Food Sovereignty, Glocalization, and Scale: Perspectives from the U.S. and France
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Date
2014-12
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
The day-to-day development of food sovereignty by organizations in specific communities is often glossed over in academic works, largely because it is unclear as to what it looks like in practice. To help fill this void, my research identifies and analyzes two food sovereignty initiatives affiliated with La Via Campesina, Community Farm Alliance (CFA) and La Confédération Paysanne (La Conf), located in Kentucky, U.S., and Bagnolet, France, respectively. I further iinvestigate the ways in which food sovereignty is adapted to and reshaped by different contexts, social relationships, and cultural forms. This process of adaptation can be described by the concept of glocalization. Moreover, glocalization is an inter-scalar process, where scale is understood as a matter of relation rather than hierarchy or size. In other words, the local, regional, national, and global scales exist in dialectical relations with each other. Food sovereignty initiatives, as represented by CFA and La Conf, develop through the glocalization of the concept of food sovereignty, but the ways in which they put it into practice depends on interactions with other social actors and material realities on multiple, interdependent scales.
Description
My research was funded by the OSU Undergraduate Research Office
Keywords
food sovereignty, glocalization, relational scale theory, La Via Campesina, Confédération Paysanne, Community Farm Alliance