Other Examples and Cases

In writing Deepening Food Democracy, we did not attempt to comprehensively cover the entire range of participatory processes occurring across the U.S. and the globe.  However, to provide even more inspiration to implement deep democratic approaches in your work and lives as well as provide more examples to illustrate the broad range of applications of these approaches in diverse places, with different social, cultural, and political contexts, below are more examples to explore, that were referenced briefly throughout the report.

Projects and groups practicing, advocating, or embodying elements of deep democracy

  • 500k Voices
    • Large-scale survey in SW Washington
    • Found significant support for values of community, way of life over development, and value of environment vs. economic growth
    • http://www.500kvoices.org/results/
  • Center for Deliberative Democracy
    • “The Center for Deliberative Democracy, housed in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, is devoted to research about democracy and public opinion obtained through Deliberative Polling®.”
    • http://cdd.stanford.edu/
  • Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative
    • “The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s (DSNI) mission is to empower Dudley residents to organize, plan for, create and control a vibrant, diverse and high-quality neighborhood in collaboration with community partners.”
    • http://www.dsni.org/
  • The Farmer-to-Farmer Movement (El Movimiento Campesino-a-Campesino)
    • Explored in Eric Holt-Gimenez’s book, Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture (Oakland: FoodFirst Books)
  • The Food Dignity Project
    • “Food Dignity is a 5-year initiative to trace [paths to a brighter future] taken by five US communities and to collaborate in mapping and traveling the most appropriate and effective roads forward for creating sustainable community food systems that build food security. The Food Dignity team includes dozens of people at two universities, one “action-think” tank, one college, and five community-based organizations.”
    • http://fooddignity.org/
  • FoodFirst
    • “Food First envisions a world in which all people have access to healthy, ecologically produced and culturally appropriate food. After nearly 40 years of analysis of the global food system, we know that making this vision a reality involves more than technical solutions—it requires political transformation. That’s why Food First supports activists, social movements, alliances and coalitions working for systemic change.”
    • http://foodfirst.org/
  • The International Food Security & Nutrition Civil Society Mechanism
    • “The purpose of the CSM is to facilitate civil society participation in agriculture, food security and nutrition policy development at national, regional and global levels in the context of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS)… The CSM is an inclusive space open to all civil society organizations, with priority given to the organisations and movements of the people most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition, i.e. smallholder producers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous, urban poor, migrants, agricultural workers etc. The CSM is founded on the belief that the people most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition must be the agents of their own development, are best placed to represent their own interests and views and are not only victims but also bearers of solutions.”
    • http://www.csm4cfs.org/about_us-2/what_is_the_csm-1/
  • The Jefferson Center
    • “We envision a democracy where individuals interact genuinely with public institutions, elected officials, community organizations, and with one another to address common challenges. Our current work advances civic engagement and public deliberation on a range of issues including environment and climate, student civic leadership, patient safety in healthcare, and diversity and inclusion in public institutions.”
    • http://jefferson-center.org/
  • Participatory Budgeting in New York City
    • “Through Participatory Budgeting, residents of twenty-four Council Districts across the City are directly deciding how to spend $25 million of taxpayer money. From September 2014 to April 2015, community members are exchanging ideas, working together to turn ideas into project proposals, and voting to decide what proposals get funded.
    • http://pbnyc.org/
  • The Participatory Budgeting Project
    • “Our mission is to empower people to decide together how to spend public money. We create and support participatory budgeting processes that deepen democracy, build stronger communities, and make public budgets more equitable and effective. Building on decades of experience around the world, we understand participatory budgeting (PB) as a democratic process in which local people directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. We approach our work in three main ways: We build real power over real money; We transform democracy; We address inequality.”
    • http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/
  • Participedia
    • https://participedia.net/
    • “Anyone can join the Participedia community and help crowdsource, catalogue and compare participatory political processes around the world. All content on Participedia is collaboratively produced and open-source under a Creative Commons License.
      • Explore: Search, read, download and gain insight from our database of cases, methods, and organizations.
      • Create: Help improve the quality of this knowledge resource by editing existing content or publishing your own.
      • Teach: Use Participedia in the classroom as a tool to engage students and showcase their research.
  • Rural Coalition
    • “The Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural is an alliance of farmers, farmworkers, indigenous, migrant, and working people from the United States, Mexico, Canada, and beyond working together toward a new society that values unity, hope, people, and land. Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural is one of the most grassroots-oriented and culturally-diverse of rural organizations. With over 90 grassroots member organizations we serve as a critical advocacy voice of African-American, American-Indian, Asian-American, Euro-American, Latino, and women farmers, ranchers, farmworkers, and rural communities throughout the U.S.”
    • https://www.ruralco.org/
  • The US Food Sovereignty Alliance
    • “The US Food Sovereignty Alliance works to end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system. We believe all people have the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food, produced in an ecologically sound manner. As a US-based alliance of food justice, anti-hunger, labor, environmental, faith-based, and food producer groups, we uphold the right to food as a basic human right and work to connect our local and national struggles to the international movement for food sovereignty.”
    • http://usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org/

 

Case study collections and databases

Other resources and further reading

  • Arun Agrawal, Eva Wollenberg, and Lauren Persha, “Governing agriculture-forest landscapes to achieve climate change mitigation,” Global Environmental Change In press, November 7, 2014, doi: 1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.10.001
  • Sol Erdman and Lawrence Susskind, The Cure for Our Broken Political Process: How We Can Get Our Politicians to Resolve the Issues Tearing Our Country Apart (Dulles: Potomac Books, 2008).
  • Lawrence Susskind and Ella Kim, “Playing ‘serious games,’ adults learn to solve thorny real-world problems.” The Conversation: http://bit.ly/2opCnp4 .
  • Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, eds., Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (London: Verso, 2003).
  • Jesse Hardman, “Budgeting for the people: US cities let citizens divvy up funds,” Al Jazeera America, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/4/participatory-budgetinggivesresidentsasayinspendingcitymoney.html (accessed November 17, 2014).
  • International Journal of the Commons, http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/index
  • Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapieza, and Luigi Zingales, “Long-term Persistence,” (formerly, “Was Putnam Right?”), http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/sapienza/htm/putnam.pdf.
  • Alexa Kasdan and Susan Lerner, “Be Our Guest: Participatory budgeting gives voters a voice in government spending and could curb corruption,” New York Daily News, (April 22, 2013) http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/br-guest-participatory-budgeting-tool-corruption-article-1.1323640?localLinksEnabled=false (accessed November 17, 2014).
  • Tim Lang, David Barling, and Martin Caraher, Food Policy: integrating health, environment and society, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  • Frances Moore Lappe, Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life (San Francisco: Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2005).
  • Frances Moore Lappe, EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want (New York: Nation Books, 2013).
  • Josh Lerner, Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press).
  • Thomas Prugh, Robert Costanza, and Herman Daly, The Local Politics of Global Sustainability (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).
  • Hank Renting, Markus Schermer, and Adanella Rossi, “Building Food Democracy: Exploring Civic Food Networks and Newly Emerging Forms of Food Citizenship,” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19, no. 3 (2012): 289-307.
  • Hannah K. Wittman, Annette Aurelie Desmarais, and Nettie Wiebe, eds. Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2010).
  • Pedro Dal Bó, Andrew Foster and Louis Putterman,”Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy,” American Economic Review 100, no. 5 (2010): 2205-29.

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