Deliberative Food Democracy: Food Policy Councils or Deliberative Food Systems?

Food democracy is both an academic literature and social movement advocating the democratisation of food systems. Recently, it has undergone a deliberative turn. This paper critically examines the implications of this turn and argues that while deliberative forums have enhanced the democratic legitimacy of food policy, their centrality to the food democracy movement is limiting. We argue that adopting a deliberative systems lens (Mansbridge et al., 2012) is essential to address key challenges in the food system, and realise food democracy’s transformative potential. The paper consists of three parts. First, it traces the deliberative turn within food democracy. It shows that the food democracy literature increasingly incorporates insights from democratic innovations and that deliberative forums are being integrated into food policy-making (see Baldy & Kruse 2019; Bassarab et al., 2019; Behringer & Feindt, 2019; 2024; Berti & Rossi, 2024; Borsellino et al., 2024; Candel, 2022; Lorenzini, 2019; Schiff et al., 2022; Sieveking, 2019). In the second part, we argue that this focus on deliberative forums has narrowed the conceptual and practical scope of food democracy. The paper critiques the focus on deliberative forums by exploring three interconnected problems. First, the issue of scale: there is an incongruence between the local nature of deliberative forums and the global scale of food system challenges. Second, the issue of power: structural social, political and economic inequalities can marginalize voices even within ostensibly inclusive spaces. And third, the issue of appropriation: deliberative forums run the risk of co-optation by dominant actors, which undermines the transformative potential of food democracy. In the third part, the paper proposes the deliberative systems perspective as a remedy to these limitations. By integrating diverse forms of deliberation, considering multiple sites of democratic engagement, and attending to systemic dynamics, a deliberative systems approach offers a more robust analytic and normative framework for food democracy. The paper concludes by discussing the methodological and practical implications of this systemic lens for academics and food democracy practitioners respectively.