The Micropolitics of Care: Exploring Municipal Support for Community-Based Food Assistance Initiatives in Amsterdam Noord

Reforms in state care provision have increased reliance on community initiatives to address food insecurity and poverty across high-income countries. Community-driven food assistance initiatives (FAIs) have emerged as spaces of ‘embodied care’, fostering trust, solidarity and reciprocity among volunteers and recipients. Yet while research often studies the care provided within FAIs, less attention has been paid to how their care practices are shaped by local governance. This article examines the micropolitics of care in Amsterdam Noord, asking how changes in municipal support for FAIs affected the type and quality of care provided by and through these initiatives, and their relationships with social welfare organizations (SWOs). It draws on in-depth interviews conducted in 2023–2024 with FAI recipients and volunteers, social workers, municipal staff, NGOs and funders. The findings show that FAIs provide more-than-food support through attentiveness, familiarity and shared lived experience, while also acting as trusted bridges to more institutional forms of care provided through local welfare provision. However, newly introduced funding requirements for FAIs risked institutionalising their otherwise informal and relational care practices by introducing standardization, conditionality and distance into volunteer–recipient and SWO–recipient interactions. Ambiguity surrounding these changes further threatened fragile relationships of trust between FAIs and SWOs, weakening bridges between embodied and institutionalized forms of care. The article contributes to sociological debates on recipient positioning, food charity, welfare governance and food justice by showing how welfare retrenchment is negotiated through everyday care relations, and how municipal support can both enable and undermine the care-full food justice potential of community-driven food assistance.