Category Archives: publication

Publication | With whom do you want to be interdependent in producing food?

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JAFSCD article by Margriet Goris (Wageningen University & Research) Daphne Schoop (Wageningen Research), Dirk Roep (Wageningen University) en Jan Hassink (Wageningen Research)

Intentionally shifting interdependencies through territorial food networks

Values-based territorial food networks (VTFNs) hold immense potential for reshaping our food supply, but little is known about how they bring about change. In a new JAFSCD article, “Relational autonomy highlights how interdependencies shift in the transformation of food provisioning,” Goris, Schoop, Roep and Hassink present findings from narrative interviews and observations during fieldwork in three different VFTNs in The Netherlands.

They aimed to understand how shifts in interdependencies in VFTNs come about and what this means for autonomy in food provisioning. The scholars show how mutual autonomy is promoted in relations among farmers, livestock, soil life, plants, citizens by creating opportunities, rights, respect, trust, and capacities amongst others. They state that autonomy is not an individual matter but is created in relationships of interdependency.

This helps us explain how people and nature depend on each other. For example, when we stop using agrochemicals, we depend more on natural processes and other market relations. To make this work, farmers and rural workers need to be able to mimic those natural processes, and to be able to create a fairer food market where everyone shares the risks, acknowledging mutual vulnerabilities and interdependencies.

Read the entire @JAFSCD article for free
Visit members VOKO Utrecht to food forest by VOKO Utrecht

Publicatie | Gebiedsgericht werken: hoe maken we transitie écht werkbaar? 

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“Erken het politieke karakter van transities, combineer actie en leren, want blauwdrukken zijn er niet voor. Ken de mensen en hun emoties, en probeer wat zij doen, ook als is het klein, te zien als zaaigoed voor grotere verandering”  – Marleen Buizer (Rurale Sociologie, Wageningen University & Research)

Hoe geef je gebiedsgericht werken vorm in de complexe transities van het Zuid-Hollandse landelijk gebied? Dit rapport biedt houvast met zeven principes, gebaseerd op twee jaar actie-onderzoek. De inzichten komen voort uit intensieve samenwerking met mensen uit beleid en praktijk die werken aan opgaven op het gebied van water, natuur, stikstof, klimaat en landbouw.

Gebiedsgericht werken vraagt om een samenhangende en context-specifieke aanpak, waarbij de kracht en kennis in gebieden centraal staan. In de praktijk blijkt dit uitdagend: de focus ligt vaak op juridisch-technische maatregelen, sectorale beleidsdoelen en win-win oplossingen, terwijl er in beleid en recht een schijnbare tegenstelling is ontstaan tussen landbouw en natuur.

Dit rapport pleit voor het serieus nemen en voortvarend ondersteunen van gebiedssamenwerking en de mogelijkheden daarvan voor een duurzamere toekomst van het landelijk gebied. Het  biedt handvatten voor beleid en praktijk. Elk principe wordt toegelicht met concrete voorbeelden uit de provincie Zuid-Holland, waar gebiedsgericht werken in de praktijk wordt gebracht.

Dit rapport is het resultaat van het project ‘Actieleren gebiedsgericht werken’, een samenwerking tussen ACCEZ, de provincie Zuid-Holland en diverse kennisinstellingen.

Lees het volledige rapport:

Eindrapport-Gebiedsgericht-werkenDownload
2pager-gebiedgerichtwerken-in-zeven-principes (1)Download

Auteurs: Marleen Buizer (WUR), Mara de Pater (DRIFT, EUR), Saskia Ruijsink (TU Delft/LDE), Tobias Hofland (ACCEZ).

A Place to Transit: The seasonal migrant workers of Huelva’s strawberry industry

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A new article by Merissa Gavin and Joost Jongerden explores the lived experiences of seasonal migrant workers in Lepe, who play an essential yet precarious role in the agri-food industry of southern Spain. By examining their experiences and actions through a temporal lens, this research offers deeper insights into the dynamics that sustain migrant vulnerability and the individualized strategies they employ to navigate these challenges.

Embodying the paradox of being essential yet unprotected, undocumented migrant agri-workers navigate a terrain of precarious in-betweenness. Policy-making affords little urgency to addressing their routine exploitation or facilitating dignified solutions for their working and living conditions. Focusing on seasonal migrant workers in the strawberry fields of Lepe (Huelva, Spain), this article examines how temporality structures endurance, agency, and vulnerability.

Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork—including participant observation, informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews—this study reveals how workers endure exploitation in expectation of future documentation through arraigo policies. However, the temporal horizon of arraigo not only sustains individual endurance but also dampens collective resistance, rendering precarity a structured condition rather than a momentary hardship. Because arraigo systematically encourages endurance over resistance, precarity becomes a long-term structural reality, with temporality actively shaping workers’ vulnerabilities. This process individualises what is essentially a shared struggle, further sedating collective action and reinforcing exploitation. While migrants in Lepe internalise temporality as a survival strategy, disruptions—such as withheld contracts—demonstrate the limits of endurance and trigger resistance.

This study advances scholarship on migrant precarity by shifting the focus from spatial or economic dimensions to the performative construction of sequential time as a mechanism that both sustains and constrains migrant agency. In highlighting how European agricultural policies prioritise productivity while obscuring labour exploitation, these findings underscore the need for interventions addressing both the legal limbo of undocumented workers and the temporal structures that sustain their vulnerability.

Read the full article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718525000661

Publication | Relational autonomy highlights how interdependencies shift in the transformation of food provisioning

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In a recent study published in JASFC, Margriet Goris, Daphne Schoop, Dirk Roep, and Jan Hassink explore the growing movement of values-based territorial food networks (VTFNs) in the Netherlands. These networks seek to transform conventional food systems by fostering stronger connections between farmers, citizens, and natural resources.

Abstract
In the past decade, there has been a surge in the Netherlands in food initiatives that seek to trans­form the prevailing agro-industrial model of food provisioning. This has evolved into a wide range of values-based territorial food networks (VTFNs). This article aims to understand the evolving diver­sity in VTFNs by looking more deeply into how community, circular, and territorial-based food net­works operate. In doing so, the article examines how citizens, rural workers, and farmers cooperate to change and create connections between live­stock, land, water, and other resources. Further­more, it aims to assess to what extent the evolving food provisioning practices of these VTFNs are re-embedded in the territory, how their collective capacity to transform food provisioning practices has expanded, and the impact that the expanded capacity has on the degree of relational autonomy over their operations. Twelve participatory obser­vations and 16 interviews with farmers and citizens engaged in three different VTFNs are analyzed by identifying themes that emerged from the data, and themes that originate from the concept relational autonomy. Relational autonomy is introduced by feminist scholars and entails that autonomy is not an individual matter but is created in relationships. The concept allows for a deeper understanding of how a transformation of relations can raise the autonomy of all living beings, both human and non-human. The analysis demonstrates how rela­tional autonomy in the three VTFNs studied is emerging along the three interdependent and co-evolving dimensions identified by Catriona Mackenzie (2019): determination, governance, and authorization. All three VTFNs studied crafted their own pathway toward relational autonomy by creating opportunities and building capacities. A relational autonomy lens enables us to articulate the interconnectedness between human and non-human systems; for example, phasing out agro­chemicals increases our reliance on natural pro­cesses. This necessitates farmers and rural workers’ ability to mimic these processes and requires a rear­ranging of market relations to share risks more equitably with citizens.

https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/view/1341

New paper: An everyday political economy of food insecurity in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone

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In this new paper co-authored by RSO member Mark Vicol, the authors argue that the everyday experience of food insecurity is highly differentiated in village contexts in Myanmar (and the Global South more broadly), and develop an everyday political economy approach as a fruitful way to interrogate and understand this difference. The analysis is based on a large scale mixed-methods study of rural villages in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone conducted between 2016 and 2019. You can read the paper for free here https://rdcu.be/d5bci, or download here (paywall) https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-024-01506-4.

Postscript: On 1 February 2021 the Myanmar military (Tatmadaw) deposed the democratically elected National League for Democracy government of Myanmar in a coup d’état before returning power to a military junta. At the time of writing, the military junta has thrust Myanmar back into a period of violence, arbitrary arrest, oppression, uncertainty and de facto civil war. Many villages in the Central Dry Zone have been arbitrarily burned by the military, and residents forced to flee, including the villages in this study. Similarly, many Myanmar researchers, academics and activists have been arrested or forced to flee the country. It is likely that the dynamics analyzed in this paper have shifted dramatically and unevenly, however further research remains impossible at present. The authors of the paper are distressed that the people interviewed for this paper are now the bearers of state-sanctioned violence and express our solidarity with those wishing to return democracy to Myanmar.

Farm labourer in Myanmar's Central Dry Zone
Farm labourer in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone. Photo credit: Mark Vicol