As described in the previous section, although the three regimes were grown one after another, changes never appeared in a linear manner. However, I embrace the idea that a realistic understanding can be reached by using an innovative mix of factual evidence and affective experiences, drawn from my own reflections as well as from those involved in this practice and research. While there were clear differences in the specifics of stakeholders, in their activities and the outcomes from these, by applying the integrative framework as ‘a tool of insight’ within the UCL case study, three emergent themes have been identified in each one of its three distinct, yet interlinked stages, namely, strategic planning, commoning dynamics and commoning outcomes and evaluation (See Table 4.2). This in turn provided the base to reveal a model that has emerged from the case study.
Stages of growing a commons food regime with the UCL case study
1� Strategic planning 2� Commoning dynamics 3� Commoning outcomes and evaluation
•
Global citizenship and local participation•
Sustaining and widening engagement•
Continuity and variations•
Conducting an urban food festival•
Enacting an urban food movement•
Publishing a radically different cookbook•
A ground-breaking festival•
It’s hard to assess the impacts of the movement•
Cookbooks are the history of an epochEmergent themes
•
Exercisinginstitutional entrepreneurship
•
Forming core groups and key partners•
Articulating inclusive framing and communication•
Mapping spaces and places for commoning•
Embracing embedded learning routes and mobilising diverse food knowledge•
Expanding the meanings and practices of the commons•
Balancing multi- evaluation mechanisms•
Facilitating multi-loop and multi-level learning (for both food knowledge and commoning)•
Ensuring the continuity and quality of growingTable 4�2 Emergent themes at each stage of growing a commons food regime in practice at UCL
Firstly, three key themes are identified in the stages of strategic planning, including exercising institutional entrepreneurship, forming core groups and key partners, and articulating inclusive framing and communication. Unlike the concept of leadership and entrepreneurship broadly recognised in the literature, exercising institutional entrepreneurship refers to the ‘embedded agency’ and “activities of actors who have an interest in particular institutional arrangement and who leverage resources to create
191 new institutions or to transform existing ones” (Maguire et al., 2004:657). UCL as
an established institution has certain rules, norms and beliefs. On the one hand, for navigating change, what we attempted from the outset was to capture any kind of window of opportunity, explore and elaborate resources and capacity, arising from the institution in which we are located. On the other hand, the existence of a policy framework that legitimised our actions at higher levels of decision making also helped cross-scale management. Therefore, exercising institutional entrepreneurship emphasises how we organised ourselves to resolve tensions and challenges related to this embedded agency with continuity and variations.
The next crucial theme was to form core groups and key partners with the ‘right’ combination. In part this would be based on previous social networks, people and organisations we had already known, but also on a certain kind of risk-taking in working with newcomers, who should at least have a basic level of shared values, mutual trust and respect, commitment and capacity. Within this self-organising process, we were willing to explore and experiment with different ways of working together and took responsibility for the decisions and actions we carried out on behalf of the initiatives involved.
Articulating inclusive framing and communication took place when we decided the titles of the initiatives in order to make them more relevant, useful and responsive, not only for all stakeholders’ needs, but also for achieving the wider scope of participation, and opening up people’s imagination. Furthermore, we employed a kind of care-based communication, meaning that we aimed to be the best ambassadors of our values and beliefs by being ourselves, communicating with people with an open mind and above all, being active in listening to and appreciating others whenever possible.
Secondly, instead of a linear sequence, three interacting elements were particularly important and constituted the stages of commoning dynamics: mapping places and spaces for commoning, embracing embedded learning routes and mobilising diverse food knowledge, and expanding the meanings and practices of the commons. Learning, as I did from the investigation of the current landscape of community food initiatives in London, I found out that the term commons was not familiar to most of the study participants I spoke to, even though they found the term relevant to what they were doing on the ground. On the contrary, the power of food was well expressed and demonstrated in a variety of ways. Therefore, taking these two distinct attributes together, we endeavoured to expand the meanings and practices of the commons by mapping places and spaces for commoning and embracing embedded learning routes and mobilising diverse food knowledge. More specifically, mapping places and spaces were aimed to optimise the possibilities of change through designing new institutions, rules of games and patterns of behaviour, even though it was mostly informally. We also paid special attention to networks of actors and actants and tried to engage with food agencies innovatively. In turn, we have discovered, claimed, created and connected places and spaces, local and global, natural and cultural, physical and virtual, at
different levels, scales, and contexts, with a focus on a variety of power relations among stakeholders involved.
Inspired by the food sovereignty movement, embracing embodied learning routes and mobilising diverse food knowledge was meant to create epistemic communities, where knowledge is shared and generated, not only focusing on knowledge itself but also the process of identifying and establishing it. Our commitment to having genuine
collaboration between the university and communities was a clear example. We preferred to ‘preach’ the notion of a commons food regime through our actions – by actually growing it together. The basic assumption was that once people experienced the growing process, they would start to see the world through the lens of the commons, and to a large extent they would naturally apply that perspective to their everyday lives and in some cases, they might even begin to rethink what might constitute the elements of a new kind of society. In so doing, we have extended the varieties of the commons from not only focusing on common-pool resources but also looking at public goods (e.g. public spaces, public services, knowledge, cultural/natural heritage), club and toll goods (e.g. redistributing benefits of membership), and even private goods (e.g. seeds, crops, cooked food and recipes, facilities, tools, private properties). We also helped people to realise that growing a commons food regime can have multifaceted dimensions – a refreshing discourse and language, a philosophy of political economy, an experiential, practical and even spiritual way of being, or a set of values, attitudes and a worldview. Finally, the last stage of growing a commons food regime was commoning outcomes and evaluation, which also consisted of three key themes: balancing multi-evaluation mechanisms, facilitating multi-loop and multi-level learning (for both food knowledge and commoning), and ensuring the continuity and quality of growing. While it is important, for all stakeholders to agree upon a set of clear parameters for growing a commons food regime, in practice we sometimes had to alter the process of growing a commons food regime to accept different outputs and outcomes from the original aims and objectives. This was due to the occasional uncertainties, conflicts and contradictions associated with collective action in a complex world. Acknowledging that conflicting differences between stakeholders were not negatives to be eliminated but diverse values to be recognised was helpful in developing a balanced view in terms of evaluation. For example, our funders recognised that we were breaking new ground, so they were more flexible with the terms and conditions of their funding.
One of the key factors that allowed us to continue the journey was a more inclusive and long-term perspectives from those involved, either funders or study participants, in the sense that no-one was blamed for changing trajectories and failed goals. What really mattered to us was that we had multiple monitoring and evaluation mechanisms (e.g. evaluation from UCL Public Engagement Unit, from partnering community organisation, core team internal evaluation and my own reflections) that would help us assess whether people involved had gained an adaptive capacity to learn and to organise themselves to make our food systems more sustainable.
This led to the second theme: facilitating multi-loop and multi-level learning (for both food knowledge and commoning). We understood the importance of a learning culture and a learning organisation which allowed the freedom to experiment and innovate without concern about making mistakes. Therefore, rather than keeping our learning and knowledge restricted to a handful of individuals and groups, we adopted a large number of methods (see section 4.2) to facilitate multi-level (e.g. individuals, action groups, organisations, and networks) and multi-loop learning (single-loop, double- loop and triple-loop; see Table 2.5) for the complexity of food knowledge and actual process of practice. To this end there has been a variety of learning reports and reflective accounts produced by our projects, together with conferences, seminars and workshops. We were also continuously building and nurturing networks of communication,
bridging organisations on the edge, creating mutual trust and mutual support and above all, through everyday practices such as growing, cooking and sharing, we provided
193 the conditions for learning and exchanging knowledge about growing a commons
food regime.
Lastly, we come to the third theme of this stage, which refers to ensuring the continuity and quality of growing, including being aware of historicity, reflection, forward thinking and co-evolution, all of which was underlined by the concept of time. Despite the non-linearity of the three commons food regimes, it was a journey which had a clear beginning, middle and the end, although the end later became another beginning (i.e. the journey ending is the journey beginning). It was a series of critical decisions that we made from several possible alternatives that determined a particular development of our journey. Although we are a product of a particular time in history, in our case study, we were able to step back and reflect on what we were doing and consider alternative routes forward. In this sense, all people involved in the case study were revealed to co- evolve with a wider system. To a large extent, growing a commons food regime is like creating virtuous circles whenever and wherever possible.
The examination of the processes by which stakeholders became engaged in the case study revealed an emergent model of enabling, facilitation, coordination and communication. Informed by the case study, we realised that each commons food regime, like all human organisations, contains both designed and emergent structures in the evolutionary process, which echo the statement that human beings are both the product and the designer of the system they live in. This human-oriented perspective argues for a different approach to managing organisations with the notion of enabling conditions and infrastructures (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). These enabling conditions and infrastructures may also include political, social, cultural, psychological and technical aspects which are needed at a variety of levels and scales, and over a long period of time. Thus, in addition to holding a vision of a new way of life, one of the most significant challenges for growing a commons food regime was how to bring together ‘appropriate’ enabling conditions and infrastructures that can allow us to establish “deliberate processes which encourage reflection and observation”, encourage “opportunities for communication and persuasion among social actors” (Armitage, 2008:25) and reclaim the self-organisation adaptive capacities of citizens and communities to experiment and innovate, and through this, offer alternatives to shape the very essence of life.
From this specific note, we now move to a discussion of implications of this emergent model from the case study for growing a commons food regime through a community food initiative in London.