Pathways to transformation: institutionalizing urban agriculture in a Montréal borough

Around the world, cities and their residents are experimenting with innovations for social and ecological sustainability, sowing the seeds of good Anthropocenes. Although such seed initiatives tend to operate at society’s margins, some successfully embed their innovations into new or existing regimes. This process, which is called institutionalization, is deemed crucial for accelerating transformations and ensuring the persistence of change, yet little is known about how institutionalization unfolds. Our study aimed to deepen empirical understanding of the dynamics of institutionalization by exploring how seed initiatives interact with other actors and interventions to institutionalize innovations in the pursuit of transformative visions and goals. We conducted a qualitative case study in Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles, a borough in the city of Montréal, Canada where urban agriculture became more strongly institutionalized following the local government’s enactment of an urban agriculture policy in 2019. Through semi-structured interviews with 46 governmental and non-governmental actors, we discovered that government-supported interventions, including policies, can significantly bolster transformation. When these interventions are effectively designed in collaboration with a diverse community of change-makers, they make space for synergies between actors and resources, thereby supporting the flourishing of seed initiatives. Our findings revealed that institutionalization is not a linear process, but rather an iterative and dynamic process that can span every phase of transformation. In Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles, institutionalization and experimentation were mutually reinforcing processes. Our results challenge prevailing notions of actors’ roles, for example by demonstrating that governments, too, can be seed actors, conducting their own innovative experiments. This study offers an alternative, more nuanced, explanation of how institutionalization relates to sustainability transformations through an empirical case-study in an urban local context.