The Political Economy of Sustainable Healthy Diets: Power, Governance, and Food System Transformation

How are sustainable healthy diets shaped by power relations within contemporary food systems? This session explores the political economy of sustainable healthy diets, focusing on the institutions, actors, and structural forces that influence what people eat and how dietary transitions unfold.

We invite contributions examining how states, corporations, international organizations, social movements, and scientific networks shape the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of food. Relevant topics include: the role of the food and beverage industry; ultra-processed foods; food environments; food regimes; corporate concentration and financialization; global governance initiatives; the politics of nutrition and sustainability metrics, and the sociology of nutrition, among others.

The session welcomes critical analyses of major initiatives and institutions, including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations Food Systems Summit, CGIAR, the EAT-Lancet Commission, and related governance arenas. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine barriers and pathways to food system transformation, the rise of overweight and obesity in low- and middle-income countries, inequalities in access to healthy diets, the tensions between public health goals and the political-economic structures that shape dietary outcomes, and the intersections of diet, climate change, and social justice.

We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions from sociology, rural sociology, political economy, development studies, geography, environmental studies, and related fields. Through a mix of invited and open talks, this session seeks to bring together researchers to consider a sociological contribution to the food systems transformation debate and to strategize about the research needed to address the issues underlying unhealthy and unsustainable diets.