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Food systems scholarship has largely overlooked blue foods, rendering marine political ecologies and coastal fishing community dispossession invisible. This paper examines small pelagic fisheries governance in South Africa, where fish have been channelled through industrial pathways since apartheid—anchovy to fishmeal, sardine to canning—whilst marginalised coastal communities face food insecurity and progressive exclusion.

Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis of fisheries policy documents (1998-2025), we reveal how Administrative and Economic Rationalism and Sustainable Development rhetoric interlock to constitute blue colonialism. This regime naturalises industrial capture whilst legitimising dispossession by framing capital requirements as technical necessities rather than political choices. Post-apartheid "transformation" discourse enables elite accumulation: Black ownership statistics mask continued race and class-based dispossession of poor Black coastal communities. Scientific management monopolises knowledge authority, marginalising traditional ecological knowledge, whilst "sustainable utilisation" rhetoric depoliticises allocation decisions serving capital over food security.

The case exposes intersections of racial capitalism (where Black ownership masks continued race and class-based dispossession), epistemic colonialism (where only science counts as legitimate knowledge), and extractivist metabolism (where fish flow through industrial pathways that extract economic value and control from coastal communities).

This regime forecloses alternative rationalities, yet they persist in fisher knowledge, place-based practices, and community food systems, offering pathways toward transformation centring both human wellbeing and more-than-human ecological relations. This research centres marginalised marine political ecologies, reveals how "progressive" discourse conceals colonial dispossession, and articulates how alternative knowledge systems offer possibilities for food futures honouring justice and ecological integrity.

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Presentation short abstract

Agricultural change in India remains shaped by Green Revolution interventions. Assam’s contrasting trajectory reveals the limits of standardized policy. This study examines how farmers navigate transformation and why reflexive, context-sensitive approach to policies are crucial.

Presentation long abstract

Understanding agricultural transformation in India requires revisiting the legacy of the Green Revolution, a defining moment that reshaped global food systems. While the Green Revolution supposedly led to higher yields, it also produced unintended social and ecological consequences—deepening inequalities, increasing marginalization and transforming food systems in ways that continue to reverberate through farmer distress, protests, and rising precarity. However, Assam presents a distinctive case within this national story. Unlike early Green Revolution states, Assam remains rich in biodiversity, with a long tradition of cultivating diverse rice landraces, limited mechanization, and agricultural practices embedded in unique cultural and ecological contexts.

Assam’s agrarian landscape has also been shaped by colonial histories, political unrest, identity movements, and plantation economies, creating layers of vulnerability alongside recurring floods, biodiversity loss, and human–animal conflicts. At the same time, new input-intensive technologies are increasingly shaping agricultural choices, raising questions about how global models of modernization intersect with local realities.

This study proposes to examine Assam as a critical site for rethinking agricultural transformation in India. Its trajectory diverges significantly from states that experienced the first wave of Green Revolution interventions, offering an opportunity to explore how and why these differences persist. The study argues that despite decades of evidence of uneven outcomes from standardized agricultural models, policy approaches remain top-down and insufficiently reflexive. The paper will foreground three core concerns: how farmers negotiate change, whose knowledge is valued, and what more context-sensitive and inclusive agricultural planning might look like for the future.

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The coffee industry in Puerto Rico, is clouded by complementary, contradicting, and divergent narratives tied up in a history of colonization, globalization, and local movements. This study examines the intersections of coffee trade politics, local agrarian geographies, and social organizations.

Presentation long abstract

The coffee industry in Borikén, or Puerto Rico, is clouded by complementary, contradicting, and divergent narratives tied up in a history of colonization, globalization, and local identitarian movements. In the past three decades, transnational corporations have bought out heritage Puerto Rican coffee brands while local bean production has fallen over 90% due to a legacy of industrialization, climate change and a debt-crippled economy. As a result, large-scale roasters are increasingly more reliant on cheap, imported beans which they blend with local coffee and market as “developed in Puerto Rico.” Smallholders struggle to pay U.S. prices for labor and inputs, and either sell their beans green or produce less competitive, expensive "specialty" batches. Meanwhile, NGOs offering fiscal and technical support have emerged from both the local agroecology movement and foreign corporations. This study examines the intersections of global coffee trade politics, local agrarian geographies, and social organizations involved in coffee production. Through archival research, ethno-photography, and participatory interviews, we worked with small, medium, and large-scale farmers; local and transnational roasters; NGOs; agronomists; and local government employees. The preliminary analysis reveals a complex matrix of influences (1) Oligopolies dominate the industry with intensive agriculture, mass imports, and commercial processing. 2) NGOs supporting smallholders are funded by the same companies driving intensive production. (3) Despite receiving NGO assistance, small producers absorb externalities of transitioning away from an agroindustrial system. 4) Through NGOs, large companies co-opt agroecology as a “business solution to poverty” that serves public-private partnerships but leaves smallholders out.

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Territorial approaches illuminate agroecological practices, governance, and social relations shaping food system transformation. This paper examines households' agroforestry responses to climate, migration, and markets in Eastern Indonesia, considering the possibilities for transformation.

Presentation long abstract

While territorial approaches have become central to agroecology and food system transformations in the Global South, most Southeast Asian literature prioritizes technical and farm-level issues over territorial-political concerns. Territorial frameworks can illuminate the practices embedded in specific places, the governance processes, and the social relations that shape who benefits and loses from agroecological change, as well as the prospects for transformation. This paper analyses community livelihood strategies in Flores, Eastern Indonesia, exploring the opportunities and the structural barriers to developing territorial strategies. Flores faces intersecting crises: climate variability undermines dryland farming, out-migration depletes rural labour, and market integration subjects smallholders to volatile prices, while gender intersects with social differentiation to squeeze the space available for social reproduction. The paper examines how households, relying on agroforestry and migration, craft autonomous responses to these threats. It examines both the possibilities and limitations of these strategies for navigating external pressures and local social relations. Finally, the paper considers the prospects for territorial strategies that address interlinked pressures— including governance challenges, policy fragmentation, and stakeholder exclusion—to reduce nutritional insecurity and climate precarity, identifying lessons relevant for agroecology and food system transformation agendas across Southeast Asia.

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Research on Wales' protracted agri-environmental reform process illustrates how co-design can be mobilised to depoliticise sustainability transitions when market power and structural drivers of ecological harm go unchallenged, narrowing the scope and scale of "just" agri-food transitions.

Presentation long abstract

State policies to meet climate and nature goals in food-system transitions increasingly invoke the rhetoric of participation and just transition as strategies of legitimation. Yet the politics and outcomes of such processes remain under-examined. In Wales, post-Brexit agricultural reform was explicitly framed around co-design and well-being, yet in practice became mired in contestation and protest, with ambitious proposals progressively diluted in pursuit of consensus.

Drawing on interviews, workshops and documentary analysis, this paper examines the protracted co-design of a national farming scheme and its attempt to reconcile conflicting ideas about what farming is for, and who the transition should serve, at a time of growing polarisation and uncertainty in rural Wales. These tensions were not only ideological but reflected the structural demands of a food system built on cheap food, efficiency and competition. In this context, efforts to transform a predominantly livestock-based sector toward environmental objectives were constrained by the same market pressures driving ecological harm and the precarity of workers and smaller-scale farmers. Government attempts at structural reform were thus foreclosed, with co-design reduced to marginal “win-wins” and symbolic inclusion.

By tracing how conflict, compromise and silences shaped the emergence of “acceptable” pathways, the paper argues that just transition rhetoric risks being absorbed into governance arrangements that mobilise participation to depoliticise transitions, and tolerate inequalities as necessary for sustainability. The Welsh case illustrates that a meaningfully just agri-food system transition must be a struggle over political economy, not merely a matter of procedural participation.

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The presentation analyzes how Chinese investments reconfigure food-system governance in Argentina through the case of Chinese-funded mega-swine farms. It highlights the resulting socio-environmental challenges and the debates sparked by the initiative.

Presentation long abstract

Existing literature has shown that, through trade and investments in food-related sectors, China is restructuring global commodity networks and reshaping power relations in the global food system. However, less attention has been devoted to examining how these processes unfold in specific local contexts, particularly in territories of the Global South that have become critical zones for China’s food supply. This paper analyzes the influence of Chinese investments on the governance of food systems in Argentina. It focuses on the social resistance that emerged in response to the proposal to establish mega pig farms in 2020, following the outbreak of African swine fever in China. Drawing on a dialogue between the neo-Gramscian approach of International Political Economy and Latin American Political Ecology, the paper argues that Chinese capital is facilitating processes of reconfiguration of food system governance.nHowever, these transformations tend to reinforce corporate power, thereby exacerbating existing socio-environmental challenges within food systems. Nonetheless, the disputes and resistance show that the initiate also opens space for debating alternative forms of governance.

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The paper addresses the political tensions that arise in participatory transdisciplinary processes for Food System Transformation. We focus on how power operates through the methods mobilized, the relations enacted between actors, and the conceptual representations that shape the framing of FST.

Presentation long abstract

Food systems frameworks are increasingly used as heuristic and analytical tools to guide food system transformation (FST) processes by supporting decision-making and fostering collaboration across diverse knowledge domains. However, limited attention has been paid to their value-laden and epistemological foundations, which condition the diagnosis, trajectories, priorities, and types of solutions these frameworks advance.

This presentation addresses this gap by critically examining the epistemic and political tensions that arise in participatory transdisciplinary processes aimed at developing and implementing food system frameworks for advancing socio-ecological transformations. We draw on ethnographic work conducted within a European process aimed at developing a food systems framework to inform FST at different levels and advancing transdisciplinary knowledge in the field.

Our analysis builds on the authors’ active involvement in 1) co-developing a food system conceptual framework and 2) the transdisciplinary and participative use of a systemic food map and a Multi Level Perspective (MLP)-based theory of change in Catalonia (Spain).

We examine how these tools structure engagement, frame transformation pathways, and stabilize particular narratives of FST, ultimately contributing to the depolitization of transformative processes.

Our analysis centers on how power operates through the methods mobilized, the relations enacted between actors, and the conceptual representations that shape the framing of FST. In doing so, we argue for greater reflexivity in recognizing and addressing the epistemic divides, positional conflicts, and underlying values embedded in these frameworks to avoid reinforcing epistemic injustices and to foster more inclusive and transformative transdisciplinary food systems research and practice.

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Informal food systems are vital to urban food security in sub-Saharan Africa as they provide affordable diets to the low-income urban residents. However, they are often marginalized, which disrupts food availability. This study examines the strategies the informal vendors use to endure.

Presentation long abstract

This research examines the irony of informality and regulation in shaping urban food landscapes in Sub-saharan Africa. Informal food retailers operate within a state of regulatory exception that is both visible and crucial to food access and availability, yet are exempt from formal recognition and often face punitive municipal actions. Despite these shocks, they remain essential to the diets of low-income urban residents who rely on accessible and low-cost meals. The study analyzes how existing policies and regulatory frameworks, particularly licensing regimes, street clearing operations, compulsory relocations to formal markets, and periodic evictions, influence the affordability and availability of food within urban informal economies. It also explores how informal vendors adapt, negotiate, and endure within restrictive governance environments. By addressing the limited empirical evidence on the interface between policy and food security in Kenya’s informal vending sector, the research highlights the critical role of everyday governance practices in shaping urban food security outcomes. Through analysis of policy documents and vendor experiences, the study reveals how regulatory exclusion creates spatial and economic barriers that ripple through low-income urban communities, which heavily rely on informal food systems. At the same time, vendors demonstrate notable endurance by reorganizing their operations, adjusting supply chains, leveraging social networks, and navigating authority structures to sustain their livelihoods. Findings aim to inform more inclusive, context-appropriate policy interventions.