Re-building food systems: embedding assemblages, infrastructures and reflexive governance for food systems transformations in Europe

This introductory paper to the special section argues that there are now significant signs and opportunities of real transformations of food systems in which to create new synergies between sustainable consumption and production, and which can potentially shift agri-food into more secure and sustainable sets of conditions. With reference to empirical research in Europe, the paper assesses the transformative potential of a series of mobilisations associated with: sustainable city networks, community cooperative and share schemes, and regional agro-ecological, seed, plant and livestock schemes. Not denying the significance of countervailing intensive and industrialised food regimes, the paper introduces a set of conceptual building blocks, which emerge as ways of both assessing and progressing these mobilisations. It is argued that to succeed they need elements of at least four conditions: (i) a significant and lasting reconfiguration of governance and regulatory conditions; (ii) an ability and capacity to both promote sustainable production and food access and diet through the development of new assemblages; (iii) develop new social and physical and distributional infrastructures which can scale out their impacts; and (iv) be embedded in a more reflexive governance context which is both supportive and spatially sensitive to their diverse conditions. The succeeding papers in the special issue will deal with these transformatory factors in comparative and empirical depth. Here we outline how and why such a ‘re-building’ has become so critical at this current juncture.