Food governance is a key area of investigation to better understand the actors and interests at play in today’s globalized and financialized world in which food and natural resources constitute a central terrain of conflict.  The module will offer an analytical and differentiated overview of global and local food systems, their impacts on food security and social and ecological sustainability, the institutions and modes of governance with which they interact, and the challenges they face today. It is intended to stimulate an understanding of the interrelations among a range of topics addressed in the Masters and a critical engagement with the issues posed and the evidence presented.
The module will start with an introduction to the history of food governance. The aim will be to place approaches to organizing food provisioning in the  contexts in which they have developed in order to guard against their ‘naturalization’ and understand them, instead, as the products of specific time-bound economic, social, cultural, political, and ecological conjunctures. It will then contrast two contemporary approaches to food provisioning and their governance implications: global corporate supply chains (dominant in structural and discursive terms) and territorially embedded food ‘webs’ (often termed ‘alternative’ despite the fact that they account for some 80% of the food consumed world-wide). Key questions will be raised regarding the two approaches such as: who holds power? who derives benefits? how do they measure up to important challenges the world faces today?
The module will then shift from structural to discursive power. It will introduce students to crucial vocabulary, thoughts and ideas that represent the building blocks of discussions around the food regime, stimulating them to develop a capacity to critically ‘read between the lines’. It will examine how discursive power is wielded to affect changes (or defend against them) in paradigms and norms. Important paradigms that are relevant to food governance will be reviewed, such as productivity/modernity, the ‘free’ market, food security, the right to food, and food sovereignty. The pitfalls and potentials of ‘evidence-based policy’ will be discussed, along with the paradigmatic and evidence/knowledge generation requirements for building transformative public policy.
The module will then address one of the key problematic areas in governance today,  that of corporate power in governance arena, exercised through multistakeholder platforms, public private partnerships and private regulatory mechanisms.  Issues pertaining to the theory and practice of inclusive and democratic public policy spaces will be reviewed, such as representation, legitimacy, accountability, deliberative capacity. The module will introduce students to the highly innovative human rights-based Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the only global policy forum in which organizations representing sectors of the population most directly affected by the decisions under discussion are full participants on the same footing as governments. The module will discuss the challenges the CFS faces as it moves into its 10th year of operations. It will conclude with reflections on entry points and requirements for multi-sector and transcalar governance that promotes transitions towards more sustainable and equitable food systems.