Summer School: “Who is Governing the Global Food System?” (30 juin-2 juillet 2025)

Who is Governing the Global Food System?
A Joint RC40-RC17-ESRS PhD Summer School

Time: 30 June – 02 July 2025 (arrival on 29 June)
Venue : Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris – CUNP, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme,
54, Boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris
Organizers: Hilde Bjørkhaug (NTNU) and Allison Loconto (INRAE)
Senior Mentors [tbc]: Bruce Muirhead (Canada), Nadine Arnold (Switzerland), Sergio Schneider
(Brazil), Jess Duncan (The Netherlands), Paul Stock (US), Rachel Bezner-Kerr (US)
Eligibility Requirements: PhD students and post-docs up to three years following the PhD
Topic of the Summer School: Who is Governing the Global Food System?
In an attempt to govern problems that do not have an addressee, institutions, organizations, and
networks have evolved that seek to address, negotiate, and find solutions to major societal
challenges. Global governance has become a popular term for institutions, organizations, rules,
norms, and methods to guide and facilitate action. While ambitions for problem-solving and
development may be high, enforcement mechanisms are few.
One example that illustrates many global governance dilemmas is food security: We live in a world
with enough food for everyone if production, distribution, and allocation are distributed fairly and
justly. Although the international community has worked for global food security for eight decades,

the goal seems far off. The crises of recent decades have made us aware of the need for self-
sufficiency, shorter value chains, the value of independent suppliers of food to the markets, and the

importance of sustaining small food producers. At the same time, we observe that the concentration
of power in the system accelerates with support in the same crisis scenario. National policies enable
the exploitation of people and resources internationally to gain access to inputs such as feed, or
cheap precarious labor for seasonal work and also overlook the extreme concentration of power in
supply chains and food trade. Other examples are the governance of oceans, energy sufficiency, and
climate change – which are societal challenges that cannot be resolved at the national level only.
Indeed, food systems are inextricably linked to other systems in society that provide the energy,
biodiversity, transport and water needed to ensure that food can be eaten. The challenge of this
complex situation is that globally, there is little agreement on how the production, distribution and
allocation of the resources needed to create food can be governed – or even if it should be
governed. Thus, while much research provides statistics and metrics that tell us about food
availability and food insecurity, less knowledge is produced or disseminated on how food system
governance failures are produced, maintained through different forms of organization, and
justified.
This summer school critically engages in how global governance systems influencing food might
more efficiently address sustainability pathways that protect social and biophysical environments in
the Anthropocene, for the health and wellbeing of the present and future generations. Who is
governing global food systems? What levels of organization are emerging? What can we learn

from different schools of thought in the social sciences? How can we know that we are on a better
track?
We welcome theoretical, conceptual, and empirical papers that engage in the concepts of food
system governance, institutions, collective action, private / public collaboration at different levels of
governance, forms of organization, science-policy interfaces, epistemic communities, and knowledge
construction.

Applications should include:

1. CV
2. Cover letter explaining how this summer school will contribute to your career development
3. Abstract submitted to the ISA or ESRS Conference
4. Proof of submission from the ISA/ESRS platforms
   Please send applications to: hilde.bjorkhaug@ntnu.no and allison-marie.loconto@univ-eiffel.fr
   Deadline for application submissions: 19 February 2025
   Acceptance decisions announced: 28 February 2025

Conditions of participation:
This summer school is being organized in collaboration with the Research Committee for the
Sociology of Agriculture and Food (RC40), the Research Committee for Sociology of Organizations
(RC17) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and the European Society for Rural
Sociology (ESRS). With financial support from the European Union through its HorizonEurope funded
FOODPathS project (under grant agreement No 101059497), the Economics and Social Sciences
Department of the French Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) and the
Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris (CUNP), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
The summer school will be held in Paris from 30 June to 2 July 2025, which is the week before the
ISA’s 5th Forum of Sociology held in Rabat, Morocco and ESRS’s Conference in Riga, Latvia.
We would like to facilitate the participation of young scholars from around the world in either of
these two events. Therefore, one of the key selection criteria for participation in this summer school
is the acceptance of an abstract in one of these two conferences.

We are offering financing for staying in Paris during the summer school and will seek support for the
onward travel to Rabat or Riga. Please indicate your needs. We ask participants to seek co-funding
for their travel to Paris.

*** For those young scholars planning to attend the ISA Forum, please apply for a registration grant
through your RC, with the mention: RC40/RC17/ESRS summer school in Paris. ***

---

---