This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective.
The book sparks the debate on food as a commons between and within disciplines, with particular attention to spaces of resistance (food sovereignty, de-growth, open knowledge, transition town, occupations, bottom-up social innovations) and organizational scales (local food, national policies, South–South collaborations, international governance and multi-national agreements). Overall, it shows the consequences of a shift to the alternative paradigm of food as a commons in terms of food, the planet and living beings.
Chapters 1 and 24 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Jose Luis Vivero-Pol is a Research Fellow on food governance and agri-food transitions at the Centre for the Philosophy of Law and the Earth and Life Institute, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. An agronomist and development worker with 20 years of experience in food security and nutritional policies, right to food, food sovereignty movements and biodiversity conservation schemes, mostly working in the Global South (Latin America, Africa and Asia). At present, he is working with the United Nations World Food Programme in Asia.
Tomaso Ferrando is Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Law School, UK. He has been Visiting Professor at the Universita' di Torino, Italy, and Universidad Externado de Colombia, Colombia, and Resident Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, USA. He is an active member of the Legal Action Committee of the Global Legal Action Network and the Extraterritorial Obligation Consortium.
Olivier De Schutter is Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, SciencesPo Paris, France, and the College of Europe, Natolin, Poland. He has been Visiting Professor at Yale, UCLA and Columbia universities in the USA. He is a member of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of the United Nations and Co-Chair of IPES-Food, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. Formerly, he was UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and the Chair of the EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights.
Ugo Mattei is Alfred and Hannah Fromm Professor in International Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, USA, and Professor of Civil Law at the University of Turin, Italy. Previously, he was Professor at the University of Trento, Italy, and Visiting Professor at Montpellier University, France, Berkeley, Macau, Yale, USA, and Cambridge, UK.
