How Urban Farming Initiatives Are Changing the Policy Regime in Amsterdam
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Ticket to paradise or how I learned to stop worrying and love the transition: How urban farming initiatives are changing the policy regime in Amsterdam Research design Name: John-Luca de Vries Studentnumber: 10762779 Datum: July 6th, 2018 Word count: 15821 Supervisors: John Grin & Anna Aalten Introduction The stability of urban food systems depends on a properly functioning global market, open trade routes, affordable energy and stable weather conditions, factors which will likely become less secure under the influence of climate change and ecological degradation (Fraser et al., 2005)(Moore, 2015). Urban Agriculture (UA) is an urban food production practice attaining more resilience in urban food systems by making cities less reliant on the import of food and the export of waste, more self-sufficient in food production, and by bringing a range of environmental and health benefits to the urban population (Bell & Cerulli, 2012). However, many structural barriers are still in place that make it difficult for the mainly small-scale community gardening initiatives to grow into a proper alternative food network. A lack of access to land, labor, water, seeds and technical support, or restrictive regulations and public health laws may act as barriers preventing the transformation of small-scale community gardening initiatives into a viable alternative urban food production system (Mourque, 2000)(Bell & Cerulli, 2012)(Roemers, 2014). In the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular we can see that policy makers have started accommodating urban farmers by offering subsidies and giving the phenomenon more attention (Metaal et al., 2013)(Agenda Groen, 2015). Changing policy is central to reduce barriers that urban farmers run into because preconceptions of city planners and managers make it more difficult to institutionalize and expand farming in the city (Mourque, 2000, p. 120). Researchers into urban farming in Amsterdam are however unclear over the exact nature of the process through which urban farming practitioners and promoters interact with government institutions to influence policy (Roemers, 2014, p. 108). While a common infrastructure that connects UA practitioners, UA promoters and government institutions with each other is not available, making it difficult to put their issues on the government’s agenda (Stolk, 2015, p. 73), the policy climate in Amsterdam still seems to be becoming more conducive to the growth of urban farming. How is it possible that policy towards urban farming is becoming more favorable while the different actors in UA are not making a coordinated effort to change the policy landscape? And how exactly do existing barriers to change play into this process? 2 In this research project my goal is to understand how UA practitioners and UA promoters are overcoming barriers to growth and influencing the policy regime in Amsterdam. My core theoretical framework is derived from the field of transition studies, which aims to research how innovative social projects overcome barriers embedded in systemic practices by understanding how social innovations can transform these practices to enact a sustainability transition (Elzen & Wieczorek, 2005; Elzen, Geels, & Green, 2004; Grin, Rotmans, & Schot, 2010; Loeber, 2007; Loorbach, 2007; Olsthoorn & Wieczorek, 2006). The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) within this field of studies can aid us in understanding how processes interfering between the niche (novel practices) and the regime (consolidated structures) are re-directed by the coordinated agency of actors aiming to initiate structural change (Bos & Grin, 2012). Grassroot projects aimed at enacting structural changes in the urban regime may be connecting with each other and actors in the regime to access knowledge and physical infrastructures, governance arrangements, partnerships, market arrangements and so on, in ways that allow them to annul the restrictive influence of barriers embedded in the regime (Grin, 2017, p. 362). Understanding this process of structural change requires us to first take a step back from the level of structural arrangements and to observe how UA practitioners and UA promoters are accessing arrangements in practice through their connections with each other and government institutions. Some problems do however become apparent when we want to utilize the MLP to detect practical ways in which agents use resources to attain political change on the policy level. One main line of scholarly criticism leveled at the MLP has been that the usage of the dichotomous concepts niche and regime obscures the interdependencies that exist between actors within a given field of practice (Smith, 2007). This recommendation mirrors the criticism formulated by Actor-Network Theory scholars on the ways in which mainstream social science attributes the source of social action to ‘powerful’ social structures. Utilizing an elaborate conceptual apparatus derived from theory when researching a particular instance of the social world can lead the social scientist to misconstrue the causes behind social action by attributing causality to social structures, which thereby become an explanandum sui generis (Callon, 1984)(Latour, 2005)(Law, 2009). The social context within which networks of actors operate has then 3 become an explanatory variable without precisely explicating how networks ‘generate’ power through the network itself. One example of research in the field of transition studies that has attempted to deal with this theoretical flaw comes from Hoffman & Loeber (2016), who made huge steps forward by developing a relational perspective on the way in which niche and regime transform each other through the power struggles that actors engage in over time (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016, p. 2). Their research aims to break down the dichotomy between niche and regime by showing how regime and niche actors form networks together to access resources to influence the formation of a newly developing practice (ibid; pp. 16-17). While succeeding in flattening the construction of political agency by locating it in a network bridging the divide between niche and regime in the empirical reality, the authors did not bring translation processes between both levels into view without resorting to placeholder concepts such as fields and structures that are utilized as an explanandum sui generis. A methodologically pure ANT study might allow us to avoid this problem by constructing agency by ‘following the actors’ without making any a- priori assumptions about the sources of causality. This would however strictly limit us in our capacity to make any a-posteriori theoretical generalizations utilizing the MLP to indicate the figuration of the social structures in which actor-networks are embedded. We want to prevent obscuring the exact nature of the power relations between actors in the domain of urban farming by making premature theoretical statements. We make use of Actor-Network Theory to give us initial sensitizing concepts that we may use to render this process traceable from a relational perspective without obscuring these relations. In ANT, power is operationalized as the ability to achieve an outcome through the support of a network (Page, 2010, p. 14). Achieving political outcomes necessitates access to resources such as knowledge and physical infrastructures. We cannot however attribute an a-priori ontological status as social structures sui generis to these resources without instantly reifying the dichotomy between structure and agency (Latour, 2005, p. 67, p. 85, pp. 168-171). Instead we view resources as performatively constructed interdependent bundles of stabilized relationships between people, technologies, documents, and other entities (Steen, 2010). This 4 operationalization brings the resource concept closer in line with Latour’s use of the actor-network as a conceptual tool to deploy the connections between human and non-human actors that give shape to their combined agency (ibid; p. 136). In this research project we propose to utilize concepts from ANT and the MLP explicitly as sensitizing concepts that we use to make inferential statements about the sources of political agency in the domain of urban agriculture in Amsterdam. We follow Blumer (1954) his original insight that sociologists must prevent making problematic ‘scientific’ statements about the nature of reality with a concept that is insufficiently grounded in empirical data (Blumer, 1954). Any of the concepts that we will define later in our operationalization should be taken as a temporary indication which we use to give some direction to our methodical inquiries. We thereby hypothesize that there are certain barriers embedded in larger structures that constrain political agency, that actors can utilize resources to overcome these barriers, and that actors can influence policy by aiming their action at barriers utilizing particular resources. My main interest in this research project is in understanding how actors in UA utilize relationships with other human and non-human actors as resources to overcome structural barriers and achieve lasting political influence. How do UA promoters & practitioners utilize resources to influence the decision-making processes of the Amsterdam municipality? Which role do government representatives interacting with UA promoters & practitioners play in this process? And by which factors is the ability of UA promoters & practitioners to achieve their common goals constrained? Methodology We start off the research with a qualitative inquiry