Building a Municipal Food Policy Regime in Minneapolis: Implications for Urban Climate Governance

Abstract

With this paper we analyze Minneapolis's urban food policy regime and attempt to make a case for applying urban regime theory (URT) to study climate change governance at the municipal level. In 2008 Minneapolis launched Homegrown Minneapolis, a multiple stakeholder initiative bringing together local government actors, businesses, and NGOs to build a sustainable and local food system. As the link between food systems and climate change is increasingly acknowledged in the literature, the analysis of food policy regimes provides valuable lessons for understanding the dynamics of urban climate governance. Theoretically, we attempt to contribute to the fields of urban climate governance and urban political theory by applying URT as developed by urban political theorist Clarence N Stone and others. To this end, a ‘building blocks’ approach is introduced, facilitating and enhancing the analysis of the different elements of a regime, including initiation, coalition building, agenda setting, resources, cooperation, and consensus building. We show that there are several key elements comprising successful regimes: individual political leadership, knowledge exchange, and community-wide collaborative engagement.