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This paper utilises the ‘sustainable innovation journeys’ concept to trace how people organise and design urban food initiatives and influence city-region food policy. We evaluate whether designs succeed or fail and monitor the exchange of ideas that takes place between stakeholders. Tracing these interactions reveals the transformative potential of innovative projects, particularly if the food system changes they bring to the fore are aligned with policy interests. Three case studies provide on-the-ground insights to assess how small and medium-sized enterprises at the micro-level induce sustainability shifts. The case studies are businesses in the city-regions of Rotterdam, The Netherlands (urban farm and circular food economy); Vigo, Spain (food, forest and multi-functional land use); and Zurich, Switzerland (organic food and short supply chains). Each initiative was studied in-depth over a two-year period, with follow-up analysis for a further four years to monitor change over time (2013–2018). The cases promote the adoption of micro-level innovation practices: locally designed transition pathways that bring the benefits of change to the city-region (i.e. from the micro-level initiative to meso-level policy). The analysis highlights the importance of ‘soft change’. This can be something as simple as visiting an inspiring urban food initiative and meeting with stakeholders to generate mutual understanding, from where interests align to influence food chain practices and policy. Soft changes act as ‘seeds of transition’ for a shift towards more sustainable urban food systems, but we observe too potentially negative impacts due to lack of alignment at the micro- (initiative) or meso- (city-region) levels.

The modernisation of agriculture has been, and continues to be, the cause of an increasing disconnection between farming, nature, and society. This has given rise to a series of social, economic, and ecological crises in the food chain. Some farmers are responding to this by adjusting their land-use and farming practices so as to make their farms more sustainable. But such changes need to be aligned with the specificities of the local bio-physical environment and the logic of the political economic environment. This article highlights how cooperative approaches allow public and private regulatory systems to support ecological transitions. Through a theoretical lens on place-based and restorative farming practices it analyses and interprets three complementary cooperative approaches as possible starting points for the transition towards a more sustainable agri-food system. The case studies show how farmers cooperatives can be either linked to the environment and to public policies (and thus extrinsic product quality), or to the market (and intrinsic product quality), or a combination of both. These links provide competitive advantages to farmers, and enable them to increase income from farming. We then discuss the effectiveness of these forms of self-governance, and how cooperative approaches, if well organised and implemented and appropriately embedded, can empower farmers to further change and adapt their farming practices so as to restore and improve their endogenous resource base. The analysis shows that while they are place-specific they are far from locally/regionally-bounded and that their success (or failure) critically depends on their alignment with national, supra-national and global actants.

This paper introduces the concept of commoning in circular economies, and explores how commons reproduce over time. The starting point is that commoning can have an important role in fostering circular economies and sustainable and socially-inclusive development. By commoning, we refer to local stakeholders working collectively to preserve or restore their natural resource base to generate benefits that are locally shared. Through the analysis of a specific case of a group of commoners’ associations in Galicia (Spain), the paper describes and discusses the development, and ultimate unravelling, of an innovative and decentralized waste management project to convert waste biomass from the monte (often-neglected upland green spaces, largely consisting of brush and trees) into compost. In order to make this composting project economically viable the possibility of collecting and processing urban green waste was also explored. While the project’s application of the principles of a circular economy had the potential to bring locally-shared economic and ecological benefits, and foster territorial prosperity and resilience, it was ultimately frustrated by questions of scale, administrative and regulatory barriers, competing and conflicting land-use claims and financial cutbacks in the public sector.

The path to sustainable development involves creating coherence and synergies in the complex relationships between economic and ecological systems. In sustaining their farm businesses farmers' differing values influence their decisions about agroecosystem management, leading them to adopt diverging farming practices. This study explores the values of dairy and beef cattle farmers, the assumptions that underpin them, and the various ways that these lead farmers to combine food production with the provision of other ecosystem services, such as landscape conservation and biodiversity preservation. This paper draws on empirical research from Galicia (Spain), a marginal and mountainous European region whose livestock production system has undergone modernization in recent decades, exposing strategic economic, social and ecological vulnerabilities. It applies a Q-methodology to develop a values-based approach to farming. Based on a sample of 24 livestock farmers, whose practices promote landscape conservation and/or biodiversity preservation, the Q-methodology allowed us to identify four 'farming styles'. Further analysis of the practices of the farmers in these groups, based on additional farm data and interview material, suggests that all 24 farmers valorize landscape and nature and consider cattle production and nature conservation to be compatible within their own farm practices. However, the groups differed in the extent to which they have developed synergies between livestock farming and landscape conservation. We conclude by discussing how rural development policy in Galicia could strengthen such practices by providing incentives to farmers and institutionally embedding a shift towards more diversified farming and product development.

Debates about the design and management of ecosystem services and interweaving of rural and urban spaces in metropolitan regions raise questions about how to conceptualize “the local”. Rather than presupposing spatial settings or identities as rural-urban or local-global, attention here shifts to the immediacy of connections and relations. Conceptualized in terms of activity space, this paper presents a relational analysis and a practice oriented approach. To illustrate the approach, we overview three case studies in food provisioning and show how an analysis in terms of a set of spatially organized activities can generate new insights.

Place branding holds a promising contribution to sustainable territorial development and requires changes in the social organisation of places, which implies complex transitional processes towards new management regimes. This article explores place branding of the River Minho estuary in the borderland of Portugal and Spain. It deals with the tension between creating a brand, enhancing market development and sustainable (endogenous) development. The central question is: ‘How to develop a successful inner brand in the context of a geographically peripheral area facing severe ecological, social and economic vulnerabilities?’. In the case study, area rural dwellers, entrepreneurs and representatives of institutions represent contrasting viewpoints on innovation, ecosystem coordination and economic progress, viewpoints that point to power issues on control over the natural environment, but also provide input for the development of a common strategic vision or connective storyline. This article provides a ‘tool’ for sustainable development in this vulnerable estuary and contributes to our understanding of how place branding – as a means to create place distinctiveness and attractiveness – can be combined with an endogenous approach in vulnerable peripheral areas. Such an approach fits with the EU objectives of sustainable, inclusive and smart growth and an increasing focus on place-based development.

European policy increasingly supports territorially based rural development in which local actors play a decisive role in realising economically, socially and ecologically responsible development. This paper makes use of four case-studies, from a largely depopulated mountainous area in Galicia, Spain, where local people strive to combine the creation of new businesses with the revitalisation of the natural resource base. The paper, in analysing local knowledge infrastructure and its interface with policy, reveals the dominant role of grassroots development initiatives in effecting regional learning and capacity building. Further it is acknowledged that in Galicia progress is brokered in practice by individual stakeholders who manage structural constraints, cross boundaries and construct new cross-cutting, bridging networks. It is also apparent that these niche-actors constitute a largely untapped reservoir of knowledge brokers that could be used much more effectively if more direct cooperation with policymakers and the existing knowledge infrastructure could be achieved.

The modernization of agricultural food production has diminished and is diminishing the sustainable use of the local natural resource base, resulting in the fragmentation of landscapes and the decline of biodiversity. In this paper we analyze the revitalization of ecological capital, which provides insights into how effective adjustments in land-use and farming practices can stimulate a reconnection between farming, nature and society. The paper focuses on a case study about endogenous knowledge on the relation between farm activities and the reproduction of the landscape and its flora and fauna in the (Dutch) Friesian Woodlands. We suggest that building adequate, local institutional frameworks that strengthen landscape structures, regional identity and the ‘branding’ of food products will sustain rural development in the area. The results should be of value for increasing the understanding among researchers and policymakers of the potential of endogenous knowledge in governing the increase of the ecological stock in an area