Paper for Conference on Endogenous Development and Bio-Cultural

New social movements for food self-reliance in the context of endogenous development are arising worldwide. In the face of the organised power of science, business and mainstream politics, the more diffuse but networked power of this growing food sovereignty movement is confronted with many interrelated challenges. In this paper I focus on only one of these: the need to transform knowledge and ways of knowing to regenerate locally controlled food systems. More specifically, the food sovereignty movement is increasingly challenged to actively develop more autonomous and participatory ways of knowing to produce knowledge that is ecologically literate, socially just and relevant to context. This implies a radical shift from the existing top down and increasingly corporate-controlled research system, to an approach which devolves more responsibility and decision-making power to farmers, indigenous peoples, food workers, consumers and citizens for the production of social and ecological knowledge. The whole process should lead to the democratisation of research, diverse forms of co-inquiry based on specialist and non-specialist knowledge, an expansion of horizontal networks for autonomous learnin