In this blog, originally published in the Rooted Magazine, authors Jessica Milgroom and Josh Brem-Wilson reflect on how communities and cultures have developed informal policies that are based on a shared set of values, which play a crucial role in shaping food systems. In fact, these are in some ways stronger than formal policies as they become part of the norms and fabric of society whereas policies often don’t.
The term ‘policy’ conjures up the idea of a written document: a law, or formal regulations meant to guide people’s behaviour that have been explicitly drafted by so-called ‘policymakers’. However, there is also a world of informal policies that guide people’s everyday behaviour that is neither written nor necessarily explicit: norms, tacit rules, customs and practices. These informal policies shape our diverse food systems.
Informal policies are based on a set of values. They are upheld and enacted through individual and collective adherence to these values and a social system of collective accountability, rather than through a system of punishment and top-down policing. Relationships are central to the way that informal policy influences people’s day to day behaviour.
Informal policies in agroecology
Agroecology is about collectively building food systems that take care of people, the earth and all of its creatures. It is grounded in place-based knowledge that has sometimes been transmitted over many generations, and it locates power in the hands of people who are in direct contact with the land and with food growing, gathering and tending.
The agroecological stewardship of land is governed by tacit norms based on the values of reciprocity, care and place.
The agroecological stewardship of land, water, seeds and soil is governed by various tacit norms, rules and customs based on the values of inclusivity and care, as well as respect for and relationship with place. In agroecology, what happens in the food system – from the farm, forest or ocean to the plate and beyond – is largely determined by informal policies.
Informal ‘policies’ in agrarian or hunter-gatherer food cultures were often – and sometimes continue to be – based on values of solidarity and reciprocity. In many places, these values emerged from Indigenous cosmologies that explain people’s place on this planet in relation to the spirit world and their sacred responsibility to take care of it and of each other. This resulted in social safety networks that ensured access to food and water for current as well as future generations.
For example, in many cultures, customs of sharing water were based on practices that ensured that everyone had and would continue to have sufficient clean water. This general code of conduct was transmitted to children as values (“don’t use more water than you need”) or traditional practices dictating how many hours of irrigation water each plot in a particular watershed should receive.
Despite the fact that it is against the law to exchange seeds in many countries, people all over the world continue to save and share their seeds. Photo: Jessica Milgroom
How informal policies change
Informal policies emerge through experimentation and evolution over time. They are unique to a certain location and culture or group of people. When small, incremental changes in a system are made, the informal policies that govern individual and collective behaviours gradually change. But these informal policies can also shift rapidly in response to a changing environment, such as a strongly enforced formal policy or the increasing scarcity of land and water.
Today, due to the pervasive extractive and individualistic nature of capitalism, many informal policies governing the stewardship of land and water in rural areas are no longer explicitly based on solidarity and reciprocity and social groups may not enact collective stewardship for a particular location.
However, a group of people with shared food values may instead come together around community-based sites of agroecology such as a social movement or a farmer’s market. These are important spaces for the reproduction of informal policies of agroecology, even if they are not land-based or place-based.
Formal and informal interactions
Although some informal policies provide a basis for (and are eventually codified into) formal policies, many remain informal. The interaction between informal and formal policies – or what people do in the day to day – is thus also extremely relevant in shaping what happens in practice.
Often, informal policies defy the capitalist logic of immediate economic benefit.
Coexisting informal and formal policies sometimes align, but they may also be opposed to each other. Often, informal policies defy the capitalist logic of immediate economic benefit. For example, in agroecological systems, farmers will often choose costlier, more labour-intensive ways to fertilise their fields for the sake of nurturing the soil, even if formal policies promote chemical fertilisers.
Formal policies are an important way to open new horizons for agroecology, and to facilitate the scaling up and out of agroecological practices via structural or economic incentives or through providing access to knowledge. However, in conversations about policies for agroecology, we must not forget the multitude of existing and evolving informal policies based on anti-capitalist values that give primacy to maintaining and reviving agrarian and food cultures, and to long-term relationships with the land and with each other.
Even in a formal policy environment hostile to agroecology, fostering and reproducing informal policies of care for others and for the earth in the food system can go a long way, whether you are a farmer, an eater or a policymaker.
Authors: Jessica Milgroom works at the Institute for Sociology and Peasant Studies at the University of Córdoba. and Josh Brem-Wilson works at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University, UK. Both authors are part of the Agroecology Now! group. This contribution emerged from conversations about a masters course on ‘Policies and Institutions’ at CAWR and draws on work by academic and nonacademic authors and thinkers.