Governance of urban agriculture initiatives: insights drawn from European case studies

Over the past decades, urban agriculture has been receiving increasing interest from governments, markets, citizens as well as scholars. There is consensus that, in order to support urban agriculture, top-down management and cooperation is insufficient, and a co-governance between different stakeholders is required. This book chapter deals with the pressing question how to facilitate and stimulate co-governance in urban agriculture development. However, we argue that it is imperative in a first step, to explore the common governance characteristics, shared processes and structures of the diverse initiatives that together are commonly labeled as urban agriculture. The chapter analyzes and compares twenty eight urban agriculture initiatives in European cities and formulates a range of governance characteristics, categorized under (1) the wider urban context, (2) internal and (3) external governance characteristics that prove relevant in all the urban agriculture initiatives. This results in a coherent framework that is proposed as a useful tool to deal with the complexity and diversity in urban agriculture and the subsequent governance responses.