From Participation to Transformation: Understanding Sustainable Empowerment in European Food Policy Processes

Urban food governance has become a key laboratory for democratic experimentation, yet the extent to which participatory initiatives generate substantive and durable transformation remains contested. This paper employs sustainable empowerment as its conceptual lens. It is a framework defined as a dynamic and context-sensitive process through which peoples gain the collective capacity to shape, govern, and transform their food systems in ways that are ecologically resilient, socially just, and politically inclusive. Sustainable empowerment understands transformation as rooted in four interdependent pillars: power, governance, justice, and sustainability. Building on this conceptual foundation, the paper adopts an iterative theory-building approach, using empirical insights from fieldwork to interrogate, refine, and potentially expand the framework. Rather than treating sustainable empowerment as a fixed model applied to empirical cases, the analysis positions fieldwork as a dialogical space in which theoretical propositions are tested against lived governance practices and in which new context-specific dimensions may emerge. The analysis draws on ongoing comparative fieldwork in two European urban contexts with distinct but ambitious food governance trajectories: the Métropole Européenne de Lille (France) and the City of Turin (Italy). Turin represents one of Italy’s most advanced urban food governance ecosystems, characterised by its Food Policy initiative, strong interdepartmental coordination, and a long-standing tradition of municipal-civil society collaboration. Lille similarly combines institutional restructuring with participatory and multi-actor processes, particularly through the PAT’MEL (Local Food Strategy) and emerging cross-sector governance infrastructures. The empirical basis of the paper includes semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, civil society networks, and food system stakeholders; participant observations of participatory arenas (interdepartmental working groups, neighbourhood initiatives, etc.); and a systematic analysis of strategic documents and regulatory frameworks. Three core findings emerge. First, participatory infrastructures in both cities broaden inclusion but vary markedly in their capacity to recalibrate power relations, particularly depending on the degree of political commitment and institutional permeability. Second, cross-sector coordination, especially between food, environment, social policy, and procurement departments, appears essential for transforming food strategies from symbolic commitments into operational governance tools. Third, sustainable empowerment occurs at the crossroads of civic mobilisation and institutional openness: it is when organised civil society networks, municipal actors, and intermediary organisations collaboratively develop policy priorities that establish lasting forms of democratic innovation. The paper seeks to show that local food strategies can evolve from consultative exercises into engines of democratic transformation, but only under specific socio-political conditions. In both Lille and Turin, such transformation depends on the convergence of sustained political commitment and institutional openness, the presence of organised and historically embedded civil-society networks, and the capacity to coordinate food, environmental, social, and procurement policies across municipal departments. Recognising these conditions provides clear guidance for policymakers aiming to enhance democratic food governance and, crucially, feeds back into the ongoing theoretical development of sustainable empowerment, demonstrating how empirical insights can sharpen its analytical precision, reveal new context-specific dimensions, and strengthen its capacity to explain transformative governance in diverse urban settings.