Food Democracy Roundtable in Bologna: a critical assessment of a participatory food policy

This paper analyses the socio-political conditions under which local administrations can enable meaningful participation while producing effective policy outcomes, using the Bologna Metropolitan Area’s Urban and Metropolitan Food Policy (PAUM, 2023) and the statutory recognition of the Right to Food (Ius Cibi, 2024) as a paradigmatic case. Combining 17 semi-structured interviews with municipal and metropolitan officials, civil-society organisations, agroecological producers, together with a multi-level analysis of EU, national, regional and municipal laws, the study examines how participatory governance (Turnhout, Van Bommel & Aarts, 2010) fosters equity, accountability and responsiveness in a context marked by the commodification and touristification of food (Lind & Barham, 2004). Initiated by elected officials and co-designed with the University of Bologna, PAUM institutionalises food as a social right, a common good, and a domain of democratic co-responsibility. Its central participatory mechanism, the Food Democracy Roundtable, is a permanent, multi-stakeholder forum embedded within the municipal bureaucracy, mandated to co-draft a Food Democracy Manifesto and a Citizenship Pact and to integrate diverse actors into policy formulation. The analysis shows that the effectiveness of participatory governance in Bologna hinges on how local officials exercise political and bureaucratic discretion, which is the interpretive space in which administrators decide how to translate binding multi-level mandates into local, operational programmes. Within a vertically integrated governance system shaped by EU CAP regulations, national waste-reduction laws, and regional circular-economy strategies, municipal officials selectively filter, reinterpret, and adapt these mandates to develop concrete interventions on food poverty, school catering, and short supply chains. At the same time, the findings reveal structural constraints that complicate participatory aspirations. A tension between a bottom up trajectory rooted in agro ecological movements that frame food as a commons and a top down trajectory that leverages food for branding and heritage tourism ("City of Food"), thereby privileging symbolic capital over equity. Overall, the Bologna case demonstrates that participatory governance strengthens democratic engagement and policy outcomes when institutional design, political leadership, and bureaucratic discretion converge to create administratively anchored spaces for deliberation, yet these same structures can reproduce exclusion where fragmentation and hierarchy persist.