Author:

Keywords:

Hybrid Governance, Governance Tensions, land accessibility, Urban Agriculture

Abstract:

Enabling urban agriculture and Local Food Networks in urban and peri-urban areas is a real challenge. Serious constraints relate to the access and use of land and related resources for urban agriculture: scarcity of quality land, urban development pressures, unfavorable planning systems, administrative fragmentation, etc, pose huge barriers to the enablement of urban agriculture. Land being an essential and yet very contended resource, it becomes essential to sort out the ways access, distribution and fair use of land for urban agriculture are actually governed. To address that, this article capitalizes from recent theoretical and empirical work on the hybrid governance of alternative food networks (Manganelli and Moulaert 2017a, 2017b – in preparation). The hybrid governance approach identifies interrelated governance tensions among organizational, resource and institutional aspects, showing how these tensions condition the governance and the overall development of urban agriculture and alternative food networks. Having addressed organizational governance tensions in a previous work on the Brussels’ GASAP consumers-producers’ network, this article focuses on land-resource aspects, as primary sources of organizational and institutional governance tensions in the development of urban agriculture and local food networks. The hybrid framework is applied to a case study – the Boeren Bruxsel Paysans (BBP) project – conceived to implement urban agriculture and local food networks in a peri-urban area of the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) called Neerpede. Urban expansion as well as institutional complexity, due to the proximity with the Flemish Region, add on the land governance pressures to protect agriculture and develop local food networks in this area. The analysis of the BBP actor’s network also shows how accessing and using land for urban agriculture is becoming a sensitive and contentious governance issue not only at the local, but also at the Regional and, potentially, interregional scales.