Caring about food insecurity: Exploring the micropolitics of civil society, municipality and research efforts to address food insecurity in urban food sustainability

Food insecurity is persistent in European cities. Beyond hunger, it often means that people rely on less nutritious, cheaper, and unsustainable foods due to limited income. It has significant physical and mental health impacts and is a matter of justice, disproportionately affecting people in marginalized positions and intersecting with inequalities related to housing, migration, gender, race, and class. Despite increasing attention within urban food sustainability efforts, food insecurity figures have not improved, raising questions about the effectiveness of existing responses. This dissertation explores the micropolitics of sustainability-oriented civil society, municipality, and research efforts addressing urban food insecurity. It asks how such efforts might contest the structures underpinning food insecurity, or, by contrast, contribute to its (re)production despite their ambitions. Central to this is the argument that care in urban food insecurity governance is key to contesting injustices without simultaneously reproducing them. The research draws on three empirical contexts. First, it examines community food initiatives in Amsterdam Noord and their relationships with the municipality, showing how they provide embodied, relational, and attentive forms of care, while being constrained by funding relations and institutional dynamics. Second, it includes action research with municipal staff across European cities coordinating participatory policy experimentation, highlighting how their work is shaped and restricted by local political decision-making, even as they act politically to enable change. Third, it studies EU-funded research and project contexts, showing how justice is often reduced to participation and shaped by funding dynamics that risk hollowing out its meaning. Across these contexts, four recurring sites of micropolitics are identified: accountability, formality, collaboration, and participation. These are sites of tension through which efforts to address urban food insecurity are both enabled and constrained. Accountability can privilege measurable outputs over lived experience, formality can limit change by aligning with the status quo, collaboration is difficult to sustain across fragmented systems, and participation often remains tokenistic without redistribution of power. Rather than offering straightforward solutions, this dissertation shows that urban food insecurity governance is marked by tensions through which food insecurity is both reproduced and contested. A micropolitics perspective makes these tensions visible and helps to understand what is at stake in efforts to address food insecurity. Across the cases studied, civil society, municipality, and research actors are often entangled in the very structures that sustain food insecurity, yet they also engage in everyday practices that push against dominant ways of working. Attending to these practices highlights how moving from careless systems towards more care-full approaches requires supporting and expanding such efforts, while recognising the structural conditions that shape what is possible.