Our Food Future: A regional food circularity case study from Canada

Abstract

In response to the socio-economic and environ­mental limitations of contemporary food systems, a multistakeholder group of community change­mak­ers came together to create Our Food Future, an ambitious effort that aimed to develop a region­al circular food system in the Guelph-Wellington region of Ontario, Canada. This study involved interviews with individuals (N = 35) who contrib­uted to the development and/or implementation of Our Food Future’s programming and projects in order to identify lessons learned from this munici­pally led circular economy initiative. In this article, we argue that the proponents of Our Food Future worked to leverage circular economy and municipal innovation discourses and practices to catalyze a sustainability transformation based in the local food system. Perceived enablers to success include the centrality of relationships and partnerships to the project design, collaborations across traditional city/county divides, the diversity of thought embodied by the workstream model, the focus on food as a locally relevant issue, and the municipal scale of intervention into policy and practice. We also observed that the municipal governance model operationalized in the project was itself an innova­tion. Our analysis indicates that Our Food Future represented systemic and enabling approaches to sustainability transformations, and that structural transformation will require ongoing efforts to fun­damentally change the socio-ecological context of contemporary food systems. This study functions as an early case study of regional food circularity initiatives, with the goal of enabling the project’s lessons to be applied to other locales in Canada and abroad.