Rethinking Leadership in Scholarship for Agroecological Transformation.
In this article, Colin Anderson grapples with the notion of “leadership” and the grievances that some people have with this term. He examines the meaning of leadership in agroecological transitions, questioning how power, hierarchy, and authority shape collective action among researchers and movements. He argues that transformative leadership balances individual and collective agency while centering care, vulnerability, and mutual support to advance just and democratic food systems. These ideas are being explored in the UVM Institute for Agroecology’s inaugural Global Agroecology Leadership Program, where participants are examining how to navigate tensions between working within institutions while resisting hierarchical relations, potentially, through a practice of agroecological leadership.
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Lately, I’ve found myself in several conversations where people have questioned the very notion of leadership: whether we need leaders or leadership at all, or whether “leadership” is the right language to use. At the heart of these questions lies a concern with the concentration of power in privileged individuals, hierarchy, and the coercive rather than consensual approach to leadership that often accompanies positional authority.
Indeed, mainstream approaches to leadership, as developed through corporate leadership traditions, academic leadership steeped ivory-towerism, and mainstream culture more generally, reproduce these dynamics of oppression in informal groups and large institutions alike. It is valid and deeply important to critically question leadership – which is what a group of us in the IFA Global Agroecology Leadership Program is embarking on over the next year.
Is leadership the right language to use? What is an approach to leadership that reflects the values of food sovereignty and agroecology? If we reject leadership altogether, how do we move forward? In what direction, and through what process? What is the role of individuals with distinct gifts, and of collectives with their complex, vital intelligence and agency? How can we know where we’re going, or get there, without some form of leadership– whether it’s held by an individual using authoritarian methods, shared collectively in an anarchist tradition, or, more likely (in my view), some approach that transgresses this binary between individual and collective leadership?
Perhaps it is not leadership itself that some people balk at, but rather the idea of the leader as an individual identity or position. Often modeled on the “heroic” leader: male, white, and embodying traits that concentrate power and stifle transformation, this top-down leadership style has proven to be highly problematic, in concentrating power and exacerbate inequity.
Mainstream notions of leadership and traditional training often reinforce this pattern, for example by teaching leaders to cultivate “executive presence” or adopt behaviors that project an appearance of confidence and authority over others. This is clearly not the kind of leadership the world needs now, and certainly not the kind aligned with transformative agroecology. Yet this model dominates in the mainstream. And, traces of this approach persist, even within agroecological movements, institutions and leaders that claim to reject it.
Yet, we need change, and fast. The dire state of the world expressed through the ecological crisis, deepening inequality, a culture of extraction, war and violence, and the inertia of the systems that sustain them. Yet, it is hard to think about moving things in a new direction without some practice of leadership? Not a practice of leadership that pulls everyone toward a single person’s vision, but a collective process that brings together the gifts of individuals and the agency of groups, rooted in strong values and commitments to a better world. Leadership, in this sense, is not about an individual only giving direction, but creating direction together.
Agroecological Leadership in Hierarchical and Anti-Hierarchical Spaces
The challenge is that most mainstream systems (the ones we are trying to change), from business and politics to academia, are hierarchies. In these settings, individual leaders are typically elevated precisely because they’ve learned to navigate and thrive within deeply hierarchical and unequal structures. That doesn’t mean that all leaders within these systems are problematic. On the contrary, many are working both within and against hierarchy, leveraging positional authority to access decision-making spaces, redirect resources, and open cracks for transformation. Universities, for instance, might only become sites for radical work if people inside them work strategically to carve out space for alternative ways of knowing and being. The question is how to engage with these systems without becoming them.
I’m sure many of us have been exposed to leaders who, by virtue of positional authority, violate principles of collective action and democracy, taking decisions that are harmful, transactional, instrumental and based on logics solely of squeezing productivity out of people, gaining prestige and growth.
On the other hand, I’ve been part of groups that reject not only leadership but resist what I would consider to be collective, shared or distributed leadership. That is to say, that some people in these situations resist adopting structured processes and agreements on ways of work and they militate against acknowledging the importance of the individual and reject the notion of giving authority to people who hold ownership over areas or domains of the work. I’ve seen this done with claims of a loose commitment to non-hierarchy. Perhaps you have too?
Yet, in these spaces where there’s often no shared sense of direction, few agreed upon ways of working, and little capacity to navigate conflict, things generally stall or fumble, and don’t move us towards just transformation. Further, I have often seen that the people with the most privilege (again often male-identifying, white) tend to thrive in these spaces, here too. To me, these kinds of situations reflect not only the absence of a leader, but the absence of leadership: which can as much be a collective, distributed process where groups and organisations gain agency based on common agreements, ethics and vision.
Between these poles, there are spaces of creativity where groups are experimenting with shared or distributed leadership, trying to open up autonomous and democratic space while still “working the hierarchy” from within. This is delicate and difficult work, and it’s not everyone’s cup or tea nor does it align with everyone’s theory of change. But for some, it’s a necessary strategy.
To Lead or Not to Lead
This brings us back to the core question: Do we need leaders and leadership, and if so, what kind? What practices, values, and ethics can make leadership (or whatever we call it) genuinely transformative? For me, I see the need to balance individual and collective agency, bring care, vulnerability and compassion to the center. It requires a commitment to hard work, nurturing each other to excel and self-actualize as individuals while also attending to the mission of the groups, movements and organizations we’re involved in. Lots of tension, complexity, and contradictions in there! But, this is the way.
Many people have been grappling with this, within and beyond agroecology. At IFA, we’ve been exploring these questions through a careful reading of the leadership literature together, engaging in collective inquiry, and having conversation with people working within universities who are asking: What does leadership look like for agroecology, food systems transformation, and food sovereignty, especially from within academic institutions?
This is the terrain we’re exploring in our inaugural IFA Global Agroecology Leadership Program. Together, we’re wrestling with these tensions: How to engage with institutions without becoming them, how to act within hierarchies without reproducing them, how to co-direct rather than command, how to distribute power in our work while also building power in hierarchies.
As the coordinators of the program, we’ve been reading the book, A Third University Is Possible, which is based on a critique of the first university which is charachterized as dominated by neoliberal, extractive, colonial logics. It calls for envisioning and claiming a “third university”, a decolonial process, that is continually being co-created within and beyond the first university.
The book challenges us to think about how to repurpose the colonial “machines” of the university toward decolonial futures, drawing on radical traditions of education, organizing and world-making (often led by the thinking of women, BIPOC and queer thinkers, feminist organizers and activists). Might we similarly imagine a “third university leadership” that moves beyond heroic individualism and hierarchy, and instead whose role is to harness collective energies and capacities to strategically repurposes the resources, infrastructures, and ideas of the university for agroecological transformation and food sovereignty?
Over the next year, we will explore this together along with a group of 19 colleagues working in different academic settings spread across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia. We are coming together in a process of co-inquiry, a participatory action research process. Our aim is to deepen our understanding and practice of courageous leadership in this troubling moment in history. This kind of leadership embraces complexity, is collective and critical, and is rooted in care and accountability. It is oriented toward an emergent process of equitable transformation rather than a path predetermined by heroic leaders.
We hope this is the first year of an ongoing annual process of building capacity for this kind of leadership, and strengthening a global network of committed people and networks working together for change.
We have selected some readings and podcasts, below, that we have found inspiring in our co-learning thus far for your reading pleasure:
- Intercultural Leadership: An Indigenous Perspective in a Multicultural World. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-38129-5_16
- Armored vs. Daring Leadership (Part I and Part II)
- ActionAid’s Ten Principles of Feminist Leadership