Reconfiguring Food Systems Governance: The UNFSS and the Battle Over Authority and Legitimacy

Matthew C Canfield; Jessica Duncan; Priscilla Claeys

doi:10.1057/s41301-021-00312-1

Reconfiguring Food Systems Governance: The UNFSS and the Battle Over Authority and Legitimacy

Development (Rome). 2021;64(3-4):181-191. doi: 10.1057/s41301-021-00312-1. Epub 2021 Oct 13.

Authors

Matthew C Canfield¹, Jessica Duncan², Priscilla Claeys³

Affiliations

¹ Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden Law School, Leiden, The Netherlands.
² Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
³ Centre for Agroecology, Water, and Resilience, Coventry University, Coventry, UK.

Abstract

The UN Food Systems Summit was an ambitious and hotly contested event that brought competing approaches to global food governance into relief. In this article, we unpack the rival visions that circulate around how food systems should be governed, focusing on two issues that we feel are at the heart of these divergences: authority and legitimacy. We illustrate how both corporate-philanthropic and food sovereignty networks are struggling to establish epistemic authority of food systems as well as produce legitimacy through very different approaches to participation and accountability.

Keywords: Multi-stakeholderism; Multilateralism; UN Committee on World Food Security.