Rome, a Policy without Politics: The Participatory Process for a Metropolitan Scale Food Policy

Urban Farm DB summary

A 2020 study of the process by which a local group of stakeholders drew up a proposal for a metropolitan-scale food policy for Rome, Italy, combining a network analysis of the bottom-up process — who took part, what was negotiated — with an analysis of the Roman food system and an overview of urban food policies in Italy. The authors' starting point is that although numerous food-related initiatives have appeared in Rome in recent years, they are unrelated to one another and lack coordination and political coherence. The analysis maps the actors and topics involved and identifies what a more comprehensive participatory process for a systemic metropolitan food strategy would require. As the title 'a policy without politics' indicates, the paper records a situation where participatory policy drafting advanced without the political backing needed to institutionalise it — evidence that a participatory process does not by itself deliver a policy.