Many people and organisations interested in agroecology and food sovereignty are mapping. It is all the rage!
People are mapping farms, markets, crop varieties and livestock breeds, soil fertility and water management practices, policies and more. Mapping is being used as an important way to advance agroecology and food sovereignty.
The urge to map responds to a need to document, better understand and make visible the rapid emergence and evolution of agroecology and food sovereignty initiatives and movements.
Researchers at the AgroecologyNow initiative at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) and Cultivate! partnered to produce this new publication, A Guide to Mapping for Food System Change.
The guide highlights the issues, challenges and emerging opportunities that might arise when designing mapping processes with the intention of supporting mapping efforts to be more powerful tools for food system change.
We focus on online interactive platforms that aim to list, communicate and/or share ‘what is going on where’ with respect to agroecology or food sovereignty.
The guide is based on astudy carried out in 2018-2019. We looked at 30 on-line mapping initiatives and carried out interviews with their organisers and held three focus group discussions with mappers from all over the world. The projects set out to ask:
Who is mapping?
What are they mapping?
And, how are they doing it?
We hope this guide provides a useful point of reference for all the mappers out there.
We have also started a list of agroecology and food sovereignty mapping initiatives and encourage you to add your own here.
This publication is a part of a series of civil society briefings based on our research.
Guide recommends thinking carefully about the criteria and processed used to decide what goes on the map and what doesn’t (Control) and who is involved in decision-making in regards to making the map (Participation)