Roberta Sonnino
Prof. Surrey University
Daniela Bernaschi
University of Florence
Food Policy Councils (FPCs) have emerged as critical spaces for rethinking the food system from the ground up. However, they face a fundamental challenge: how to ensure that their composition truly reflects the complexity and diversity of the food system. This requires going beyond sectoral silos—e.g., agriculture, health, food assistance—to embrace a systemic perspective that accounts for the interconnections between production, distribution, consumption, waste, and care.
Many FPCs are caught in a structural tension. On the one hand, limited participation—dominated by public authorities or a single set of actors—risks reproducing partial or siloed approaches. On the other hand, broad but fragmented participation can dilute decision-making capacity, hinder accountability, and prevent systemic change. It also means that if the FPC's composition merely reflects the status quo, the resulting policies will only reinforce the existing food system. Similarly, if the council's composition over-represents certain transformative niches, the resulting policies might appear unfeasible to policymakers or lose touch with the broader needs of the city.
This session explores how FPCs operating in different contexts—urban and rural, Global North and South, grassroots-led and institutionally embedded—navigate this tension.
We ask:
Grounded in case studies and research, the session invites participants to reflect on deeper political and ethical questions that underpin the role of FPCs in shaping food systems: Whose knowledge counts? Who decides? And what kind of food systems are we building when we choose who is at the table—and who is not?
The presenter examined the evolution of Nutrire Trento, a local food policy initiative, using a substantive (rather than formal) approach to analyze the functioning of the Food Policy Council (FPC). By identifying 36 key events, they outlined three main phases in the council's development.
The initial phase was marked by enthusiasm from diverse stakeholders but also by tensions over representation, particularly around whether to include non-organic producers. The second phase emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, which acted as a catalyst for renewed engagement and collaboration, leading to innovative experiments in short food supply chains such as ACSA. In the third phase, this momentum was disrupted after the 2020 local elections, when political shifts and institutional reshuffling led to decreased support, new conflicts—such as a controversial organic farming referendum—and institutional ambiguity.
These developments eroded trust and participation. The presenter concluded by underlining the institutional ambivalence and ambiguity that eroded trust, emphasizing that Food Policy Councils must continuously negotiate power and priorities—and that static representation is not enough.
The presenter focused on the integration of human rights principles, especially the right to food—into the governance of food policy councils. Emphasizing that food is not charity, but a human right recognized in international legal frameworks, the speaker highlighted the importance of ensuring urban food governance is inclusive, transparent, and accountable. Drawing on instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Right to Food Guidelines, they underscored principles such as participation, non-discrimination, and accountability as central to implementing the right to food. The presenter raised concerns about the growing role of large corporations in food councils, warning that while they may provide resources, their involvement often introduces conflicts of interest and risks undermining the priorities of more vulnerable stakeholders. Power asymmetries must be addressed to ensure meaningful participation, especially for marginalized groups such as small-scale producers, indigenous peoples, refugees, migrants, women, and youth. The presentation concluded by pointing to emerging frameworks—like the Pan American Health Organization’s 2022 roadmap and Brazil’s CONSEA observatory—as examples of efforts to monitor and prevent corporate overreach and posed critical questions on how to protect participatory spaces from being co-opted by powerful interests.
The presenter shared the experience of the Food Policy Council in Liège, which is embedded in a broader initiative called the Liège Food Belt. The presenter is actively involved in this initiative and organizes the Nourish Liège (or Feeding Liège) festival, a key cultural and participatory event that forms part of several interconnected projects supporting territorial coordination.
The initiative’s strength lies in its structure, with five interlinked commissions that reinforce one another and help sustain a robust Food Policy Council. The Council includes 24 municipalities—representing around 625,000 inhabitants—and is coordinated by the Liège Food Belt, the Liège Métropole (the assembly of municipalities), and the University of Liège, with financial support from the Walloon region. From the outset, the initiative conducted a territorial diagnosis and divided the region into four sub-regions to host territorial encounters and public presentations, ensuring broad participation beyond the usual actors in sustainable food networks. As a result, the Council successfully gathered 120 members in 2022.
It aims to foster internal knowledge and dialogue among local actors, promote local collaborations, and formulate proposals to public authorities, while also creating spaces to disseminate pilot projects. Organized through a coordination committee and six thematic working groups, the Council emphasizes inclusive participation. In February 2025, membership was expanded to 180 to better represent diverse stakeholders, including refugee associations, youth syndicates, cultural actors, conventional farmers, and health sector partners. Cultural players are seen as essential contributors to the food system and are actively included in the Council’s activities.
The Council has also broadened its reach by involving a supermarket and additional conventional farmers, reflecting a commitment to bridging alternative and mainstream food sectors. Ensuring balance among these varied interests and avoiding conflicts of interest remains a core principle. The Council also holds two annual plenary sessions, informal networking events, and publishes analytical reports to support engagement, transparency, and shared learning across the governance ecosystem.
The presenter discussed her research on representation and inclusion within food policy councils, particularly focusing on how farming stakeholders are engaged. She highlighted that current food policy research often treats "farmers" as a homogeneous group, which obscures the diversity of voices and perspectives within the farming community. To address this, she conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with food policy council leaders across the US and UK, exploring councils operating at city or regional levels.
Her findings revealed that while councils typically include 3–5 different types of farming stakeholders, significant representation gaps persist—particularly for large-scale industrial farmers, non-white and immigrant farmers, and those engaged in indoor agriculture. She identified challenges with both direct and indirect forms of representation: direct participation often involves small-scale or alternative farmers who may lack time, resources, or incentives to join councils, while indirect representation through unions or institutions risks disconnecting from farmers’ lived experiences.
Organizational design also plays a key role: some councils reserve seats for specific types of farmers, but mismatches between council scale and farming operations (e.g. local vs. export-oriented) can limit broader participation. She concluded by posing two critical questions: How should representation be defined and measured in food policy councils, and how does it evolve as councils and communities change over time?
The presenter, speaking on behalf of the Mississippi Food Policy Council and the Center for Mississippi Food Systems, offered a powerful contextualization of Mississippi as a historically contested space and a site of both deep struggle and trasformative potential.
Mississippi is the ancestral land of the Choctaw, Chikosa, Natchez, Pascagoula, and other Indigenous nations, and its rich biodiversity and fertile soil made it a target for settler colonization. Colonizers reshaped the land through plantation agriculture, enslavement, the redirection of waterways, and extractive systems that concentrated wealth and power—patterns reinforced by violent Confederate legacies that persist today through poor governance and regressive policy.
These structural injustices have left Mississippi as the poorest state in the U.S., with the highest rates of child food insecurity. Communities across the state face poverty, underemployment, poor health, unsafe drinking water, limited access to fresh and culturally appropriate foods, and escalating climate-related challenges affecting housing, wellness, and mobility. Yet, Mississippi is also a place of deep and ongoing resistance—from Indigenous sovereignty movements and the Civil Rights era to the present-day work of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class food producers reclaiming land, food systems, and economic agency.
In this context, the Center for Mississippi Food Systems has emerged as a hub of relationships among individuals and institutions dedicated to transforming regional food systems and economies. To break entrenched cycles of repression, the Center engages in radical time mapping—a visionary process that looks 500 years into the past and 200 years into the future—to identify systemic harms and guide long-term strategy.
Their theory of change holds that values-aligned relationships have the power to transform culture, structure, and policy, and they believe that true transformation requires at least two generations of abundant, guaranteed investment. Over the past five years, the Center has already achieved significant progress, and it now works within a bold 10-year plan nested inside a 60-year strategic horizon—all while dreaming and building toward a 200-year vision.
The Center’s immediate goals focus on three transformative outcomes: making racial equity the cultural norm for dignified development; embedding economic justice as the financial and budgeting standard for non-extractive systems; and defining sustainable development as the end goal, rooted in regeneration and resilience.
Their three-pronged approach involves: investing in individuals as food systems leaders; strengthening institutions through network weaving for collective voice; and developing cultural and economic infrastructure across the state. Capacity is being built through immersive gatherings, book talks, expert sessions, story circles, food futures dialogues, wellness workshops, political education, coaching, and professional development. This work, grounded in history and driven by vision, aims to shift power, narrative, and material conditions toward lasting justice for current and future generations.
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Key Issues
Is Conflict Productive or Problematic?
Flattening conflict may lead to safer but less impact outcomes. Some suggested conflict is intrinsic to democratic processes and innovation, while others warned that seeking consensus may dilute radical or transformative policy proposals.
Diversity as a Strength and Challenge?
Reaching beyond traditional actors, including marginalized and underrepresented groups is crucial. However, this can introduces complexities around participation, inclusion, and legitimacy.
Representation VS Participation
Farmers, immigrant producers, and vulnerable communities remain often under-represented.
How do we “sell” the value of participation?
This involves not only outreach but also redefining engagement models, as in Rhode Island’s use of “on-call advocates” and tailored leadership programs
Radical vs. Representative Democracy
Radical democracy, grounded in values, local legitimacy, and grassroots action is supported by most.
However, this radical edge is often constrained by the need for institutional legitimacy, which can dilute the trasformative potential of councils.
How do we remain bold while interfacing with less radical institutions?
Power and Trust
A central issue that need to be addressed is power asymmetries. A central mission of FPC is to move at the speed of trust. Without trust, representation and collaboration cannot be meaningful.
Relationships are Everything
“Relationships are sacred and at the core of policy transformation.”
Building and repairing relationships—among people, institutions, and communities—was framed as essential groundwork for structural, cultural, and policy change. This includes intentional efforts to hold space for dialogue, conflict transformation, and collective learning.
The Role of Geography and Social Space
A geographer reminded the group of the need to think in horizontal (networked) and vertical (embedded in place) terms. Food policy councils operate within territorial, social, and political landscapes, where conflicts often arise. Understanding spatial embeddedness helps councils navigate these dynamics more effective
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