Mobilizing Collaborative Networks for a Transformative Food Politics: A Case Study of Provincial Food Networks in Canada

In this dissertation I focus on the diversity of alternative food initiatives (AFIs) that have emerged amidst concerns about the corporate-led industrial food system. While there have been significant successes, critics suggest that many AFIs are an inadequate response to the complex problems within the food system, and further, are complicit in propagating neoliberal ideals and facilitating the retrenchment of the state. While these critics identify important challenges, they tend to consider place-based AFIs as operating independently on particular projects, with specific claims, or in isolated sectors of the food system. There has been little documentation or analysis situating AFIs within a broader community of practice. To fill this gap, my research builds on the existing literature to investigate the increasing collaborations among AFIs in Canada. Using a community-based action approach, I explore the development of provincial food networks in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia. I pay particular attention to efforts that foster and maintain these networks by exploring their history, structure and processes of collaboration. My findings reveal that the provincial food networks can be characterized as assemblages constituted by the self-organization of diverse actors through non-hierarchical, bottom-up processes with multiple and overlapping points of contact. Further, I find that AFIs have used networks strategically to contest the rules and institutions of the dominant food system and to develop participatory and democratic practices that challenge the logics of neoliberalism. Based on the results from this research, I argue that besides developing viable place-based alternatives to the dominant food system, AFIs are also involved in prefigurative ways of being - establishing democratic governance structures, building new institutions, and engaging in different kinds of social relations - in the belly of the existing (food) system.Ph