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Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is striking for its ideological flexibility, we argue that GODAN propagates an anti-political, neoliberal vision for how open data can enhance agricultural development. This approach centers values such as private innovation, increased production, efficiency, and individual empowerment, in contrast to more political and collectivist approaches to openness practiced by some agri-food social movements. We further argue that open agri-food data projects, in general, have a tendency to reproduce elements of “data colonialism,” extracting data with minimal consideration for the collective harms that may result, and embedding their own values within universalizing information infrastructures.
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GOVERNING URBAN AGRICULTURE : Formalization, Resistance and Re‐visioning in Two ‘Green’ Cities
Abstract As municipalities across the global North highlight urban agriculture as a marker of their ‘greenness’, how can we best understand how the spaces and practices of urban food production are governed? This article develops an analysis of urban agriculture as a complex site of governance in which numerous interests engage. We underscore the politics of governance, through which some actors resist the imposition of a narrowly normative and exclusive notion of urban agriculture and against which they envision and enact alternatives. The article contributes to efforts to transcend the often dichotomous framing of urban agriculture as radical or neoliberal, formal or informal, political or post‐political by employing ‘everyday governance’ and ‘everyday resistance’ as lenses through which to focus on the prosaic practices of engaging with, pushing back against, and stepping beyond the imposition of hegemonic models of urban agriculture. We argue that the co‐constitutive, ‘braided’ nature of urban agricultural governance is revealed through attention to the manifold forms of negotiation and resistance to formal urban agricultural governance. Moreover, our perspective highlights the ways that some practitioners are excluded by, challenge, or re‐vision formal definitions of urban agriculture. We draw on the cases of Portland, OR and Vancouver, BC to illustrate our argument.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1539750
- PAR ID:
- 10452188
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0309-1317
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 498-518
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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