It is about power!: Unveiling power and empowerment in grassroots agri-food initiatives

Abstract

Capitalist agri-food systems prioritise economic growth and capital accumulation, leading to extensive environmental degradation and social inequalities. Their dominance, shaped by unequal negotiations among actors, relies on marginalising agri-food identities and practices diverging from profit-driven logic. This imbalance has prompted calls from scholars, activists, and practitioners for a sustainability transformation towards socially just and environmentally sound agri-food systems. This PhD thesis investigates power and empowerment in grassroots agri-food initiatives, key spaces for realising sustainable alternatives. It expands these concepts to understand their role in micro-politics and collective identity formation within these initiatives. Through empirical research in Italy and Portugal, it explores how power dynamics shape work relations, queer inclusion, and women farmers' leadership in community-supported agriculture (CSA). Chapter 2 reviewed 88 studies on power and empowerment in grassroots initiatives, revealing a prevailing approach to these terms as strategic exercises. It urges a broader understanding and deeper exploration of power and empowerment, proposing future research avenues including collective identity, micro- and macro-politics, and expanding empirical studies beyond the Global North. Chapter 3 explored power dynamics' impact on prefiguring postcapitalist work relations in three CSAs in Portugal. Despite fostering the diversification of work relations, CSAs faced hurdles in challenging hierarchical and exploitative power structures. Strategies like participatory decision-making and fostering enjoyable work interactions in the fields were common but faced obstacles due to centralised farm ownership and persistent gender and class inequalities. Chapter 4 investigated queer empowerment within a CSA in a rural region in Portugals. The CSA facilitated various forms of empowerment and active engagement influenced by the leadership of queer producers and recurrent gatherings on queer-owned farmland. Three critical lessons on rural queer empowerment emerge: the self-confidence to perform queerness may be restricted to a selective rural community; partnerships between producers and co-producers may enable reciprocal queer empowerment; and queer leadership in agri-food community action may quietly represent gender and sexual diversity in the countryside. Chapter 5 investigated how new entrant women farmers in CSA create leadership roles, revealing tensions as they resist capitalist and heteropatriarchal identity structures. Factors like family and sexuality influenced their varied forms of disidentification. The analysis highlighted everyday power dynamics and empowerment, informing intersectional gender studies in agri-food transformation research. These chapters reveal grassroots agri-food initiatives as spaces where conflicts between domination, oppression, and empowerment influence the shaping of sustainable agri-food systems. Notably, these initiatives experiment with alternative, non-capitalist approaches to food influenced by the power imbalances exacerbated by capitalist agri-food systems. While grassroots initiatives' micro-politics and collective identity formation promote diversified work relations and empower marginalised agricultural communities, their transformative potential still needs to be improved. These initiatives struggle to dismantle capitalist and heteropatriarchal structures fully, and their deliberative efforts only partially address these internal power imbalances. This thesis advocates for the inclusion of gender and sexuality topics in grassroots initiatives' political agenda, alongside concerns like food sovereignty and agroecology. It emphasises the ongoing need for inclusive and participatory structures to address persistent inequalities in agri-food systems.