Social innovations, particularly in the food system, are transforming and creating new social relations, addressing unsatisfied human needs in the transition towards more sustainable and resilient systems. Social innovations have been defined as innovations that simultaneously meet societal needs and create new social relationships or new forms of societal cooperation (BEPA 2010: 13). In particular, not only social relations are transformed by social innovation, but the governance system in terms of cooperation and democracy as well (Moulaert 2009), and in the context of the transition towards sustainable societies, the democratizing effects of social innovations are being progressively identified (De Schutter 2014). In fact, several scholars have argued that democracy offers the best chance for achieving sustainability (Morrison 1995; Prugh, Costanza, and Daly 2000; Valentin and Spangenberg 2000), going as far as affirming that democracy is a basic condition for sustainable development in general (Valentin and Spangenberg 2000).
Although democracy is commonly understood as the government of the majority, either directly or through elected representatives, in these cases democracy is understood less as an exercise of individual rights and more as the expression of collective rights to self-determination, long recognized as part of the third-generation of human rights, and indeed as “a prerequisite to the full enjoyment of all fundamental rights”.[1]
The food system is a realm of active social innovation where transformative challenges are driving societal change around the world. These innovations stand out against a hegemonic food system that perpetuates a state of suppressed agency: citizens are turned into passive consumers, while in parallel the idea is spread that, in a market-based democracy, consumer sovereignty and dollar voting are people’s best, and often only, voice. As a response to this situation, socially innovative initiatives have organically sprouted from the communities they serve. Examples include solidarity food purchasing groups, urban gardens and collective learning spaces, or participatory certification schemes. Their members display varying degrees of agency, often integrating new ways of expressing oneself beyond consumption. In the food system, the exercise of agency, understood as the capacity of a person to become an agent of change in her or his own reality, means a multiplicity of subject-positions appear, beyond that of a voter and that of a consumer, even that of a participant or a critic. It becomes a system that requires the redefinition of solutions by the communities and the citizens that are involved in them.
The assumption of this paper is that the stimulation of agency, as a key principle in democracy, is essential because the exercise of agency is a strategic driver for the acceleration of transition processes towards sustainability. This paper (1) reviews the concepts of consumer sovereignty and democracy in the context of the food system; (2) presents the importance of agency for collective self-determination in this context; and (3) proposes an agency typology based on 106 mixed-method questionnaire-interviews with an equal number of local, collective, food-related initiatives in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, the U.S., and Japan. Like Arendt's "right to have rights", which comes into being when it is exercised by those who act in alliance (Butler 2011), it is here argued that democracy is collectively defined and practiced by the exercise and reproduction of agency, and that therefore supporting agency-stimulating social innovations can be a better policy compass, in democratic terms, than improving consumer sovereignty.
In order to scale territorial dynamics, there is a need for political institutions that can accommodate different kinds of implication and activism within the food system so that these social innovations, whether operating within the market economy or in parallel to it, can be fully recognized for their contributions to the transition towards more democratic and sustainable food systems.
[1] U.N. Res. A/RES/637(VII)A, A/PV.403 16 Dec. 1952, A/2309 and Corr. 1, 637 (VII)
8. Social enterprises, sustainable transition and common goods
