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Abstract

The policy mobilities framework aims to understand the things, spaces, moments and people that contribute to the diffuse, non-linear and power-laden processes involved in the circulation and mobilization of ideas in cities. Recent contributions work to strengthen the framework’s ability to capture the role of social movements and civil society members therein, notably when it comes to the mobilities of counterhegemonic ideas. Here, we investigate the circulation of agroecology in Madrid, Spain, using a combination of participatory and non-participatory observations, semi-directed interviews and documentary research. Our results highlight a dual role played by movement actors in the circulation of the agroecological framework: on the one hand, they disseminate the project while, on the other, they protect its transformational imaginary by limiting its circulation. These results attest to the contribution of ordinary practices and spaces in the dissemination and infiltration of counterhegemonic ideas, as well as to a wide range of new ideas and practices arising from a social movement’s interactions with local administrations.

Keywords

policy mobilities agroecology urban food policies social movements

Introduction

The policy mobilities framework draws analytical attention to the processes and power dynamics behind the accelerated circulation of policy models, metrics, and frameworks between and within cities, while paying particular attention to the situated and specific nature of their subsequent adoption, adaptation, and operationalization (Baker and Temenos, 2015; Jacobs, 2012; McCann and Ward, 2010, 2012, 2012b, 2013; Peck, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010; Temenos and Baker, 2015). Building on (and away from) the work of political scientists interested in the knowledge transfer process (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996), research on policy mobilities has homed into the plurality of things, spaces and actors making up the informational infrastructure supporting ideas mobilities (McCann, 2011; Silva and Ward, 2024). Several studies focus on the role played by actors such as educators, professional organizers, supralocal policy organizations, as well as popular media as they “interpret, frame, package, and represent information” (McCann, 2011: 114). Doing so, they stress the influence of formal spaces like study tours, conferences, and award ceremonies (Andersson and Cook, 2019) and elite “transfer agents” (Baker et al., 2020).

Recently, policy mobilities studies have begun to look beyond “the power of hegemonic institutions in circulating their policy models” (McCann and Duffin, 2023: 85). Some highlight the role that social movements can play in contesting policy models (Lauermann and Vogelpohl, 2019). Others stress the influence of civil society and social movements in the circulation of ideas (McFarlane, 2011; Temenos, 2016). Baker et al. (2020), for instance, describe the practices of non-elites in bringing forward harm reduction policies, while distinguishing practices of collaboration, convergence, disobedience and display. These studies complement both a rich literature on social movements as “signifying agents” (Benford and Snow, 2000; Cefaï and Trom, 2020), and extensive work on internationalism and translocalism in social movements (Furukawa Marques and Lagier, 2022; McFarlane, 2009).

Nevertheless, new insights are needed to better conceptualize the contribution of social movements to the myriad discursive, political, and material processes involved in policymaking and in the transnational production and circulation of ideas. Bringing social movements into the policy mobilities framework, we suggest, is particularly useful in drawing attention to the circulation and infusion of a broader range of ideas, notably those that are counterhegemonic. According to McCann and Duffin (2023), counterhegemonic ideas can be distinguished by their questioning of political orthodoxies. They “stem from and facilitate visions of alternative, more just futures” (p. 85) and their circulation involves the “resistances, disruptions and alternative pathways used in activism for policy reform by people in disparate locations” (Temenos, 2017: 585).

In this article, we examine the processes by which one such idea, agroecology, has emerged as a frame of action in the policy and sociopolitical landscapes of Madrid. We begin by introducing agroecology and its diffusion, as well as our methodology. We then explore the dual role played by the social movement in the circulation of the agroecological framework as they simultaneously disseminate their political project and limit its circulation. The case of Madrid, we argue, elucidates the contribution of ordinary spaces and practices in the circulation of counterhegemonic ideas, as well as the range of social movement actions involved in their institutionalization.

Agroecology as an idea in motion

Agroecology has historically been associated with rurality and peasant social movements (Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2012), and with context-specific practices that restore key ecological functions in agricultural spaces (Altieri, 1995). The concept has evolved, however, to become a frame of reference for efforts to transform not only agriculture, but also food systems and societies more broadly (Anderson and Maughan, 2021; Francis et al., 2003; Giraldo and Rosset, 2023; Gliessman, 2016; Stassart et al., 2012).

In recent years, agroecology has become increasingly widespread and institutionalized (Wezel et al., 2009, 2020). Various authors have begun to study the rise and circulation of agroecology as a frame of reference. For instance, Bellon and Ollivier (2018) analyzed the use of agroecology as a “flagship word” in France. Loconto and Fouilleux (2019) examined how the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) via its Global Dialogue sessions has rendered agroecology a stable, defined, and delimited object. Lamine et al. (2019) described how agroecology came to be included in public policies of France and Brazil, while Ajates Gonzalez et al. (2018) compared how agroecology was defined in French and U.K. policies. These studies converge in highlighting the differentiated agency of stakeholder groups (farmers, social movements and civil society, government employees, researchers, NGOs, etc.) as well as the importance of alliances and debates over what agroecology is. What these studies also reveal is that agroecology does not mean the same thing everywhere and to everyone.

As a frame of reference, agroecology tends to act as a boundary object, and, as such, is characterized by a certain malleability. Precise definitions and interpretations of a boundary object are plural (Brand and Jax, 2007). Such flexibility can be an asset, as it facilitates the coming together of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. It has, for instance, allowed farmers to unite across the transnational network of La Via Campesina (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2014) and in diverse spaces of agroecological learning in Europe (Anderson et al., 2019). However, the polysemy and polymorphy of agroecology as a boundary object presents challenges (Walthall et al., 2024). Agroecology’s malleability can indeed also place at risk some of its underlying tenets or values.

If agroecology refers to both agricultural practices and normative socio-political visions, they are also conceived as inseparable from one another. Yet as institutions and private actors from around the world increasingly recognize and value agroecology, many fear that it might be stripped of its critical linkages to food sovereignty (Pimbert, 2015) and reduced to a technical fix (Altieri et al., 2017; Giraldo and Rosset, 2018; Rivera-Ferre, 2018). As an activist from La Vía Campesina puts it: “Agroecology without food sovereignty is a mere technicism” (in Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2014: 986). The development of various toolkits, ‘recipes’ and checklists have fueled concerns that agroecology is becoming simplified and disconnected from the social practices and knowledge that have long been integral to it (Compagnone et al., 2018; Giraldo and Rosset, 2023).

While some urban initiatives and institutions are now speaking in terms of agroecology (see for instance Hasnaoui Amri et al., 2020; López-García et al., 2020; Tornaghi and Hoekstra, 2017), little research has been undertaken to understand how urban actors are explicitly mobilizing the framework. The diffusion of agroecology in the Global North might challenge its integrity as an agrarian transformative project since only a small proportion of people are directly involved in food production, and marginalized populations are often excluded from urban alternative food initiatives (Alkon and McCullen, 2011; Fairbairn, 2012; Rice, 2015). Adding to recent studies on how food related initiatives are being repurposed as a fix in apolitical, growth-oriented urban sustainability policies (Alkon et al., 2020; McCann et al., 2023; Stanko and Naylor, 2018; Walker, 2016), the literature suggests that the circulation, adaptation, and operationalization of agroecology in the Global North both by activists and policymakers merits critical examination. To this end, a policy mobilities approach is a useful point of entry.

Methods and context

Our methodology aims to reveal how agroecology has been mobilized and shaped locally “amidst myriad influences from elsewhere” (Robinson, 2015: 831). We use a case study approach to understand how people “arrived at” agroecology, paying particular attention to their interpretation of their own processes of learning and testing of ideas (Wood, 2016). Rather than addressing a specific set of public policies related to agroecology, we focus on the larger, slow and complex process of agroecology’s mobilization in Madrid between the mid-1990s and 2019. Our objective here is not to analyze the degree of institutionalization or mainstreaming of agroecology in Madrid, but rather to elucidate certain mechanisms that have influenced its circulation and enabled its infiltration into local public policies. We do so with particular attention to the role of social movement actors in mobilizing ideas and practices within the policy sphere.

We selected Madrid as a case study because the food movement there has organized under the banner of agroecology and been explicit about incorporating agroecological practices (Simon-Rojo et al., 2018). Moreover, agroecology has also been incorporated into a suite of urban food policies, including the 2018-2020 urban food strategy and the urban collective garden program launched in 2014. The City of Madrid is also a member of diverse national and international food policy networks, some of which employ agroecology as a frame of reference. The City signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and has set up a consultation committee to monitor its implementation. With the political changes ushered in by the 2015 local elections (see for example Houde-Tremblay et al., 2025; Mota Consejero and Janoschka, 2023 or Martínez and Wissink, 2022), Madrid was also a fertile ground to study the interactions between social movements and local administrations promoting New Municipalism (Russell, 2019; Thompson, 2021). Agroecology is further known to have deep roots in the broader context of Spain (González De Molina and Guzmán, 2017).

This study was undertaken in the context of the first author’s doctoral thesis and involved a 3-month stay in Madrid (September to December 2019). We conducted a case study combining participant and non-participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and documentary research, and engaging with two scales of analysis. Our study addressed the general context of agroecology’s mobilization in Madrid (for example, the emergence and work of networks at the city- and regional-levels and the initiatives carried by institutional actors, such as the City of Madrid and universities), and involved an in-depth analysis of four initiatives in order to have a better understanding of how agroecology was understood, practiced, and debated on the ground.

With the help of a local scholar familiar with the movement, we selected the four initiatives based on their explicit use of agroecology as a framework, their geographic diversity, their various ages, as well as their relationship to institutional and network structures. Two of the initiatives were gardens, the Huerto de Batán and the Huerta Solidaria de la Quinta de Torre Arias, and two were focused on distribution, Trasiego Coordinadora Agroecológica Vallekana and AUPA (Asociación Unida de Productores Agroecológicos) farmers’ markets. Our selection was not intended to be representative of the agroecological social movement on the whole, but rather to offer insights into two critical dimensions of the movement’s practices (production and distribution). It also allowed us to meet with activists who had a long trajectory of participation in the agroecological movement. In this paper, we focus less on the specific initiatives and more on the broader scale of our case study. We discuss these initiatives in more detail elsewhere (Houde-Tremblay et al., 2023, 2025).

The first author completed over 100 hours of participant and non-participant observation with these four initiatives and other agroecological activities. It should be noted that she did not conduct observations in any institutional spaces: by the time fieldwork began, the city council had changed, and food policy efforts were at a standstill. Interviews were carried out with leaders and participants of each initiative (17 in total), and with key institutional, consultancy and network respondents (9 in total). All interviewees were asked about their introduction to agroecology, about their definitions of agroecology, and about what was guiding their interventions in agroecology. Some of them (leaders, institutional and networks actors) were also asked about the wider evolution of agroecology in Madrid. All interviews were transcribed, and the content was analyzed through thematic coding.

A review of academic and grey literature, web sites (blogs of key networks and initiatives such as the Red Agroecológica de Lavapiés, Madrid Agroecológico or the ReHd Mad!), meeting minutes, and more than 300 media articles complemented the first author’s fieldwork. This documentary research greatly contributed in understanding the broader context of agroecology’s evolution in Madrid.

Agroecology according to social movement actors in Madrid

Agroecology in Madrid was not restricted to any one definition. As a concept, it was somewhat fuzzy. It was associated with a variety of agricultural and food practices and the term was sometimes used to describe alternative food action more broadly. Nevertheless, while definitions and standpoints were diverse and represented more of a spectrum than a fixed position, our data suggests that Madrid’s agroecological movement, by and large, upheld agroecology as a sociopolitical project that aims for a radically different future.

First associated with organic farming, the agroecological movement has evolved as a distinct phenomenon (Migliorini et al., 2018).¹ For producer H24, agroecology came from “the militancy of people who wanted to consume in a different way and then suddenly realized that it was not enough just to be ecological.” Producers also turned towards agroecology for both practical and ideological reasons. Producer H3 explained:

I think that we began to use the term agroecology to go beyond. It's not only ecological, organic, which they have taken away the possibility for us to describe our product as such and all. But also, to go beyond the way of producing, the ethics of production, all that.

For many activists in Madrid, organic agriculture is the baseline that agroecology strives to “go beyond.” “It’s like a more complex philosophy than what’s related to organic production alone,” as consultant H6 explained. Agroecology is seen as holistic approach that encompasses a way of living and an ethics of care. Grassroots activists interviewed shared common concerns regarding the “way of being on the land” (H5), agricultural labor conditions, the economic system, the urban-rural divide, and, more broadly, how people relate with each other and with nature. They mentioned agroecology’s connection with political projects such as autonomy, horizontal and collective self-management (autogestión), degrowth, or ecofeminism. For consultant H15, agroecology “puts on the table the need to refocus our way of organizing things.”

What we observed was also a very personal relationship with the framework. For producer H3, agroecology relies on “processes that change your mind little by little.” Interviewees described non-linear processes of learning involving everyday practices in agroecological initiatives in Madrid, elsewhere in Spain, and abroad, autonomous learning processes, and participation in a variety of convergence moments (like conferences and gatherings). Agroecology referred to practices with which they were familiar well before they were identified as “agroecological.” Activist H18 for instance stated that “as a concept, it is something that was already there. I mean, I believe that they gave it this name, but it has existed since time immemorial.” Many interviewees further drew connections between agroecology and their personal experiences on their family-owned agricultural land.

For most, the relationship to agroecology was thus anything but academic, marked out by definitions, criteria or indicators. What we observed among social movement actors was instead a critical perspective regarding how to transfer and mobilize knowledge. In designing their project, for example, Trasiego’s initiators conducted research on and reached out to other initiatives in Madrid and Granada, but were conscious and wary of the challenges of moving ideas around: “Each one is a world, isn’t it? Each one is adapted to its environment, to its people, to the tools they have and to what they want and so on. Rather than take a model and replicate it as it is, we take little things, ideas” (H13). To ground their initiative, they collected information on consumer groups in their area to understand their visions and needs. They further valued deliberation and the practice-based knowledge they have gained throughout their activist journey.

Agroecology therefore did not exist as a fixed ideal, but rather as something braided together from local experimentation and deliberately gathered inspiration. There was no “Pope” of agroecology (H13), no one deciding precisely what it means as a sociopolitical project.

Agroecology’s circulation and dissemination via social movement actors

Interviewees revealed a key role that agroecological movement actors played in disseminating the framework in Madrid. Agroecology “has come from the people” (H16) and has its origin “in a very hard militancy, with a very strong ideological component” (H11). Starting in the mid-1990s in Madrid, agroecology’s entry took the form of community-supported agriculture, integrated production, distribution and consumption cooperatives (cooperativas intregrales or unitarias)² and later, collective gardens. These “spaces of insurgences” shared an autonomous ideological stance and functioned at the margins of formal rules (Simon-Rojo et al., 2018: 59). The BAH!, for example, was often identified in interviews as one of the key drivers of agroecology’s initial circulation in Madrid. It involved occupying peri-urban farmland and collectively organizing the production and distribution of food for the cooperative’s members. It emerged from the convergence of several social movements, bringing together university students, environmentalists, squatting activists, and organizers of cooperatives (Benito Morán, 2016; López García and López López, 2003). Early agroecological spaces were highly politized and little known:

The people who were pushing these projects at the beginning were very punkish, sometimes very radical in many things […] it was very hard to take part in these initiatives as they were so marginal. It was very demanding. You had to be already involved in those networks […] There is no sign that tells you, “Here is a consumer group.” It’s not going to come up anywhere. (H11)

Information circulated mostly within the networks of social centers, squats, and cultural associations, spaces which widely valued action at the local scale, notably in opposition to globalization (Flesher Fominaya, 2015). At the time, the militant political stance nonetheless tended to complicate cooperation between initiatives. For example, collaboration between two pioneering initiatives faded because of diverging positions on how to change the system (from outside or within) and whether to participate in other spheres of militancy. A coordinating entity created in 2001 was also shut down in 2005 due to internal conflicts about how to participate in broader social movements and political actions (Benito Morán, 2016).

Nonetheless, the concept of agroecology started to take root. In the BAH!, for instance, the notion of agroecology was introduced by a student from the University of Cordoba who researched the initiative³. H15 recalled:

He set up discussion groups and there were a few of us, and that’s when he talked to us about agroecology. It was like, “Oh, well, that’s what we do!” From there we then really started to use [the term agroecology] a lot... […] We started to talk a little bit, I mean, with that term.

Shortly after the launch of the BAH!, participants began to speak in terms of agroecology and started to organize grassroot agroecology schools, which allowed for the diffusion of the concept. According to activist H13, this “effervescent moment” was further marked by the publication of several influential books. In particular, Con la comida no se juega was written by members of the BAH!. The book clearly positioned agroecology as “a means for social transformation” and, according to H13, has seen significant distribution in various districts of Madrid. During this period, many activists were also involved in other social movements, notably the protests against the Maastrich Treaty and in the Movimiento contra la Europa del Capital, la Globalización y la Guerra.

Starting in 2008 and notably with a push from the 15-M context (see for example Castañeda, 2012 or Sampedro and Lobera, 2014), the movement underwent a consolidation process (Simon-Rojo et al., 2018). At the time, initiatives proliferated (Migliorini et al., 2018; Montesinos and Pérez, 2015) and numerous local networks were created, including the Red Agroecológica de Lavapiés (RAL), the Initiativa por la Soberanía Alimentaria de Madrid (ISAM), and the Red de Huertos Urbanos de Madrid (ReHd Mad!), allowing for close cooperation between practice-based initiatives.⁴ Moreover, many moments of convergence, such as the Primavera Agroecológica, the Semana de Lucha Campesina, or the gatherings around the World Social Forums, allowed for the circulation of agroecology.

Online maps of agroecological initiatives were also created, grouping initiatives that did not necessarily directly speak of agroecology, but which movement participants, notably those with a certain expertise (researchers, consultants, non-profit organizers, etc.), judged to be relevant. During these years, a professionalization of agroecology was indeed observable. With time, some early members of the agroecological movement formally studied agroecology and, in some cases, had become professional in the field of agroecology. Some acted as what we could call expert-activists or scholar-activists. Respondents described these expert-activists as being involved in diverse spaces and networks and, as such, served as key nodes in the diffusion of agroecology and its structuration as a boundary object.

Together, these dynamics opened space for newcomers, resulting in a more diverse set of participants. They also led to greater circulation of information, notably via various texting and social media platforms. Over time, hands-on practices and activities (through gardening and food distribution, for instance) have continued to take center-stage in the agroecological movement’s actions, contributing to the normalization of new practices and ways of being in the city.

While some members continued to work in isolation, many thus organized and participated in collaborative networks and spaces of convergence, allowing for the consolidation of a complex, reticular, and decentered web through which agroecology circulates within Madrid. Throughout, learning opportunities took various forms, from everyday life practices to more organized educational activities bringing together various forms of expertise. But, as the political opportunity structure evolved, the movement further broadened its collaborative interactions.

State-civil society interactions and the institutionalization of agroecology in Madrid

Our case study suggests that the regulation of informal urban gardens served as a first bridge between grassroot collectives and the municipal administration. The ReHd Mad! and the Federación Regional de Asociaciones Vecinales de Madrid engaged in a process negotiation with the local administration leading to the launch of a new urban agriculture program back in 2014. The program directly incorporated the principles espoused by the social movement, by supporting gardens that are managed using ecological practices, are cared for by groups, and remain accessible to the public.⁵ In establishing the program, the City’s idea was also to “respect the diversity, the creativity that existed in the gardens” (H14).

With the election of the Ahora Madrid city council in 2015, collaboration between the agroecological movement and the administration ramped up (Simon-Rojo et al., 2018). Bringing together individuals, initiatives, and networks at the scale of Madrid’s bioregion, a new informal networking organization (Madrid Agroecológico) was created to facilitate the identification of a set of proposals for policy actors. Legitimized as a key actor and intermediary, Madrid Agroecológico allowed activists to closely interact with the administration (Simon-Rojo et al., 2018). Activists participated in various dimensions of Ahora Madrid’s actions in agroecology; some collectives had a seat at the Mesa de Seguimiento del Pacto de Milan, others acted as consultants for the elaboration of the first food strategy or contributed to the implementation and management of pilot projects like Madrid Agrocomposta.

To convince the City of the relevance of their ideas, the members of the movement strategically framed agroecology as a viable option, mobilizing both examples from elsewhere and collaborations with knowledge elites such as experts and universities. Meeting minutes recorded by the ReHd Mad! (2012), for example, clearly state their intention to “to gain visibility and social legitimacy” (our translation) in the eyes of the City and wider public by collaborating with universities and adopting practices found in other locales. When the City of Madrid signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, Madrid Agroecológico activists strategically used the principles of the pact to structure demands to the administration (Madrid Agroecológico, 2016). As reported repeatedly in the media, Madrid Agrocomposta, a project promoted by the social movement, also built on practices that had been tried and tested in other European cities.

Professionals working within the municipal administration who were allies to the movement were also on the front row to observe the institutional response to ideas and models from abroad. They mentioned that the City lagged behind urban food initiatives in other European cities. When told by colleagues that it was “crazy” to advocate for institutional support of collective urban gardens, H14 recalled trying to convince them otherwise by referring to other European capitals “Look, in Stockholm. Look at this photo. Look, in London.”

Indeed, the urban food policy environment was marked by spaces of translocal knowledge-sharing and an extensive mobilization of model initiatives and reference cities. The City of Madrid signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (which references agroecology only in passing), but also joined a European Network of Cities for Agroecology and the national-level Red Estatal de Ciudades por la Agroecologia. Bureaucrats also mentioned participating in the food system sub-group of the C-40 and sharing ideas about urban gardens in meetings of the Unión de Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas (UCCI). The MARES Madrid project (2018) drew inspiration from the Brooklyn Park Slope Food Coop as a model for the development of cooperative supermarkets. A documentary was screened and lectures given in various districts by entrepreneurs from other places (in Spain and elsewhere). Furthermore, the urban food strategy (City of Madrid, 2018) included more than 15 pages of “reference cases,” albeit only a couple of which explicitly used the word “agroecology.”

Indeed, agroecology was not, in fact, a dominant framework used in food policy documents. As consultant H6’s nuanced, food policy was largely framed in terms of sustainability and health as a result of the use of these frameworks by funding organisations, international institutions such as the FAO, and the translocal urban food policy pact. Ultimately, in the municipal food policy, the word “agroecology” is mainly limited to the actions found under the axis “Promoting a sustainable agrifood sector” (our translation). The framework appears briefly in other parts of the policy, but does not constitute an overarching theme (we address to the reasons for this in the next section).

Interviewees were nonetheless explicit about the influence of the agroecological movement on the content of urban agriculture and food policies. All municipal staff members we interviewed clearly stated the influence that grassroot actors had on their understanding of agroecology and on the orientation of the program. For instance, H14 explained: “Honestly, I didn’t have—I knew about organic agriculture, but it’s not the same as agroecology. […] I learned everything from the Red de Huertos, from the many people I’ve worked with.” Furthermore, according to H14, what was included in the food strategy “was based more on what was already underway.” H6, a consultant, also mentioned: “they aren’t projects or actions that pop out of nowhere. There are some that are proposed and that are new, but what it does, above all, is to unite and link things that were already being done in different departments.”

At the same time, the embrace of agroecology as a set of knowledge, values, and practices, was not universal. Some respondents perceived a certain devaluation by institutional actors of locally grounded knowledge. As one interviewee expressed, “It seems that we have to go abroad to study and come back here to propose a project. But it has to sound like that, [from] the University of I Don’t Know Where, because when we suggested it ourselves […] they did not see it as possible, y’know? They did not see it as feasible.”^6. As we discuss in the following section, we also observed that movement actors themselves limited the circulation of agroecology.

Defending agroecology as a counterhegemonic imaginary

As agroecology entered new and more mainstream social spaces, the agroecological movement had to navigate the tensions of interacting with dominant regimes. In interviews, many expressed a fear that agroecology had not really been understood by or properly integrated into municipal institutions, even though they saw the City administration under Ahora Madrid as a window of opportunity for agroecology. Consultant H6, for example, believed that municipal institutions still tended to associate agroecology solely with food production and that the information about what it means to undertake an agroecological project had not been sufficiently shared with City representatives. When asked how agroecology had arrived to the City administration, producer H3 replied that “it has not penetrated. At best, they have it on paper somewhere, written, y’know? But being conscious of its importance, no.” These comments suggest that the term “agroecological” is sometimes used in a way that fails to take into account its full meaning.⁶

Some interviewees further implied that agroecology was sometimes consciously instrumentalized by City representatives. A respondent⁷, for example, mentioned:

In the day to day, they see it as [pauses] something without much substance, without much basis. I mean, they continue to cling to the conventional management they learned when studying for their degree. So, let's say that […] they use agroecology, they don't—they don't despise it, because it sells well to the public. In other words, it's positive to say that this is an agroecological garden, that pests or the garden are managed ecologically, but they don't believe it. It's not internalized.

Members of the agroecological movement perceived that the interests of a growing diversity of municipal as well as private sector actors put at risk the meaning of agroecology. These dynamics are further complicated by the fact that agroecology encompasses a diversity of practices and remains a fuzzy concept for a significant part of the public. Producer H24 explained:

Speaking of Madrid, at least, the movement is very much in the minority […] There is no critical mass. Although there are many people who already understand what is ecological, understand what is local, there are many people who don’t identify what is agroecological, who don’t see the difference. Then, there is the problem that the big supermarket chains are trying to co-opt this market, also saying that they work with local producers and so on.

According to our interviewees, these competing narratives do not necessarily refer explicitly to agroecology but still put pressure on its meaning and interfere with its understanding and perception by the wider public.

One of the ways the agroecological movement protects the political dimension of agroecology is through subtle acts of resistance, some of which were carried out by activists who had become experts in the field of agroecology and were contracted by the City to manage and coordinate institutional actions. Having gained an understanding of agroecology within grassroots spaces, one consultant⁸ espoused a vision of agroecology as something “quite radical,” and cautioned against using the term agroecology when working with institutions, so as not to whitewash it:

For example, if one of the actions was to create a school of agroecology, great! It’s gonna be a practical school of agroecology, with topics of food production, fine. But to talk about, I don’t know, about regulations with agroecological perspectives, it was like, “Well, this is not gonna happen.” So, we don’t put it out there. […] It makes more sense to think that the City can promote healthy, wholesome and sustainable food, rather than agroecology.

Other activists were more overt, actively protesting uses of agroecology they judged to be detrimental to the movement. Activist H13 points to the strength of the network developed by the agroecological movement and its ability to act when the time comes to challenge versions of agroecology that run counter to its core values: “There are people who are watching and paying attention in order to take care of the movement, of agroecology in Madrid. They observe the people, the groups, the companies who are appropriating agroecology in a commercial way. […] and the information [the critics shared by the activists] permeates and gets to everyone.” Some also have “louder voices or can have more media repercussions, small radios, or more or less alternative medias” (H13). While the agroecological movement cannot completely prevent these initiatives from existing, H13 suggested, they can expose their contradictions and perhaps limit and redirect participation in and from these spaces.

Discussion and concluding remarks

In this article, we have focused on the circulation of agroecology in Madrid, Spain, and on the role played by the social movement in this process. Aiming to contribute to better understanding the role played by local, non-state, and non-elite actors in urban policy mobilities, we have emphasized how movement actors helped in disseminating agroecology, but also in preventing its mobilization to defend the framework’s sociopolitical content. Doing so, they mediate agroecology’s circulation and its infiltration in the policy landscape.

Although its operationalization was not without contradictions (see, for example, Simon-Rojo, 2019), agroecology was upheld by the social movement of Madrid as a holistic proposal contesting not only agro-industrial agriculture and the corporate food system, but also more reformist—and even some progressive—solutions to the food system crisis. It was upheld as a sociopolitical project questioning how we collectively organize to provide for basic needs in and around cities. It was also upheld as an epistemic project questioning whose knowledge counts and how we take contexts into consideration. In Madrid’s urban agroecological initiatives, people with different backgrounds built on diverse forms of knowledge which originated from near and far, from positivist science to grounded, everyday experimentation. Doing so, they allowed for agroecology to be interpreted, translated, and adjusted to function better in the face of local realities, a dynamic which was deemed critical to what agroecology is.

Compared to the circulation of harm reduction policies, as studied by Baker et al. (2020) and McCann and Duffin (2023), agroecology appears more difficult to “track,” given its diffuse and multivalent character and its fuzziness as a boundary object. The agroecology we encountered in Madrid encompassed a complex set of ideas and a diversity of actors. It had unclear boundaries and was not always stable. Nor was it always named or institutionalized. For some, agroecology clearly stood for an identifiable object, one that could be linked to particular practices, moments and spaces, to activists and their trajectories. For others, agroecology was hard to define not only because the concept was not widely known, but because practices deemed ‘agroecological’ were already internalized, grounded in an individual’s everyday practices rather than rationalized via a set of external, predefined principles.

Agroecology shares its fuzziness with a range of other frameworks—such as socio-ecological transition, the commons, or the right to the city—which also, to varying degrees, structure citizen-led initiatives that challenge dominant urban practices across diverse contexts (Courtemanche et al., 2022; Domaradzka, 2018; Furukawa Marques and Durand, 2023; Van Neste et al., 2024). Beyond elucidating agroecology’s mobility, our findings could thus help to a better understanding of these other civic and political projects that are similarly diffuse, but which no less contribute to the making of cities and lived environments.

The mobility of agroecology had an evanescent nature, being linked to a diversity of individual and collective practices and spaces which visibility varies greatly. In this article, we discuss the role of the social movement in terms of “dissemination” and “infiltration.” We use these terms deliberately to reflect the fact that the circulation of the project was not always intentional, nor immediately visible, as well as to suggest a potentially subversive crossing of boundaries. The trajectory of the project’s legitimation indeed did not depend solely on efforts to persuade institutions or on institutional success. It also involved the normalization of practices and the creation of dense, complex networks of relationships, mutual influences⁹, and shared meanings.

Practice-based and prefigurative in orientation, agroecological initiatives in Madrid entailed an inward focus. They engaged in actions that contributed to agroecology’s dissemination but were not necessarily intended to convince others or influence public policies. Their primary aims were often rather to respond to individual needs and to mobilize and reproduce the resources and relationships necessary for the project’s success and vitality (Béliveau-Côté et al., 2022; Cloutier et al., 2023; Yates, 2021). Practice-based initiatives nonetheless ultimately served as epistemic hubs where people constructed agroecology by mediating diverse influences through deliberation and experimentation. Agroecology, in this way, circulated both through and from these sites of confluence, experimentation, and learning.

Dissemination was also at times more deliberate and assertive, leading to outward-facing actions like demonstrations, policy proposals, participation in formal deliberative spaces such as the Mesa de Seguimiento del Pacto de Milan or the Foros locales, among others. To persuade institutions in Madrid, the agroecological movement has strategically relied on experts and referenced examples from elsewhere to gain a “stamp of legitimacy.” As Temenos and McCann (2012) put it, “policy actors of all types—not just politicians and policy professionals like planners but also members of local business communities and activist groups motivated by issues like environmental sustainability—‘scan’ globally” and strategically use ideas from elsewhere “as political and practical resources” (p. 1393).

Through the institutionalization process, agroecology was entwined with the models, spaces and mechanisms found in the broader landscape and referencescapes (Keidar and Silver, 2023; McCann, 2017) of “alternative food systems” (Cretella, 2016; Moragues-Faus, 2021; Schiff et al., 2022). This is a mutation or boundary crossing that deserves further exploration.

As agroecology reached its “second life” and infiltrated the policy agenda (Neveu, 2015), social movement actors had to navigate or come to terms with agroecology’s fuzzy boundaries and its consequent openness as a framework. The movement challenged some appropriations of agroecology and attempted to limit the circulation of the framework in discursive and material spaces judged incoherent with core tenets, values, and practices. This resistance was at times carried out through classic social movement tactics (Taylor and Van dyke, 2004) like speaking out and taking public action to denounce how agroecology has been used to support rather than to challenge hegemony, or to highlight dimensions of agroecology that were cast aside or ignored.

Other times, resistance was more subtle and took “everyday” forms (Scott, 1986), such as withdrawing from a larger-scale collaboration in order to focus on a smaller, select community, or leaving agroecology out of a policy document. Uncovering these dynamics notably involves investigating instances of agroecology’s absence. In Madrid, some municipal activities and policies conceived and carried out in collaboration with activists, for example, gave the impression that agroecology is understood as a technical, production-oriented agricultural framework. Ironically, it was in the spaces where agroecology hasn’t been mobilized formally that the agency of the expert activists (who defended the political character of the agroecological framework by limiting its use) was revealed.

Social movement actors' efforts to limit the spread of agroecology, whether overt or behind the scenes, are just as critical, we contend, as their efforts to promote it. Such defensive tactics are in this way central to the dissemination and infiltration of counterhegemonic ideas within institutional spaces.

Attention to the blurring of lines between social movements and the state, as well as between social movements and “knowledge elites” is also essential to understanding the dynamics at play in the circulation of frameworks and approaches such as agroecology. As we found elsewhere, Madrid’s agroecological movement was made up of a range of member types (see also Stassart et al., 2018), notably professionals who acted as consultants or facilitators. As observed in other fields (Bherer et al., 2017), this logic of professionalization places these expert-activists in positions of brokers or bridging agents (Giambartolomei et al., 2021). Professionalized activists appear to have greatly participated in framing agroecology as a boundary object (Anderson et al., 2019), and were key players in navigating the use of agroecology within the administration¹⁰.

Our results thus contribute to emerging discussions in the field of policy mobilities, notably the role played by activists, social movements and non-elites (Baker et al., 2020; Thompson, 2020) and the mobilities of counterhegemonic ideas (McCann and Duffin, 2023). They are a testament to how the internationalization of a framework—in this case, agroecology—can be led by everyday, ordinary and grassroots-driven dynamics of mobilities which broaden what is understood as “proper” political processes (Temenos, 2017). In this way, our results also invite to engage further with the various temporalities of policymaking (Silva and Ward, 2024), and to give greater consideration to more latent, less visible processes of legitimation and adjustments of new ideas and practices. Finally, to account for the multitude of processes that make up for the circulation, dissemination, and infiltration of counterhegemonic ideas, our results underscore the need to engage with the somehow contradictory but interdependant forces derived from a social movement’s role in both disseminating an idea, but also in protecting its underlying sociopolitical values and goals.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants for their time and generosity,as well as our local facilitator in Madrid for the support during the field work. We would also like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments,as well as members of the first author’s doctoral evaluation committee for their insights on an earlier version of this manuscript. This research was financially supported by scholarships granted to the first author: a doctoral scholarship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture,and various travel grants from MITACS Globalink,the Fondation Famille Choquette and Université Laval.

ORCID iDs

Émilie Houde-Tremblay

Nathan McClintock

Ethical considerations

This research has been reviewed and approved by the Comité plurifacultaire d’éthique de la recherche of Université Laval,approval number 2019-117/28-05-2019.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Émilie Houde-Tremblay holds a PhD in land management and regional planning. She is interested in urban,relational and everyday dimensions of the institutionalization and governance of agroecology.

Geneviève Cloutier is a professor at the Université Laval. Her research is centered on the diverse forms and scope of collective action and public participation in urban planning and environmental projects.

Nathan McClintock is a professor at the Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS). Grounded in critical geography and urban political ecology,his work is dedicated to the uneven development of cities,and what this means for both people and the environment.

Alain Olivier is a professor at the Université Laval. His work focuses on the adoption factors and the multidimensional outcomes of agroforestry and agroecology practices in rural areas.

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Social movements and the circulation of agroecology in Madrid’s policy and sociopolitical landscapes

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Agroecology as an idea in motion

Methods and context

Agroecology according to social movement actors in Madrid

Agroecology’s circulation and dissemination via social movement actors

State-civil society interactions and the institutionalization of agroecology in Madrid

Defending agroecology as a counterhegemonic imaginary

Discussion and concluding remarks

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

ORCID iDs

Ethical considerations

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Notes

Author biographies

References