Experimentalist Governance in Food Democracy: Monitoring and the Right to Food in Selected Chinese and European Cities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cities have become the level at which the right to food is either operationalized or left abstract, yet we have little comparative vocabulary for describing how they do it. This article examines local food observatories and monitoring mechanisms in four cities, namely, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Milan, and Berlin. It reads them against the four constitutive elements of experimentalist governance and finds that neither pair of cities completes the experimentalist cycle. The Chinese cases experiment extensively with means though their framework goals remain fixed and centrally set. The European cases deliberate openly over goals but show little evidence of the peer comparison and recursive revision that distinguish experimentalist governance from participatory consultation. The two sets of arrangements are therefore truncated at opposite ends of the same cycle, and the label administrative experimentalism and participatory experimentalism are used here to mark where each truncation falls. The article then asks what each arrangement makes claimable. Monitoring in Shanghai and Shenzhen produces data that flows upward and supports the evaluation of officials by their superiors. Monitoring in Milan and Berlin produces data that flow outward and support civil society scrutiny. Neither converts monitoring into a resource for individual rights claims. The study is exploratory and its four cities were selected because they are recognized innovators, so the findings are offered as concepts and hypotheses rather than as causal conclusions.