The civil economy of alternative food networks: what are markets good for?

Abstract Alternative Food Networks are an important reaction to the global food system, and an abundant literature already debates the nature and significance of these different ways of organizing the production and exchange of food. Much of this discussion pivots around whether AFNs offer an alternative to how the food system is organised by the market. Nonetheless, the very notion of what it means for an organisational form to be a market remains undertheorised; insofar as a market is that which these alternatives are alternative to, this is detrimental to the debate. This discussion paper challenges ways of using the word market, widespread in the debate on AFNs. It shows how scholarship on AFNs tends: a) to reproduce, in the very critique of neoliberalism, a neoliberal conception of the market, or b) to reproduce the assumption that the hegemony of such conceptions in the discipline of economics was a foregone conclusion of the nature of the discipline. A reconsideration of these assumptions can be facilitated by recourse to economic science – as first developed not in 18 th century Britain, but contemporaneously in the Kingdom of Naples. Thus, the paper encourages scholarship on AFNs to use the term market in a way which is simultaneously more precise and expansive, and to better situate such expansion in a larger history of economic ideas.