Delivering food sovereignty in a world of interacting scales: Insights from governance research

If food sovereignty is to be a path to food security, it must be understood within the broader political economy of the global food system. The food sovereignty movement recognises that global trade policies disempower ‘peasant' farmers, leading to poverty traps, unsustainable agricultural practices and food insecurity. Proponents of food sovereignty argue that changing such policies, and facilitating bottom-up, agro-ecological approaches to food production can improve food security and address a range of environmental challenges, including climate change adaptation and biodiversity conservation. However, all of these challenges play out over scales that extend beyond the local, and are addressed by an increasingly global governance system (for example, the UNCBD). I therefore argue that by isolating and privileging the ‘local' in food sovereignty, we create two key pitfalls:

We do not consider the compatibility of different realisations of ‘food sovereignty' between space and time. The impacts (intended or not) of one realisation may extend over scales such that another is hindered.
We do not facilitate management of global environmental challenges at environmentally relevant scales.

I discuss these pitfalls within a framework of multi-level governance. The multilevel governance framework encompasses politics, policy and the actors and powers engaged in both. It considers the relationships between state and society across and between levels of jurisdiction, from global down to local. By embedding food sovereignty within a multi-level governance framework, we can understand these pitfalls as intersections between rights and interests across scales; we can identify the mechanisms that favour powerful interests; and we can identify opportunities within global, national and local governance to reconcile interests across and between scales.