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Lara Sibbing: Making it concrete and making it stick. Two steps for local governments to make food policy work
While eyes have long been on national governments when it comes to sustainable food security, the time has come to shift our gaze to local governments. Lara Sibbing draws on her experience of studying and developing food policy in the Netherlands to propose two steps that local governments can take to develop and implement effective food policies.
Local governments benefit from the knowledge of their place, and proximity to their community meaning that they can more easily engage citizens and develop tailored solutions. However this might raise high expectations on local governments to ‘fix’ food systems. Therefore it is important to acknowledge that there are also challenges, for example: how to design solutions that can contribute to healthier and more sustainable food systems?
Two possible answers are: i) by making food policies more concrete; and ii) by ensuring institutionalization into local government structures and processes.