This is a Veni project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the period 2024-2027. The project’s primary focus is on the question of sustainable labour practices in the agricultural sector as part of the sustainable food transition. The projects CBPAR inspired method builds on Dr. Vladimir Bogoeski's experience participating in Marija Bartl’s NEXT-LAW project which also tested out PAR methods but found considerable challenges in making it work for both academics and community stakeholders simultaneously. The Law Hub connected Vladimir Bogoeski to Jules Sievert of NuLawLab (they lead the field in adopting CBPAR methods in legal research projects) to mentor/advise him on how to best implement the method.

What makes it interesting for this RPA? 

Vladimir is one of the few in the Law faculty adopting methodologies inspired by a Community Based Participatory Action Research methodology (or CBPAR). He is working directly with farmers, farmworkers, trade unionists and activists in the development and execution of his research project and in addition to collaborating on research design and data collection he has co-organised a summer camp for migrant workers in Italy to train them as advocates and legal experts.    

Project Background

Emerging green transition agendas addressing the future of food systems have mainly focused on ‘food security’ and environmental concerns. Given the entanglement between labour and environment, on the one hand, and the exploitative working conditions that have long characterised food systems (particularly in relation to migrant and racialised labour in food systems), on the other hand, no transition of food systems can be just without including the question of sustainable labour. Focusing on the Netherlands, the project draws attention to the variety of existing practices and political visions on the ground that already engage with various forms of sustainable labour and show alternative pathways. However the overall political economy of food production and its underlying legal frameworks often stand in the way of such practices and visions. The ambition of the project is to collectively generate knowledge that would help change this.

A crucial aspect of the project is that it brings together practices and visions of sustainable labour advanced by communities of small-scale sustainable food producers such as agroecological farmers with visions and struggles coming from traditional trade unions and food workers (migrant food workers in particular) in the food industry. The project strives to overcome the fallacy of looking at these struggles separately, but bring them together as a potential collective for joint learning and transformation, generating shared insight of how law can be used to support good labour and overall sustainable food governance from below.