The blooming of local food councils across Europe and the Americas: Insights on an emerging literature and its divides

Local food councils (LFCs) have been studied through different lenses and different disciplines across the social sciences since their beginning in the 1980s in North America. Given their worldwide expansion, there is a need to assess the current state of knowledge on these local food councils and the potential differences between the North American literature and experiences and those anchored in other contexts, namely Europe and Brazil where they are also quite present. Based on a focused literature review, this paper suggests three analytical entrees that allow for the characterisation of research on local food councils: (i) their functions, in relation to their origins and degrees of institutionalisation; (ii) the way they address the participation and inclusion of various actors of the agri-food system, and especially of local communities and civil society and (iii) their framing of the agri-food transitions. This characterisation gives a richer view of the diversity of local food systems, beyond the most well-known cases of North American food policy councils, which results in a new typology of these experiences, articulating their origins, degrees of institutionalisation and their sets of functions (advising, advocating for change, experimenting, networking, etc.). Moreover, our analysis shows that the way local food councils address the issues of participation and inclusion and frame the agri-food transitions as well as their functions depend upon their specific trajectories and national contexts, and that the way these aspects are tackled by the literature differs across the three world regions included in our review (North America, Brazil and Europe). We overall observe a persistent lack of consideration of power relations and imbalances, of the right to food as well as of systemic perspectives to agri-food transitions. This minimizes local food councils’ potential for promoting and acting to a thick food democracy and for supporting just ecological transitions. Finally, we identify some priorities for further research and action-research such as the need to include more “informal” as well as more rural cases and identify their specificities. • Including Europe and Brazil in the scope reveals a wider diversity in LFCs. • Rural LFCs are less visible: they are often unformal and far from research centres. • LFCs are promising arenas for thickening food democracy under certain conditions. • Ecological transition is often overlooked despite a general call for sustainability. • Including in effective ways marginalized voices and groups is a shared difficulty.