2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

Our project explores the ways formal and informal governance either supports or inhibits a resilient urban food system. We have conducted 21 interviews, each with an embedded Q Methodology values sort exercise, to better understand how and why diverse food system actors – urban farmers, community gardeners, farmer’s market managers, and local community and food system organizations – participate in urban agriculture. We draw from Light’s (2003) conceptualization of urban ecological citizenship, which describes how interaction with the land (both as physical environment and public space) cultivates the virtues requisite to sustain a resilient community, as well as Ostrum’s institutional framework (1990, 2005), to explore feedback relationships between: a) state and local institutions, b) urban agriculture-related organizations, c) institutional influence on farm-level decision-making processes, and d) the role of community participation in building robust institutions. This presentation will describe our conceptual framework and methodology, with particular attention to the ways Q Methodology can lend empirical support for ethics-related research. We will also share conclusions from our interview analysis. Though this paper is a mid-Michigan case study, our intention is to develop a methodology and conceptual framework we might apply in other urban agriculture frameworks. Therefore the approach we will present has beyond-local relevance for food systems and resilience problem-solving.