Food Systems Governance and Social Justice

Food systems governance often aspires to include integrity mechanisms and instruments to ensure that the environment is sustainably managed whilst providing safe food and fibre resources. However, perverse effects can occur from poorly designed food governance policy instruments that can result in adversely impacting the environment and the landscape managers of those environments, raising new rural social justice issues. The effects of hubris and naivety can contribute to such policy failures with the 'solution' being more active contemplation of adverse possibilities and active safeguards within law and policy processes. The paper does not proceed from or towards the conclusion that these things are bad, indeed they are all examples of enlightened policy, but they all come with costs and risks that are largely unexamined except when things become a political contest. This paper explores these issues through two case studies: farm monitoring in the Great Barrier Reef catchments and farm monitoring on New Zealand dairy farms. These case studies demonstrate the need for a more conscious consideration and management of 'unexpected' (but often eminently predictable) undesirable outcomes from food systems policy interventions and suggest the need for more systematic attention to the implementation issues of agricultural governance.