Global city goes local? State ambitions and societal undercurrents of food localisation in Singapore

Ground-up (or bottom-up) initiatives serve to coalesce ideas and engender change that is socially attuned and responsive. This study examine ground-up food initiatives in Singapore that are creating discourses and enacting food practices to chart alternative pathways to food futures against the backdrop of state-dominant food security narratives and policies. Singapore is perhaps the quintessential city-state reliant on the global food trade and imports. In a policy shift, the state signalled a new ambitious goal of locally supplying 30% of its nutritional needs by 2030 under its “30-by-30” strategy. The developmental and technocentric approaches commonly employed are being extended into this unfamiliar terrain, as the state leads strategic policy initiatives and subsidises technological experimentation in food production. This main (and outsized) top-down narrative belies the undercurrents of societal practices of food localisation, explored in this paper through interviews with researchers and practitioners in ground-up food-related initiatives. The framework uses a relations-discourse-space triad to conceptualise ground-up food system change, including exploring the notion of space-in-absence. The triad is incorporated into a modified multi-level perspective framework in transitions theory to analyse the potential for sustaining ground-up food discourses and practices through transition processes. The framework is applied to Singapore’s ground-up initiatives in food sustainability and food rescue to examine the confluence of social relations, discourse and space in food localisation as active and productive elements in the country’s less-told food system transition processes.