Deliberative Views and Practices About Food: Assessing the Potential for a More Sustainable Democratic Governance of Food Systems

Deliberative participatory processes and practices have become increasingly popular in the past few decades as a way to reach a more inclusive and empowering democratic governance in a variety of sectors. Such processes may come from above, being the initiative of the political institutions, or from below, as activities and practices carried out within the civil society. This paper examines the potential for implementing innovative deliberative participatory processes within organizations active in the field of food systems. We focus on nongovernmental advocacy organizations and groups, that is organizations and groups that have a political stance in relation to food systems and their sustainability. We address two main research questions: Which organizational factors are associated to deliberative views and practices of such organizations and groups? Do deliberative views and practices favor or prevent advocacy by such organizations and groups? In other words, we are interested, first, in knowing what makes the adoption of deliberative views and practices more likely and, secondly, whether such views and practices may lead to a more politicized field of food systems. We will also explore possible mediation and moderation effects between organizational characteristics, deliberative view and practices, and advocacy. Our analysis relies on primary data collected within a EU-funded project. The data was retrieved through a semi-structured questionnaire sent to a sample of actors that are active in food systems in seven countries (Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and UK). Including a range of different countries allows us to generalize beyond a specific case study. Our findings will be confronted with those stemming from previous research on deliberation withing organizations, in particular social movement organizations, in order to ascertain whether these processes in relation to food systems bear some similarity with those observed in other fields.