Afns As Transformative Social Innovation

„Alternative Food Networks“ (AFN) is a concept for various forms of cooperative enterprises in “short/alternative” agricultural value chains (Urban farms, Community Supported Agricultures, food assemblies,  …). These initiatives hold the potential to foster a variety of social goals, such as improving food sovereignty and justice, cross-milieu interaction and community empowerment as well as favouring sustainable food practices (Rosol 2005; Goodman, DuPuis & Goodman 2012; Hankins & Grasseni 2014). Thus, AFNs have been considered as social innovations (Kirwan et al. 2013; Seyfang 2006; Grasseni, Forno & Signori 2015), which are transformative for those involved, generate a plurality of forms of knowledge together with collective capacities and promote awareness and understanding of the links between local food and global sustainable development goals (Smith & Seyfang 2013, White & Stirling 2013).

Beyond this general contribution to foster trajectories towards sustainability through innovation, experimentation and debate, my special interest is in AFN’s capacity to do so because they bridge some of the typical industrial divides and rebuild connections between production and consumption, town and country, work and leisure as well as work and capital and between decision-makers and concerned people (Kropp 2013). Thus, they re-embed provisioning in a more relational network and strengthen solidarity-based assumptions of responsibility (f.i. taking into account constraints of local farming enterprises) instead of following dominant one-sided rationalities and its “organized irresponsibility” (Beck 2007).

Against the emphatic background in the research literature, the paper wants to examine the significance of AFNs between “local food movement” and “transformative social innovation” (TRANSIT 2015) following the above mentioned “bridging capacity”. A discussion of all three concepts, “transformative”, “social” and “innovation” will be done with respect to underlying innovation regimes (cf. Rip, Joly & Callon 2010). The paper is based in a joint German project and presents some of its first findings: http://www.nascent-transformativ.de/.