Speaker: Professor Roberta Sonnino, University of Surrey
This presentation will focus on the emergence of the “urban food agenda”. This agenda covers the concerted effort by city governments to embrace food systems thinking, enhance civil society participation in the food governance context, create new urban-rural linkages and form new collective visions for food system transformation. This presentation will argue that research and policy around this agenda need to orientate attention away from “performance-based governance” and begin to engage with issues of power. Reflections on the role of the urban food agenda in developing more regional and territorial food systems will be offered.
The talk will be followed by an online Q&A session.
Roberta Sonnino is Professor of Sustainable Food Systems at the University of Surrey. Over her career, she has produced more than 100 publications on food systems, some of which have been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean. Professor Sonnino has an established track record of creating impact and engagement at the interface of food systems research and policy. In recent years, she has been Vice-Chair of the FOOD2030 Expert Group, which led the development of four priority areas of the FOOD 2030 European research framework; lead author of FAO’s Framework for the Urban Food Agenda; and Rapporteur of the High-Level Expert Group assembled by the EC to explore ways to improve food systems governance through more effective science-policy-society-interfaces. Professor Sonnino is currently principal investigator of the €12m FOODCLIC project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Programme, researching the transformation of food systems in European and African city-regions.
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