Community Self-Organisation, Sustainability, and Resilience in Food Systems

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue considers the role of community self-organisation in relation to new landscapes of food sustainability and resilience. Recent years have seen a flourishing of community-led initiatives aiming to create systems that deliver nourishing food whilst upholding principles such as care for planetary resources, fair livelihoods for producers, food rights for consumers, and compassion for animals. Community self-organisation suggests various types of mobilisation, across multiple scales and time horizons, involving a diversity of actors and, sometimes, interplay with local authorities. Yet, many critical questions remain, for example,

• What do self-organising communities look like, what conditions are needed for them to flourish in different contexts, and what is self-organising after all?
• What theoretical frameworks are appropriate for extending our understanding of how community self-organisation operates?
• What is the outlook for community self-organisation in times of austerity and increased social tension? Are self-organising communities always socially inclusive, sustainable, and resilient?
• What principles, concepts, and worldviews underpin community self-organisation in different contexts?
• What is the role of new technologies in enabling and fostering community self-organisation?
• What is the role of engaged scholarship (Van den Ven 2007), ‘scholar activism’ (Tornaghi and van Dyke), and particularly food scholars in relation to community self-organisation?
• To what extent does—or can—community self-organisation contribute to large-scale transitions towards sustainable and resilient food systems?
• How is community self-organisation different from existing state, market, and society-led mechanisms that assist the transition to resilient food systems?

We welcome papers addressing these and related questions in a range of landscapes, including urban, rural, post-industrial, post-colonial, colonial, historical, and contemporary. We also welcome papers that address how food interlocks with self-organisation in relation to other key resources such as water, land, energy, seeds, knowledge, data, and technology across institutions, sectors, scales, and borders.

Prof. Dr. Moya Kneafsey
Mr. Mustafa Hasanov
Guest Editors

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