Transformative urban food governance: how municipal staff coordinating urban living labs navigate politics, administration and participation

Cities are crucial settings for initiating efforts at instigating sustainable and just food system transformations. While municipalities worldwide are increasingly active in food policymaking for such change, the ability of municipal staff to carry out governance tasks is scarcely studied. This study examines the experiences of municipal staff mandated by an EU-funded project to coordinate urban living labs (ULLs) as sites of urban food governance in European cities. Drawing on action research with 18 staff members from 10 municipalities between 2021 and 2024, this article explores the challenges they face and their strategies for addressing these challenges. We observe that local politics and administrative dynamics significantly frustrate staff's ability to coordinate ULLs. In response, they regularly act politically simply to get their project tasks done, using soft skills and political savviness to align ULL goals with existing politics and policies, and to more explicitly advocate for sustainable food system change. Municipal staff seek to leverage public participation for advocacy goals. Because public participation is, as a result, viewed as an extension of political and administrative logics, its food justice potential can be limited. This paper underscores the political and powerful role of municipal staff in urban food governance and suggests that future action research should pragmatically support them while critically interrogating state led change in light of justice and sustainability ambitions.