TY - JOUR
T1 - What's the market got to do with it? Social-ecological embeddedness and environmental practices in a local food system initiative
AU - Hedberg, Russell C.
AU - Zimmerer, Karl S.
N1 - Funding Information:
This article is based on research funded in part by the National Science Foundation, grants No. DGE1255832 & 1558650, and the United States Department of Agriculture Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program – Northeast, grant No. GNE15-105 . Special thanks to the Penn State Center for Landscape Dynamics, and the American Association of Geographers for their additional support. All findings and opinions expressed in this article are the authors’, and do not necessarily reflect the position of any funding body.
Funding Information:
Special thanks to Clare Hinrichs, Brian King, Erica Smithwick, and the members of the GeoSyntheSES Lab at Penn State for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This article is based on research funded in part by the National Science Foundation, grants No. DGE1255832 & 1558650, and the United States Department of Agriculture Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program ? Northeast, grant No. GNE15-105. Special thanks to the Penn State Center for Landscape Dynamics, and the American Association of Geographers for their additional support. All findings and opinions expressed in this article are the authors?, and do not necessarily reflect the position of any funding body.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - Food system localization is often advocated by academics, activists, and policy makers as a means of effectively addressing the negative social and ecological consequences of current systems of food production. Activists and academics alike point to the range of different social relations facilitated by proximity and face-to-face interactions that are defining features of some local food system initiatives (LFSI). The concept of social embeddedness, which posits that economic activity is entangled with ongoing social relations, is frequently used to interpret the social relations of LFSI and to frame overarching arguments. Social embeddedness has been used to describe the alterity of LFSI, but much of this work has yet to assess how embedded social relations affect market functioning or sustainability in these systems—particularly for environmental aspects of sustainability. In this article we utilize the lens social embeddedness to assess what we call social-ecological embeddedness (SEE), which considers how, and to what extent, environmental practices on LFSI farms are enmeshed with the ongoing social relations of the local food system initiative. After developing the SEE approach, we use it to examine how social relations in a farmers’ market network in New York City, USA, influence environmental practices on participating farms, and the implications of social-ecological embeddedness for building more sustainable food systems.
AB - Food system localization is often advocated by academics, activists, and policy makers as a means of effectively addressing the negative social and ecological consequences of current systems of food production. Activists and academics alike point to the range of different social relations facilitated by proximity and face-to-face interactions that are defining features of some local food system initiatives (LFSI). The concept of social embeddedness, which posits that economic activity is entangled with ongoing social relations, is frequently used to interpret the social relations of LFSI and to frame overarching arguments. Social embeddedness has been used to describe the alterity of LFSI, but much of this work has yet to assess how embedded social relations affect market functioning or sustainability in these systems—particularly for environmental aspects of sustainability. In this article we utilize the lens social embeddedness to assess what we call social-ecological embeddedness (SEE), which considers how, and to what extent, environmental practices on LFSI farms are enmeshed with the ongoing social relations of the local food system initiative. After developing the SEE approach, we use it to examine how social relations in a farmers’ market network in New York City, USA, influence environmental practices on participating farms, and the implications of social-ecological embeddedness for building more sustainable food systems.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.022
DO - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.022
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078990983
SN - 0016-7185
VL - 110
SP - 35
EP - 45
JO - Geoforum
JF - Geoforum
ER -