Do small food businesses enable small farms to connect to regional food systems? Evidence from 9 European regions

International audienceFor small farms across Europe, connecting to small food businesses offers a significant route to market. We analyse survey data from 85 small food businesses in nine European regions and explore the enabling and limiting conditions around this connectivity. We show how connectivity depends on context-based interrelationships among food system actors and consider the effects of these relations on small farm integration. Results show stronger connections when small food businesses are themselves farm-based. Weaker linkages are also apparent in the absence of public and social support. We argue that regional food systems can be enhanced by increasing small food businesses’ capacity to source from small farms, with the added benefit of increasing the viability of these small businesses

ANT and politics:working in and on the world

Actor-network theory (ANT) comes from Science, Technology and Society (STS), a discipline that is distinctive because it thinks theoretically through a rich tradition of qualitative case studies. This means that while it is possible to define ANT in a series of abstract bullet points, attempts to do so miss most of the point. Words aren’t enough. You need to practise it. For this reason this paper draws on an ANT-inflected ethnography of farming. For related reasons we also work dialogically, because in ANT theory doesn’t pre-exist, waiting to be applied. Instead it is created, recreated, explored and tinkered with in particular research practices. Hence we argue that ANT is best understood as a sensibility to features of the world that aren’t quite those of standard social science: to the heterogeneous materialities, relationalities and uncertainties of the practices that compose the world. And, as we have also tried to show, this is a sensibility that has political consequences. ANT works on the assumption that other worlds are possible, then it tries to articulate them. The hope is that if we can craft appropriate tools for articulation it will be possible to know and make space for different and better social arrangements