Contested Boundaries in Food and Agricultural Governance

Food governance under conditions of globalization and limited resources from the global to the local level is becoming a menacing policy challenge. Related implications affect established policy paradigms within agriculture and food policy, but also policy areas that have long been separated from food and agriculture policy. Organizations that originally dealt with food security policies are reframing their focus to expand to interconnected, separately governed issues, such as climate change. Similarly, civil society organizations and multinational corporations in the food sector are increasingly co-producing public services. These developments challenge established analytical concepts in political science, e.g., the distinction between public and private becomes increasingly opaque through public-private partnerships with ensuing challenges to decision making procedures and the categorization of stakeholders, and to traditional concepts such as accountability, transparency, and representation. Similarly, the boundaries of international regimes are becoming blurred, with, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals merging norms from climate, environmental, food and human rights regimes, setting the scene for future contestation of competences and resources. This Section contains Panels and Papers that critically analyze the re-negotiation of the boundaries in agri-food governance. We will analyze trends, including theoretical reflection on suitable concepts, proposals for new analytical or conceptual frameworks, in-depth and comparative case-studies that explore these shifts and related implications, and proposals for innovative solutions to address negative implications.