While food sovereignty has begun making promising inroads into the existing corporate food system, it is still working through what, exactly, sovereignty means. At a basic level, sovereignty implies boundary-making – including some groups while excluding others -- yet food sovereignty movements often call for growing cooperation and interdependence.
We suggest that many of the core epistemological and ontological challenges of food sovereignty can be helpfully unpacked through the lens of scale. To date, food sovereignty efforts have tended to employ a particular notion of ‘scale’ that is generally defined in opposition to the globalized food system. What appears to have gone missing is an appreciation of the multiple determinations of scale embedded in the concept of food sovereignty. We suggest that sovereignty is an intrinsically relational concept, only taking on meaning in relation to other processes, functions, and forms – not least, other sovereign units.
To develop a notion of relational sovereignty, we rub the two conceptual blocks of polycentric governance systems and relational scale together. We then apply relational sovereignty to generate some practical strategies for achieving food sovereignty more effectively, using examples from the Parque de la Papa (the Potato Park) in the Peruvian Andes. Strategies such as developing alternative (interdependent) bases for sovereignty and devising means to achieve sovereign recognition may offer a robust starting point for critical food sovereignty work.
Alastair Iles,Associate Professor of Science, Technology & Environment, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California at Berkeley, and faculty co-director of the new Berkeley Food Institute
Maywa Montenegro, PhD student in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California at Berkeley
Food Sovereignty: a critical dialogue, 14 - 15 September, New Haven.
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