Cooking, caring, campaigning: making space for lived experience in food governance

Adlerova, Barbora 2024. Cooking, caring, campaigning: making space for lived experience in food governance. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

There is a growing interest amongst UK policymakers, practitioners and scholars in more meaningfully incorporating lived experiences into decision-making. Lack of people's participation is often framed as a participatory injustice, where people cannot express their agency and participate in decisions that affect them. As a result, decisions (a policy, a programme or a service) made without people’s expertise may fail to meet their needs. Recently, similar calls have been made to democratise food governance, especially local food partnerships. These are networks of organisations that come together locally to tackle food system issues, for example food insecurity. However, theoretically and empirically, their participatory dynamics are not well understood, with impacts of participation often being asserted rather than evidenced. This thesis documents the activities of the Food Power programme that supported over 80 food poverty alliances across the UK to tackle food poverty locally, encouraging them to involve people with lived experience of food insecurity, or so-called ‘experts by experience’, in their governance. I drew on participatory and feminist ethnographic approach to understand how lived experience has been mobilized and to what extent underlying mechanisms contribute to participatory justice, I combined documentary analysis with facilitating workshops and conducting 38 conversations with Food Power and the network’s staff and activists with lived experience. This thesis makes two key conceptual and empirical contributions. Firstly, to explore how participation happens on the ground and with what effects, I develop an innovative conceptual framework of ‘care-full participatory justice’, combining participatory justice with ethics of care. This framework encompasses broad, structural considerations—addressing the 'who, what, and so what' aspects of distribution, recognition, and representation in participatory justice and a more relational perspective of ethics of care emphasising contextuality and heterogeneity Whilst existing food scholarship primarily focuses on the promising aspects of ethics of care, I deploy the “double-sidedness of care”, which foregrounds both ambivalence and challenges of democratising food governance and hopeful possibilities of more equitable participation. Most importantly, the framework also gives visibility to the essential participatory labour and care, which has been so far theoretically and empirically overlooked, despite the current interest in lived experience. Secondly, this is the first empirical exploration of how lived experience is mobilised in local food governance. The findings show that achieving participatory justice is shaped by the interaction of several factors, including degree of organisational resources, gendered and class-based organisational structures, and participants' skills and values. The thesis also illuminates the subjectivisation inherent in food democracy, which has been overlooked so far by food scholars. Food governance spaces are shown to prioritise white middle-class professional needs. People experiencing food insecurity are invited to become ‘experts by experience’ to fit into these spaces without much authority over how they are organised. Nevertheless, the findings also reveal hopeful experimentations where care, creativity and professional flexibility form a potential for more just participatory practices.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	participatory justice, ethics of care, lived experience, experiential authority, food labour, food democracy, food citizenship, care-full participatory justice, Food Power, food governance.
Funders:	ESRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 April 2024
Last Modified:	01 May 2024 11:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/168540

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