Building a Movement Ecosystem Capable of Transforming the Food System

Part 1

This three-part series explores what it could mean to build a diverse, complex, and interconnected movement around food, farming, and land in the UK. The ideas are rooted in Ali Taherzadeh’s doctoral research on the UK agroecology movement and informed by contemporary organisers and thinkers in the UK and US.

Part 1 brings together ideas around social movement building to tackle the challenge of working in coalition with integrity while developing shared visions that are still radical and transformative. It argues for a both/and approach—combining broad-based organising with transformative politics.

This means embracing diversity and the tensions it brings, while also knowing when and where to set boundaries to safeguard the movement’s direction—a theme explored further in Part 2.

Seven steps to engaging in a movement ecosystem

• Embrace complexity within a broader movement strategy

• Find your place in a diverse ecosystem

• Hear wisdom in the divergent voices

• Make space for both ‘home’ and ‘coalition’

• Know when to be in coalition and when to be in home spaces

• Recognise you don’t need to do it all

• Appreciate diversity while holding boundaries

What are we aiming for?

Across the movement—whether working in a community garden, campaigning for better land access, organising with neighbours to access food affordably, advocating for farmworker's rights, or farming agroecologically—there’s a shared urgency to transform the food, farming, and land system. But we face entrenched systems backed by wealth and power. How do we unify our efforts into a broad, compelling vision to become a formidable force for change? And how do we do so in a way that resists co-optation, staying true to a transformative politics rather than reinforcing business as usual?

Embrace complexity within a broader movement strategy

The food, farming, and land movement encompasses a wide range of organisations, tactics, and values. While there’s collaboration, there are also tensions—over practices, language,  politics, and power - as well as disagreement over what “the movement” itself is. These divisions can lead to fragmentation, especially when people resist working with those who don’t share their exact worldview.

Resistance from “moderate” parts of the movement can be connected to fear of losing legitimacy with power holders or fear of addressing power dynamics in the movement and the impact of this on the way they work. Often, however, resistance comes from those with more radical politics who fear that organising with others will result in co-optation and dilution of their efforts, risking any possibility of transforming the food and land system. These radical and transformative visions, rather than providing valuable orientation and constructive disruption in the movement, then are at risk of simply remaining in small pockets of practice, cut off from society at large.

This isn’t unique to food systems. Many in the Global North have pointed to “toxic cultures” in social movements that undermine collective action. As Kai Cheng Thom writes:

“It is an open secret among Leftists in the Global North that our political movements have a problem when it comes to building strong and durable coalitions. [...] While the Right forms alliances between billionaire techlords and ultra-conservative religious fanatics, the Left divides itself, debates ideological purity and identity with corrosive bitterness, and relies on tactics of shame and blame to police itself internally”.

And this isn’t new either. For years, activists and organisers have been speaking out against “purity politics”. In 2017, carla bergman and Nick Montgomery warned against “rigid radicalism” in their book Joyful Militancy, and in 2022 Maurice Mitchell challenged “maximalism” in their influential blogpost.  Maximalism sees “anything less than the most idealistic position as a betrayal of core values” and tends to involve a “righteous refusal to engage with people who do not already share our views and values”. This is counterproductive as:

“Holding on to tactics and overly idealistic demands that keep us small but pure ignores the basic strategic imperative of building power.”

Instead, what if we were able to recognise the value of different tactics, positions, movement cultures, and spaces within a broader movement strategy for transformation? 

Many of us recognise food system transitions are complex and non-linear. They often require meeting people where they are to support change while recognising the challenging parameters they work within. If the systems we’re trying to dismantle are powerful and multidimensional, our movements must be equally adaptive, interconnected, and able to address multiple dimensions and facets of change at once.

So how can we stay with the complexity of this work while recognising the tensions inherent in working strategically and collaboratively as a bigger movement? 

This is where the idea of a movement ecology comes in.

Find your place in a diverse ecosystem

Social movement ecology is gaining traction as a model of movement organising thanks to activist training centres Ayni Institute (US) and Ulex Project (Catalonia). Such an approach means valuing symbiosis, diversity, and interdependence as the guiding principles of movement building, rather than monoculture and competition. As Ulex puts it:

“Thinking in terms of an ecology of movements can help us to conceive of a movement as able to contain non-aligned, antagonistic, and even contradictory identities – and to acknowledge that this diversity is often crucial to the building of the collective agency needed for radical transformation.”

For a movement that often seeks to apply ecological principles to the way we farm and design food systems, it makes sense that these same ideas should inform the way we organise. This resonates with the principle of “unity in diversity” which guides the work of the transnational peasant and farmer coalition La Vía Campesina, enabling them to work strategically together in solidarity while respecting their diverse contexts and approaches. 

A healthy movement ecosystem is one where symbiotic relationships flourish despite our differences. It allows us to remain grounded in our own values and approaches, while also recognising the importance of others’ work and finding ways to align our efforts in mutually supportive ways. This requires a willingness to step beyond what feels familiar, seek common ground, and explore opportunities for strategic connection.

Being more interconnected also allows us to learn across differences and evolve our shared politics and practice. That crucially involves hearing the wisdom of “the divergent voice”, as Kai Cheng Thom calls it. 

Hear wisdom in the divergent voices

Divergent voices are those which run counter to the mainstream of the movement. They often create discomfort and challenge but hold vital information about the movement’s blind spots—who’s excluded, what dynamics are unspoken, or what needs to shift.

One example is Solidarity Against Land Trades (SALT) who have drawn attention to the need for labour practices and relations to change within the movement to better reflect our values and the future we want to see. Such challenges provoke resistance or defensiveness, especially from those exhausted by years of giving to the movement. But critique, as adrienne maree brown reminds us, can be a tool for building, not just tearing down.

“Critique is an important and irreplaceable part of a community-building process, and a way that we hold each other accountable across different ideologies and strategies. [...] we need to learn to wield critique as a tool in constructing a new society.”

Navigating a movement ecosystem means accepting conflict and tension as part of the work. Some differences can’t be reconciled. Some tactics will clash. But many challenges can lead to growth—if approached with curiosity and care. These are all things that need to be figured out and will likely not have simple answers.

Make space for both home and coalition

The work of developing a healthy and effective movement ecosystem is often referred to as field building and involves various levels and types of alliances and coalitions. This work is hard, scary even—it demands energy and openness, and it brings risk. But it doesn’t mean reducing ourselves to a lowest common denominator.

Feminists of colour like Bernice Johnson Reagon and Gloria Anzaldúa offer helpful guidance in understanding and navigating the tensions and risks inherent in coming together as a wider movement. They, and other black feminists and feminists of colour at that time, called for women to come together as a movement in a way that recognised rather than erased diversity of their experiences and confronted racism within the feminist movement. 

Reagon’s distinction between home spaces and coalition spaces is useful in framing a both/and approach between broad-based collective action and transformative politics. Home spaces are grounded in affinity—shared identity, values, and safety. They are places of nourishment and visioning.

“[Home] space... is a nurturing space where you sift out what people are saying about you and decide who you really are.”

In particular, home spaces for marginalised groups offer a retreat from an otherwise hostile society, some connection and safety amidst broader isolation and violence. However, if we want to transform wider society these spaces are not enough. We must engage with people different from ourselves. Reagon saw engaging in coalition as necessary for survival, which is ultimately bound up in collective liberation.

Thinking about engaging in that coalition work can feel scary as it may feel like risking the cultures and practices of the parts of the movement we call home, or giving up a sense of safety and connection. But we are not taking an either/or approach, either home or coalition, we need both home AND coalition spaces in our movement ecosystem. 

Know when to be in coalition and when to be in home spaces

Reagon warns that confusing home and coalition can be disorienting. 

“Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of a coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home!”

Coalition work invites us to be uncomfortable, to sit with complexity and difference and try to find a way to work together still. Home spaces allow us to regroup, reconnect, and re-energise to go back out and engage in tough coalition work. 

Gloria Anzaldúa uses the metaphor of a sandbar to capture the role of bridge-builders—people doing coalition work through connecting different parts of the movement. Like tides, this work ebbs and flows along with the capacity of a bridge builder; sometimes you can be exposed as a bridge between groups, other times you need to retreat.

Home spaces also motivate people to engage in the work of social change. That sense of community, connection, and shared values is critical. And if we want to bring more people into the movement we also need home spaces that engage with them rather than expecting them to only exist in uncomfortable coalition spaces. 

When people are trying to change their ideas, their practices, and go counter to what is familiar to them, it helps to have others in that same position who understand their challenges. For instance, farmer-to-farmer networks work well to support transition of agricultural practices because of shared experience and peer trust.

Yet one person’s home may be another’s coalition. A space may feel like “home” for some, but not for those with different backgrounds. This highlights the importance of recognising power and inclusion within our spaces, and being aware that the dominant or majority experience in a group is not shared by everyone. Spaces like the Oxford Real Farming Conference illustrate this. Some feel they’ve “found their people”; others may feel underrepresented or more aware of the movement’s internal differences.

If we can better distinguish between home and coalition spaces then we can better get what we need from them and attend to issues of justice and inclusion. We can come to coalition spaces knowing we are coming to do coalition work - we know there is going to be some stretching. We can then seek out home spaces when we need to vision and connect with those we have deep affinity with. 

Finally, home and coalition can be seen as a spectrum rather than a binary. Even identity-based spaces, when considering intersectionality, can be seen as coalition spaces. There are no truly “safe spaces” but there are spaces we will need to be more or less “brave” in. Alliances between relatively closely-aligned organisations can be seen as coalition work but these do not stretch us as much as working with groups that hold more significantly different positions to us. All of these things are needed.

Recognise you don’t need to do it all

Not every organisation or person needs to do everything. Healthy movement ecosystems rely on diverse roles, not replication. As one agroecology organiser put it:

“It’s the idea of what's strategic for us to do, what's comradely for us to do in that sense of actually nurturing a healthy, diverse movement, and not just empire building. What's sustainable for us to do in terms of people's capacity and so on.”

We don’t need to empire-build. Instead, we need to understand our strengths, what our role and place in the movement ecosystem is and what it isn’t, who we’re “home” to, and how we can work synergistically with others.

For example, some groups focus on enacting the future they want through alternative practices and cultures, bringing new people into farming. Others work to support mainstream farmers in transitioning to sustainable farming systems. Both approaches focus on scaling out alternative farming practices and both are essential in transforming the food system, but they do so in different ways and involve different types of movement spaces.

The first may lean more towards the countercultural, using language, food, and music that reflect the political values and identities of the new entrants and other landworkers involved. These spaces can be powerful and magnetic—but may alienate some. The second might prioritise practical and economic aspects of change and minimise the countercultural elements, meeting people where they are. Both are valuable and needed. It may be that one organisation can hold both types of spaces, or that it is useful to have different organisations or alliances to hold these. Importantly, rather than sacrificing certain spaces and movement cultures, it means recognising that different spaces are needed to meet different aims and engage different groups.

If we are clear on the role of each movement space within our wider strategy, on who the space is meant to serve, and on whether it is more of a home or coalition space, then we can make sure it does that well. We can then link these up to other efforts within the movement while at the same time keeping their particular nature.

Appreciate diversity while holding boundaries

A shared movement strategy must recognise how different roles and approaches interact—including the tensions between more radical and more moderate elements. Rather than undermining each other, these should work in synergy to broaden participation while staying grounded in transformative principles. This all requires us to consider what boundaries are necessary and what levels of shared vision and values we need in each kind of space to achieve its role as part of a broader strategy for change. The next blog explores how to navigate these tensions and boundaries, and how they relate to key theories of change.