The Food-as-a-Commons Discourse: Analyzing the Journey to Policy Impact

Increasingly, a discussion is emerging on new framings for food beyond food as a commodity. Several initiatives deem food a human right or a common good in the context of a variety of food issues, along the entire food system. This paper focuses on the development of discourses on food-as-a-commons and their success in influencing policy. We explore in detail four discourses: “Open source inputs in agriculture”, “Joint responsibility for food products”, “Reducing food waste” and “Safeguarding food culture and knowledge”. We examine and classify case studies in Germany based on a semi-systematic literature review including policy documents of 12 initiatives that apply and inform these four discourses. This allows us to present various levels of policy uptake, working at different speeds. Identifying characteristics based on commons theory helps us to describe the initiatives better, and especially explain the success of some discourses over others in influencing policy. Results show that discourses that invoke ideas of core human values and are aimed at changing relatively feasible goals (changing resource allocation, but not changing governance or institutions), may be the most likely new food discourses to have policy impact. A prime example of this is the discourse “Reducing food waste”.