Agri-food scholarship: Past,present and future contributions to Australasian rural sociology

Agrarian transformation

Internationally, before the 1970s, the sub-discipline of rural sociology was preoccupied with the structure and fate of rural communities, with the ‘rural–urban continuum’, and with the diffusion of innovations to farmers (Buttel, 2001; Newby, 1978). When changing economic conditions impacted negatively upon farmers and rural communities in the 1970s rural sociologists began looking for new ways of understanding the dynamics of rural and agrarian change, many turning to neo-Marxist explanations which focused upon areas such as class structure, capitalist social relations, the exploitation of labour, the impacts of farming on the environment, and the state’s role in fostering capital accumulation in agriculture (Buttel and Newby, 1980). Thus was borne the heterodox ‘sociology of agriculture’ ⁴ (Buttel, 2001), which gave new direction to rural scholars around the world.

One early example of the application of the sociology of agriculture to rural Australia was the publication of Philip McMichael’s (1984) classic Settlers and the Agrarian Question, which sought to understand the colonial foundations of capitalism in Australia. Inspired by the works of Marx, Kautsky, Chayanov and Wallerstein, it traced the class conflicts which were at the heart of the challenges to the ownership and control of the landed economy by the squattocracy. Following on its heels, but providing a contemporary, cross-sectional analysis, was Capitalism and the Countryside: The Rural Crisis in Australia (Lawrence, 1987). Published by the left-leaning Pluto Press, the book argued that Australian farmers in the mid-1980s were facing a structural crisis – one associated with changing global economic realities. The demise of ‘family farming’ was occurring at a time of record profits for banks and agribusiness. Support from the state was both makeshift and contradictory and there was a discernible move, at the time, to economic rationalist policies which further eroded the position of farmers. Explicitly rejecting the ‘naïve empiricist, positivist ontology and epistemology of agricultural economics and quantitative geography’ (Tonts et al., 2012: 294), the book outlined the social and economic impacts of a declining rural sector and gave special attention to the destructive environmental practices of capitalist agriculture. It proposed an alternative path – one supporting localism in food production, syndication of struggling farms, decentralisation, and regional governance. Importantly, it gave impetus to a more critical approach to the study of agrarian change in Australasia (Tonts et al., 2012). Much of the teaching and research in Australian rural sociology in the 1980s and 1990s was occurring at Charles Sturt University: the topics studied and the approach embraced by the scholars there ⁵ ensured that rural issues (including agri-food issues) were increasingly viewed through the lens of critical political economy.

Research that followed the publication of Capitalism and the Countryside explicitly sought to understand the global impacts of change on Australasian farming, including the complexities and dynamism of farm production, and the present-day ‘financialisation’ of the food and farming industries (Burch, Goss et al., 1999; Burch, Rickson et al., 1996; Langford et al., 2020; Lawrence and Smith, 2018; Lawrence, Sippel et al., 2015; Sippel et al., 2020). The structural political economy underpinning the Australian research was complemented by post-structural analyses by both Australian and NZ scholars as described later. Both approaches put into clear focus the plight of the farm sector – and rural communities – as neoliberal policies were enacted in Australasia and worldwide (Lawrence, 1999). Several writers (Alston, 1995; Liepins, 2000; Smith, 2012, 2014) explored the gender dimensions of farming, highlighting the disadvantages women faced, and the discursive practices that shaped and supported hegemonic masculinity, clearly demonstrating the pervasiveness of the gender order in antipodean agriculture. Following a 2006 keynote address to the network, Gibson-Graham’s (1996) feminist critique of political economy and ‘community economies’ theory further provided agri-food scholars with post-structural conceptual tools to analyse gender, rurality and farming. This has been enriched by later work on the construction of masculinities in farming in both Australia and NZ (Campbell, 2000; Liepins, 2000).

Other important contributions to agrarian transformation have been those of Argent (1996) on globalised farm/finance relations; Dixon (2002), whose seminal work on the chicken industry provided a new cultural dimension to commodity systems analyses; Pritchard and Burch (2003), whose original and revealing ‘cross-fertilisation’ of agricultural economics, organisational theory, and critical political economy provided an interdisciplinary understanding of restructuring in the global process tomato industry; Fold and Pritchard (2005), who have advanced our understanding of cross-continental food chains; Tonts et al. (2012), who worked with others to trace the rise of neoliberalism in Australian rural policy; Rosin et al. (2012), whose co-edited book helped to define the contours of the global food crisis; and Farmar-Bowers et al., whose book Food Security in Australia (2013) informed public debate on the complexities and uncertainties of Australia’s food system.

Agri-food governance and regulation

Overseas-based agri-food scholars such as Bonanno et al. (1994), Goodman and Watts (1997) and Busch and Juska (1997) argued that globalisation was altering the ways in which food and farming were being governed. Impatient with, and critical of, the structuralist and neo-Marxist meta-narratives that had been a central focus of the sociology of agriculture (see Campbell, 2009; Lewis and Le Heron, 2015), and influenced by the postmodern/post-structuralist ‘turn’ that was occurring overseas (see Lockie, 1999; Lockie, Herbert-Cheshire et al., 2003), a number of Australasian scholars began exploring micro-level processes of governance and regulation. The actions of global governance agencies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were of increasing significance, reconfiguring political power and challenging and/or curtailing the activities of nation states (Scholte, 2000). One of the most influential antipodean books in this vein was Globalized Agriculture: Political Choice (Le Heron, 1993), in which it was posited that asymmetries of power in agri-food systems were compounded by the move to a less regulated, more market-based, form of international trade. It was also being recognised that a host of new players – such as transnational corporations, non-government organisations, and other private entities (producers and retailers) – were forming global partnerships, such as GlobalGAP, to audit food safety and environmental sustainability (Campbell, 2005). It was argued that an ‘audit culture’ was permeating agriculture – one based upon private food standards developed by the retail sector (Campbell and Stuart, 2005). Private standards and the auditing requirements which accompanied them were viewed as a new regulatory politics of neoliberalism (Le Heron, 2003), one in which government regulation gave way to farm-level self-regulation (Lockie and Higgins, 2007).

Hugh Campbell was one of the first scholars to recognise and discuss the influential audit cultures that were emerging as part of a ‘greening’ corporate food regime. He revealed the ‘new language of measurement of food safety and environmental performance’ (Campbell, 2009: 316) as well as the technologies that were evolving as part of a new audit culture in food and farming (Campbell, 2005). As Australasian scholars began incorporating insights from theorists such as Latour and Foucault, a more subtle understanding developed of how power was moving away from the state and being reconstituted in local networks and hybrid practices which were reshaping governance in the agri-food industries (see Higgins, 2003; Higgins and Larner, 2010; Higgins and Lawrence, 2005; Lockie, 1996; Lockie and Higgins, 2007). The so-called ‘post-human turn’ in agri-food research gave acknowledgement to non-human actors in their interactions with humans, and considered agency, aesthetics and affect (Legun, 2015). Metrological assemblages (the creation and application of measurements that underpin standards and practices) have been explored in the kiwi fruit, wine and apple industries. Australasian agri-food scholarship has demonstrated how metrologies not only promote calculative practices but also shape human/non-human relations in the agri-food sector (Higgins and Larner, 2017; Le Heron et al., 2016).

Sustainability and the environment

During 1990s there were many studies – and critiques of – natural resource management in Australia from biophysical scientists who had observed and measured the environmental destruction of soils, rivers and vegetation (see, for example, CSIRO, 1990). However, contributions from social scientists were few and far between. With their focus upon the sociology of agriculture, members of the Centre for Rural Social Research and Institute for Sustainable Regional Development began exploring the nexus between farming and the environment. It was argued that many of the environmental problems faced in Australian agriculture were social, rather than technical, in origin (Lawrence et al., 1992) and, as such, required an understanding of class and gender relations, property regimes, Aboriginal dispossession, farmer/community interactions, and the activities of the state, among others (see Lockie and Bourke, 2001). Major contributions included critical analyses of agricultural extension in fostering productivist farming (Vanclay and Lawrence, 1995); the opportunities for, and the forces against, incorporating sustainable practices into farm management regimes (Lawrence, Higgins et al., 2001; Lawrence, Richards et al., 2004); the Landcare phenomenon and its sustainability potential (Lockie, 1996; Lockie and Vanclay, 1997); examination of new forms of governance, including ‘action at a distance’ in environmental management (Lockie, 1999); and the prospects for ‘rural sustainability’ more broadly (Cocklin and Dibden, 2005; Gray and Lawrence, 2001). Interdisciplinary research has widely reflected on the social and cultural dimensions of ‘disasters’ such as drought, fires and floods, expanding resilience thinking and adaptive governance to agri-food systems (Beilin and Wilkinson, 2015; MacMahon et al., 2015; Smith and Lawrence, 2018). Concerns about a biotechnological future for agriculture were expressed in books such as Altered Genes (Hindmarsh et al., 1998) and Recoding Nature (Hindmarsh and Lawrence, 2004). Nanotechnologies have been similarly assessed (Scrinis and Lyons, 2007), while the significance of food waste was explored sociologically in Waste Matters (Evans et al., 2013).

In more recent decades, CSAFE has developed a comprehensive research program to study sustainability. Topics included here are: Indigenous agro-ecology, agricultural intensification, biological economies, greening food, food insecurity, and Māori women and food sovereignty. The centre’s ARGOS ⁶ project, which commenced in 2003, is of particular note as it has been credited with being the largest study of farm-based sustainability in the world (Campbell et al., 2012). As a 30-year longitudinal study involving over 100 farmers, the project has revealed, among other things, the growing significance of auditing in contemporary farming, the importance of organic production in increasing returns to farmers, the impact of neoliberal policies on the nation’s producers, the characteristics of ‘good’ farmers and graziers, the application and impacts of agri-environmental indicators, and practical pathways for biodiversity conservation (ARGOS, 2020). CSAFE’s greening foods project – along with various programs on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) – had significant resonance with policy makers. In relation to the latter, research led to the NZ Royal Commission arguing against the release of GMOs.

The former director of CSAFE, Hugh Campbell, has recently provided an incisive critique of modernist farming in NZ (Campbell, 2020). Drawing from his experiences in CSAFE, from the ARGOS project, and from his own practical farming knowledge and observations, he outlines the crisis of legitimacy in modernist agriculture and examines the sustainable alternatives to the present system. Sensitive to the historical injustices experienced by Māori, and detailing the destabilising effects of new materialities, ecologies and socio-political movements on farming, Campbell’s book is a significant contribution to agri-food scholarship – both in Australasia and globally.

Food, consumption and health

The publication of Friedmann and McMichael’s seminal work on food regimes in 1989 had a major impact upon agri-food theorisation (see Campbell and Dixon, 2009; Friedmann and McMichael, 1989). Food regime theory seeks to understand capitalist food and farming according to their institutional histories, bringing together aspects of global production and consumption. Despite being contested by some (see Wilkinson and Goodman, 2019), it is proposed that two previous regimes have existed, and a third is taking shape. Australasian scholars have contributed to the debate by arguing that the new regime confronts the second regime of cheap food (a ‘food from nowhere’ regime) by becoming a ‘food-from-somewhere’ regime, in which consumers place a premium on locality, nutrition, traceability, and environmental sustainability (Campbell, 2009). Burch and Lawrence (2009) trace the emergence of a ‘financialised food regime’ – one in which supermarkets play a central role in shaping farming and food consumption. In an important contribution to food regime theory, Pritchard (2009) argues that the failure of the WTO’s Doha round of negotiations means the world is not moving in some inexorable way towards a neoliberalised third food regime. It seems we remain in a ‘long hangover’ from the second food regime (Pritchard, 2009).

The significance and impact of supermarkets in food provision has been a strong focus in Australasian agri-food research. Supermarkets have been implicated in re-designing the food system to generate maximum profits for retailers while leaving farmers to struggle economically – the example of supermarkets paying dairy farmers less for their milk than the cost of production being a case in point (Long and Sullivan, 2019). Once engaged solely in food distribution, supermarkets are now heavily involved in food production (via contracts and the setting environmental standards for farmers) and in consumption (developing ‘own brand’ and ‘ready meal’ products and by decisions on the placement of items in stores) (Burch, Dixon et al., 2013). Their private standards dictate the cosmetic appearance of fruits and vegetables (leading to widespread waste in the horticultural industry) while their use of celebrity chefs, package labelling, and loyalty schemes has allowed them to become ‘food authorities’ (Dixon, 2007). As such, they have a significant impact upon eating (Dixon, 2008), including the promotion of obesogenic diets (Dixon and Broom, 2007). Supermarkets are thus engaged in the ‘strategic manufacturing of consumer trust’ (Richards et al., 2011:29). Finally, the power wielded by firms in a highly concentrated retail sector has encouraged the growth of larger-than-family-farms to supply produce – something that has seen small-scale farmers being ‘structured out’ of agriculture (Pritchard et al., 2007; Richards, Bjørkhaug et al., 2013). Much of the above-mentioned research – particularly Dixon’s theorisations about supermarket authority, ‘dashboard dining’, and the links between diet and food retailing – has been ground-breaking.

Lockie (sociology) and Pritchard (human geography) have made many important contributions to the study of food consumption. In their edited text Consuming Foods, Sustaining Environments (Lockie and Pritchard, 2001), they and their contributors reveal the connections between production, consumption and the environment. In keeping with Actor Network Theory, Lockie and Pritchard view agency and power not as ‘things to be possessed, but as outcomes of relationships within networks that potentially involve both humans and non-humans’ (Lockie and Pritchard, 2001: 11). They see consumption and environment as being strongly linked to the social relations of food production and distribution, and argue against reductionist epistemologies that treat consumers as automatons and the environment as an ‘externality’. A key contribution to the extension of Actor Network Theory relating to consumption has been the biological economies work of Lewis, Le Heron and others (Lewis and Le Heron, 2015).

Opposition, and alternative food systems

Lastly, issues of contemporary concern arising from social contestation and alternatives to mainstream agricultural production, trade and consumption have also been a key focus. In 2005, Friedmann placed the ‘corporate-environmental food regime’ in dialectical relation to social movements, heightening rural scholars’ attention to the intersection between corporate social responsibility/accountability and oppositional movements for alternative food systems. This has had a lasting impact on AFRN scholars’ contributions to international literature on alternative food movements and greening: Lyons and Lockie were two of the first to recognise and research the rise of the organics movement and the ‘greening’ of the food industry in Australia in the 1990s (Lockie, Lyons et al., 2006; Lyons, 1999) as was Campbell for NZ (Campbell, 1996). Australasian researchers were also prominent in theorising the food crisis that emerged after the great financial crisis (GFC) in 2008 (see Lawrence, Lyons et al., 2010; Rosin et al., 2012). Much of this work built upon critiques of systemic failures of globalised food systems (i.e. hunger, poor labour conditions, rising food costs, distorted trade relations, poverty) taken up by transnational peasant movements and international protest movements (Campbell and Dixon, 2009).

In Australia, agri-food scholars have contributed to the theory and practice of food sovereignty through studies of alternatives such as community-based agriculture (Thornton, 2017), home gardening (Larder et al., 2012), freeganism (Edwards and Mercer, 2013) and collective movements (Sippel and Larder, 2019). They argue that these bridge the rural–urban divide by refocusing attention on the value of farming for domestic food provisioning (although Dixon and Richards [2016] identify an ‘urban theoretical bias’ in this work). Schlosberg and Craven (2019) interpret civic food networks as evidence of strengthening food and climate justice narratives in Australia, highlighting inequalities of class, race, gender and remoteness. The diversity and contested alterity of food movements in NZ has also been explored (Sharp et al., 2016). These studies have benefited from close dialogue with the food justice/sovereignty work of overseas agri-food colleagues Carolan (2017b, 2018a), McMichael (2014) and Guttal (2012). Ethical trade and corporate responsibility are two further areas of importance in agri-food studies in this regard (see for example, Richards and Lyons, 2016; Smith, 2014). Pritchard, Dixon et al. (2016) have drawn attention to the livelihood implications of food system governance that fails to address the right to food, while Mann (2019) has highlighted the challenges of participation and knowledge construction in collective food movements. Finally, the growing interest in justice and rights has led to an emerging program of research to reconsider the link between food waste, poverty, hunger and food relief charities through the lens of corporate social responsibility (Devin and Richards, 2018), food overproduction (Messner et al., 2021) and broader contestations around the politics of ethicality.

Labour and new work relations

Among other concerns, the Covid-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the centrality of labour relations in rural communities, and in agricultural or food-related industries in particular. While the early days of the pandemic saw many employees in food service and hospitality industries lose work in both towns and cities, the structural reliance of agriculture on temporary (i.e. migrant) labour was also exposed. Reports of fruit ripening and falling in the fields due to a shortage of cheap migrant labour has prompted predictions of substantial food price increases still to come (Rose, 2020). This is likely to affect people in rural areas disproportionately, exacerbating already higher-than-average food insecurity, particularly in remote communities where access to fresh produce is limited and expensive.

Labour and its commodification have long been addressed in structuralist explanations of agri-food restructuring, particularly in analyses of global value chains and, later, global production networks (Neilson et al., 2014, 2018). For example, the early work of Burch, Rickson and Thiel (1990) positioned contract farming as central in rural social change, considering how the trend in Australia had separated farmers and farming families from the land, shifted land-use decisions, and increased dependence on transnational corporate food processing. Later research by Hattersley et al. (2013) demonstrated impacts on regional towns following the closure of fruit processors Golden Circle and SPC Ardmona, as they moved offshore (including to NZ). The intersection between migrant labour, international migration and value chain restructuring has been widely examined internationally (Argent and Tonts, 2015; Gertel and Sippel, 2014; Guthman, 2017). These studies provide useful insights for future research in Australasia, considering our silent history of labour exploitation in pastoralism, sugar, fisheries and horticulture. In the wake of disruptions to international trade and labour flows (following the pandemic, but also future climate change), agri-food scholars continue to inform understandings of the dynamics of social change associated with complex value chain/production network restructuring.

A second important theme related to the future of work is the ongoing farm level mechanisation and emerging digital technologies – including data collection and management techniques. The application of technologies such as the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Big Data is increasingly promoted under the banner of ‘climate smart agriculture’ and ‘sustainable intensification’ as a panacea for improving food security (see FAO, 2019). But as Jakku et al. (2019) caution, farmers are concerned about who will benefit from access to and use of farmers’ data, as well as what emerging technologies will signify for what it is to be a farmer when emphasis shifts away from hands-on labour.

Agri-food scholars are contributing important knowledge on the social, political and financial aspects of digital agricultural technologies. Early research on the impacts of mechanisation on labour relations located technology as a factor influencing the financial consolidation of smaller farms and the out-migration of older generation farmers from rural communities (Lockie and Bourke, 2001). More recently, Carolan (2017b, 2018b) has analysed big data, precision farming and ‘smart’ farm equipment as socio-technical artefacts noting that ‘access’ to these technologies is understood in greatly varying ways. This has shifted the focus from interest in what new technologies are to what they can do when they are ‘actually put to work in the context of agriculture’ (Carolan, 2017b: 138), raising questions about who owns data as well as emerging possibilities for more distributed data technologies and practices. Higgins and Bryant (2020) have examined the ‘more-than-cultural dimensions’ of how farmers and other intermediaries engage with, navigate and ‘frame’ smart farming through their knowledge and practices. In NZ, research investigating how dairy farmers navigate the ‘social licence to farm’ through manipulating environmental data contributes new thinking on the materiality of technologies (Legun et al., 2018). Others have investigated how financial data on foreign land ownership are used to leverage further investment, impacting farmers’ land-use decisions, profitability and, ultimately, farm consolidation and corporatisation (see Sippel and Weldon, 2020). These studies have been accompanied by theory on agricultural-environmental governance as an assemblage that was set out in the recent edited volume by NZ colleagues, Forney et al. (2018), as well as expanding interdisciplinary literature on social licence to operate as it relates to farming, the financing of agricultural land, and livelihood impacts of new technologies (Smith and Lawrence, 2021; Westoby and Lyons, 2016). In sum, this field provides a critical framework for sociological enquiry that raises questions about the objects/subjects of transformation, who is driving transformations, who benefits and who is disadvantaged.

Indigenous and postcolonial politics

In 2007, Raewyn Connell’s book Southern Theory broke new ground for Australian sociology by drawing attention to the relationship between social science and imperialism, empire, colonialism, class, gender and race. In it, she wrote how sociology privileged views by ‘men, by capitalists, by the educated and affluent [and from] the global metropole’ (Connell, 2007: v). She also wrote how First Nations’ knowledge and theories of society and environment had been (and continue to be) discredited through colonialism, and – reflecting the earlier contribution of McMichael (1984) – emphasised land in sociology’s understanding of settler colonialism. These seminal insights have been taken up by some agri-food sociologists, who aim to ‘unsettle the silence of food politics discourse in relation to racism, dispossession and colonial violence’ (Mayes, 2018: 5).

With land and livelihoods both central themes in agri-food sociology, the concepts of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, ‘land grabs’ and ‘resource enclosures’ will continue to provide important directions for investigating the intersection of Indigenous land rights, food and agricultural expansion, food security and food sovereignty for Indigenous people. First Nations Peoples are disproportionately hungry: 22–24% of Indigenous people are reported as food insecure, compared to the 4% national average in Australia (Lindberg et al., 2015). In NZ, 29% of Māori people are food insecure, compared to the general population average of 16% (Carter et al., 2010). But while the intersection between food insecurity, low income, rurality and indigeneity is increasingly recognised, sociological explanations in other fields (particularly policy) tend to individualise these problems. By contrast, Richards, Kjærnes et al. (2016) have applied an agri-food sociology lens that foregrounds power relations in a structural critique of food security and poverty. Drawing upon Sen (1981) they concluded that more equal entitlements (or rights) to food is what is required. While not widely applied to the issue of Indigenous food (in)security in Australasia, this perspective has been widely developed by agri-food scholars working in the Global South – for example, in sustainable livelihoods and food security in postcolonial India (Pritchard, Rammohan et al., 2014) and in export horticulture in Indonesia, India and Myanmar (Neilson, 2019; Vicol et al., 2019). This work considers rural poverty alongside political economy analyses of class, as well as Sen’s (1981) concepts of entitlements, capabilities, freedom, justice and rights. Food-defining entitlements include access to land, financial resources, rights under law, and the ability to be employed – elements routinely denied to Indigenous people through the ongoing violence of settler colonialism (Staines and Smith, 2021).

Insights on postcolonial politics and decolonisation relating to food and farming have not been widely addressed by agri-food scholars, but are gaining prominence. The most comprehensive of these works is Mayes’ (2018) book Unsettling Food Politics, which problematises the practice of food sovereignty in a context where the land is stolen, Indigenous foodways are destroyed, and Indigenous knowledge systems are disrupted. He argues that the ‘deployment of food sovereignty and agrarian discourse in Australia risks using white epistemologies of ignorance to reinforce the moral and social value of the settler . . . thereby reproducing the colonial logics of land possession’, with the only way forward being to ‘let [Indigenous] ontologies and epistemologies set the terms and conditions for food sovereignty in Australia’ (Mayes, 2018: 139–40). Similarly, Morris and Fitzherbert (2016) have examined the possibility that Māori political sovereignty is not supported by discourses of food sovereignty and ‘alternative’ food. They consider how ‘assemblages’ of contemporary Māori food sovereignty strategies rely on, and reproduce, an Indigenous imaginary based on tradition – ‘a time when people were connected to the earth and each other, and to knowledge of how to produce and cook food’, but which Indigenous people themselves reject (Morris and Fitzherbert, 2016: 2). With the rise of ‘bush foods’ as a growing culinary and market-based strategy for Indigenous development across Australasia and the Pacific (Morris, 2013; Slade Lee, 2012), understanding the perspectives of Indigenous peoples about their own foodways presents a challenge not only to agri-food sociology but also to the broader discipline of sociology, as urged by Connell (2007) well over a decade ago.

Governance for the future

Finally, Australasian agri-food studies have drawn much of their intellectual inspiration from interdisciplinary and transboundary collaborations between academic, industry, non-government sectors and grassroots food activism. This is the space from which agri-food sociology moves into the territory of influencing diverse publics and polity, necessary for transforming values and practices in food systems governance to meet future challenges. As we described earlier, theorising agri-food governance at transnational, regional, national and local levels has long contributed to rethinking the tensions and opportunities for food system governance that is multi-stakeholder, multi-level and multi-scalar. At the level of global governance, Hawkes and Plahe (2012) and Pritchard (2012) have critiqued the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture and the Doha Round impacts on how food trade, rights and food security are governed. Sociologists interested in regional food governance have widely informed policy around ‘wicked’ governance issues, such as bio-security (Higgins and Dibden, 2011), the water-food-health nexus (Wheeler et al., 2018), and post-disaster governance (Cradock-Henry et al., 2018). Notable here is the ongoing work by the Local Food Contingency Group in collaboration with the Queensland government, which calls on governments to build resilience through policies that adopt local procurement, inform council planning, share control with communities and use a variety of consultative processes (Reis, 2019). Scholars also make ongoing contributions to critique and progress on the United Nations Sustainability Goals and the 2030 Agenda (Lockie, 2016; Smith, 2019).

Collaborative food policy-making is also an emerging space for experiments in food systems governance, inspired by progressive food policy councils in Canada (Friedmann, 2020; Welsh and MacCrae, 1998), the UK (Lang et al., 2009) and the US (Bassarab et al., 2019). In Australasia, successful policy alliances have been built between local governments, community and farmer groups in the highly successful ‘Foodprint Melbourne’ research programme into peri-urban agriculture and resilience (Carey et al., 2018). Another example is ‘FoodLab Sydney’ – a collaboration between the City of Sydney and Sydney University agri-food researchers – that seeks to catalyse broader change in food systems through connecting vulnerable communities with small business incubation, including through emerging digital food communication technologies. While still new, this project aims to connect local food policy with the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Craven et al., 2018). In NZ, the experiences of the Food Resilience Network (Christchurch) and Our Food Network (Dunedin) are likewise informative for progressing understandings of the pros and cons of co-created food policy in the Australasian context (Haylock and Connelly, 2018). Understanding the transformative potential of these kinds of collaborations will be crucial for improving future policy coherence and democratic participation across food, environment, society and economy .

Agri-food studies have been a driving force behind the establishment of numerous praxis-oriented food coalitions that are forging new relations between rural, peri-urban and urban food production and consumption, and trans-boundary food governance. These coalitions are at the heart of grassroots organising for systemic food systems change, including on issues affecting farm and food regulation, Indigenous food sovereignty, resilience and food democracy. In Australia, they include the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, Sustain, the Right to Food Coalition, the Melbourne Food Alliance, and the FairFoodAlliance.Brisbane. All of these have continued input from agri-food scholars with diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds including sociology, geography, politics, business, law and public health. These scholars have also contributed to international non-government organisations such as Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, and La Via Campesina. They have provided important input in the construction and debate of Australia’s National Food Plan and subsequent ‘People’s Food Plan’ (see Carey et al., 2015; Mayes, 2018). While not widely studied by rural sociologists in Australia, they are examples of hopeful experiments that could benefit from deeper consideration through the lens of food utopias as a ‘process that recognises the time and difficulty inherent in changing the status quo’ (Stock et al., 2015).