Alternative to what? Reassessing Northern AFNs through a Southern Lens

Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) are frequently presented as socially and environmentally transformative responses to the industrial agri-food system. However, less attention has been paid to the historical, epistemological, and political assumptions through which “alternativeness” itself is constructed and legitimised, particularly within European and Global North contexts. Drawing on a decolonial analytical lens inspired by Southern perspectives, this article examines how alterity is conceptualised and enacted across nine AFN initiatives in Trentino, northern Italy, including solidarity economy networks, community-supported agriculture initiatives, fair-trade organisations, food cooperatives, and community-based projects. Based on qualitative fieldwork combining in-depth interviews, field observations, and documentary analysis, the study explores how AFNs negotiate sustainability, solidarity, governance, and food system transformation within wider institutional and market-oriented environments. The findings show that AFNs generate meaningful openings for collective organisation, ecological learning, participatory governance, and solidarity-based exchange, while simultaneously remaining shaped and contained by regulatory frameworks, certification regimes, economic pressures, and uneven organisational capacities. Rather than understanding AFNs as either transformative ruptures or co-opted extensions of dominant food systems, the article argues that alterity emerges through situated, relational, and contested processes. In this sense, AFNs in the Global North are interpreted as spaces where partial openings and socio-ecological experimentation coexist with broader structures of coloniality, capitalist market relations, and institutional constraint. The article contributes to debates on decolonial food studies, the limits of alternative food systems, and sustainability by advancing a relational understanding of alterity within Northern agri-food contexts.