in the Making: Exploring the Early Phase of Policy Integration From a Practice Theoretical Perspective

Local food policies are on the rise addressing challenges of transforming food related economy, consumption and agricultural production towards sustainability. It is often argued that the integration of different policy objectives, actors and policy ideas into a sustainable food policy is inextricably linked to new forms and practices of cross-sectoral governance.. Adopting a practice theoretical perspective, we aim to identify how food policy integration is made “on the ground”. The practice theoretical perspective opens up the possibility to focus on different kinds of practice which includes both practices of institution building and discursive practices which proves to be an important approach especially in the early phase, since institutions and discourses are not yet institutionalized. In this paper, we take these trends observed in political practice as an opportunity to examine the practice of policy integration in newly developing local food policies in two small cities in southern Germany. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews and participant observations conducted in these cities which agreed to the idea of implementing a food policy as a new issue on their local agenda. The practices considered, embedded in the process of participation, were aimed at the development of objectives and measures as components of a municipal food mission statement. The sample contains people from the city administration and the city council as well as members of the local economy and civil society. The results show that applying a practice theoretical perspective on food policy integration on the local level reveals practices that were conceived as integrating had to some extent disintegrating effects. If practices had an effect of pulling together or pulling apart is connected to the specific context of the practice.