Charles Zalman Levkoe

Food systems face a polycrisis on multiple environmental, social, economic, and political fronts—each challenge amplifies the others, making solutions all the more complicated to achieve. To address these challenges, communities are turning to critical and creative approaches to make food systems governance more accessible to a wider range of people. Yet, there is still much to learn about how communities have contributed (and could or should contribute) to building solutions based on differing governance and engagement structures. The Participatory Food Governance project has studied diverse perspectives on governance issues from food movement and civil society (CSO) leaders through a national survey, in-depth interviews, and a series of case studies. To understand how the overall insights from the project resonated with the organizations, networks, and movements we studied, five CSO leaders from across Canada were invited to reflect on these insights. This field report outlines a process of dialogue with five CSO leaders and how they experience food systems governance. By connecting conversations between academics, community-based practitioners, and CSO leaders, this process seeks to advance both theory and practice. The CSO leaders who participated offered stories about what governance means on the ground, while also expressing how government processes could better reflect local, contextualized realities. In addition to revealing important insights about the different power dynamics and objectives at play, the reflections captured in this field report highlight key possibilities, tensions, and complexities that proponents of participatory governance must address moving forward.

The impacts of colonization have resulted in disruptions to food systems, land, language, and the overall health and well-being of Indigenous Peoples acros

Developing pragmatic possibilities for advancing food sovereignty to address challenges of justice and sustainability within food systems is an essential project for human survival. A practical starting point is to identify existing challenges along with comprehensive strategies that avoid isolated fixes. Community food systems report cards are a tool to inform and influence city-region food system governance by providing a connected and comprehensive snapshot of these systems, connecting people, places, and processes, and informing research, decision-making, and program planning. This article explores and reflects on the experiences of developing community food systems report cards in Thunder Bay and Durham Region in Ontario, Canada. Through sharing lessons learned, cautions, and limitations, we explore the report cards’ origins, development processes, findings, distribution, and impacts. We argue that community food systems report cards can be a valuable tool for understanding a city-region food system, monitoring progress, identifying gaps, and comparing and communicating experiences to communities, food system stakeholders, and decision-makers. However, community food systems report cards are only the starting point for advancing food sovereignty in city-region food systems.

The Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (IJPS) shares scholarship and creates connections for cultural transformation to build a world in which all relationships, institutions, policies and organizations are based on principles of partnership. View our Global Readers. A Partnership Between: Center for Partnership Systems UMN School of Nursing UMN Libraries

Emergency food planning is an emerging field of study and practice evolving from lessons learned about the need to be prepared to respond to increased food insecurity in the face of emergency events. In this era of climate change, geo-political conflicts, and growing inequality, disruptions to the global food system are occurring more frequently. Many of these disruptions have the potential to impact food access on a large scale, a reality that communities need to be ready for through prepara­tion to mitigate impacts. Like other municipalities around the world, the city of Thunder Bay in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, and its surround­ing areas were caught unprepared by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food insecurity. Prior to the pandemic, there was no coordinated body to address a sudden increase in food insecurity, partic­ularly among already vulnerabilized populations. In late 2020, Thunder Bay + Area Food Strategy (TBAFS), the regional food policy council, led the coordination of emergency food response and researched the early emergency food response that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Find­ings from this research identified the need for a collaborative Emergency Food Plan that brought together the municipality and a range of civil soci­ety organizations, institutions, and agencies. Acting on this research, the TBAFS coordinated the devel­opment of an Emergency Food Plan for the region, leveraging a group of primary partners who make up key components of civil society’s food access infrastructure. This article provides an over­view of this process in the context of existing research and literature along with lessons learned throughout the process.