Resilient urban food policies: a comparative perspective

Cities and city regions worldwide increasingly take active role in shaping resilient food systems by governing and supporting food system innovations, often related to practices for a more circular bio-economy. It is also emphasized by the FAO that there is a growing need for sustainable and resilient city region food systems. This is not a surprising development, as cities offer an appropriate scale for food system innovation, considering the complex interdependencies of actors and policy subsystems and socio-ecological consequences of innovations. Moreover, urban food policies are closely related to many other urban policy domains, such as poverty, health and social protection, hygiene and sanitation, land use planning, transport and commerce, energy, education, and disaster preparedness. Although there are multiple initiatives in cities all over the world to help shape resilient food policies, such as (peri)urban agriculture and waste prevention. However, we know very little about how these food policy innovations are governed, specifically in relation to why some cities engage in more transboundary food policy innovations, while other cities take a more conservative approach. Also the extent to which different policy alliances within urban food systems play a role in shaping different outcomes requires closer investigation. Understanding under which conditions cities actively pursue food system resilience adds on the one hand to the debate on the complexity and interdependency of urban food systems and on the other hand to the larger debate on the development of resilient policies in the agri-food domain. This paper aims to fill these gaps by comparatively investigating under which conditions cities develop resilient food policies. To do so, this study adopts a configurational and set-theoretical perspective, specifically that of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). QCA generates set-theoretic hypotheses to account for causal complexity, based on three features: equifinality, asymmetric causation, and conjunctural causation. Conceiving social phenomena as sets, QCA interprets the relations between the sets in terms of necessity and sufficiency. Against this background, this paper provides insights into combinations of necessary and/or sufficient conditions that lead to food policy innovations across cities.