Grown Together: Local Food System Policy Tool Typologies and Bundling

• In Event: Policy Design Complexity, Bundles, and Mixes

Abstract

The ways local governments use and bundle the policy tools that shape local food systems, have been left largely unexplored in extant literature. This is due, in part, to the grassroots nature of the movement to strengthen local food systems and local food access, but also reflects a larger gap in our understanding of where and how these policies fit into local policy agendas. Local food system policies are often considered part of city sustainability portfolios but also address a number of public health and equity issues, including physical access to fresh food and whether or not food vendors are required to take vouchers or SNAP. While these priorities may align in some municipalities, demographics and political motivations may cause conflict in others.

This paper aims to make sense of the how local food system policy tools are used and if they align with the needs of constituents. I begin by looking at policy tools and tool bundles; categorization of local food system policy tools in the literature; and how the typology used in local food system literature compares to more mainstream policy tools literature. The comparison of the tool typologies lays the foundation for analyses of individual tool use and use by category. It also provides the basis for my analysis of sustainability policy tool bundles and it’s applicability for studying local food and local food systems’ governance. I use a dataset which combines data collected from 2,200 local governments during a 2015 sustainable food systems survey conducted by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems (CFRS), demographics and city-level data from United States Census Bureau, and institutional data from the Census of Governments. Through a series of models, I use these data to identify the food system sustainability policy tools and bundles used by local governments of various sizes, institutional compositions, needs, and demographic makeups. I then use factor analysis to help identify underlying concepts that may be used to improve our understanding of local food system policy tool categories and their use.

Author

• Kathryn Elizabeth Wassel, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth