Building Movement, Achieving Transformation: 11th AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Conference

We live in a time of incumbent socio-ecological crises demanding short-term action, but also longer-term and structural transformations. The effects of disruptions such as climate change, environmental degradation, health emergencies, geopolitical conflicts and socio-economic inequities, cannot be ignored. These emergencies have profound effects on urban-regional food movements. On the one hand, they make key food system problems more visible: from emergency food networks escalating across urban areas and reviving food justice concerns, to groups that point to the climate breakdown and call for more ecologically and socially sustainable food production systems. On the other hand, crises are calling for socially innovative initiatives to emerge, envisioning new solutions and advocating for alternative courses of action. As a result, sustainable food planning today needs to actively engage with initiatives on the ground and create socially innovative alliances with the plurality of (food) movements.

Against this background, the 11th AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Conference asks how sustainable food planning can become more embedded in socially innovative and transformative movements, strategically supporting the multiple communities imagining alternatives and mobilizing around the sustainable transformation of food systems.

When considered through a socially innovative and transformative lens, food becomes a driver for changes in deep structures of societies and economies (Holt-Giménez, 2019). Which socially innovative food planning practices are capable of devising creative solutions to unmet needs? How to imagine cooperative and responsible action across diverse agents of the food system and at critical scales? How to build cohesiveness and cooperation without losing sight of the multivocality and diversity of food systems that are necessary to build more resilient societies and urbanities (IPES-Food, 2016)? How to effectively advocate for institutional and planning frameworks that respect the autonomy and creativity of socially innovative food initiatives and encourage alternative forms of food production to take root? How to courageously advance goals of socio-ecological justice as triggers and targets for food systems´ transformations?