Contemporary food systems are often dominated by global corporations that employ technological fixes, such as upscaling, rationalization, specialization, and standardization with the objective of achieving economies of scale, and ultimately, mass consumption. At the same time, a vast and diverse array of practices and modes of organization under the conceptual heading of food commons and commoning have persisted and continue to emerge. They include, for example, self-organized food production and redistribution, collective eating and cooking, and alternative food networks. These initiatives rely on shared resources, community-based decision-making, and joint responsibility. This prompts questions about their potential for transformation pathways towards more sustainable and just food systems: - How do food commons and commoning initiatives organize food systems, including food production, processing, distribution, and consumption? - What are the defining characteristics of these initiatives across different (geographical, cultural, socio-economic, political) contexts? - Which strategies do they use to achieve their intended transformations? - Which conditions and challenges affect the realization of their transformative potential? This panel aims to bring together empirically grounded contributions on food commons and commoning initiatives to answer, among others, the above questions . It seeks to explore concrete practices and institutional arrangements by which food commons and commoning initiatives are seeding change.
