The University of Rhode Island team is studying how urban agriculture can contribute to a more equitable food system in Rhode Island. The project has worked with farmers, food system organizations, government agencies, community groups, researchers, and other stakeholders to understand what equitable urban agriculture governance could look like and how progress toward it can be measured.
Our Approach:
Stakeholder interviews
We interviewed 32 stakeholders across Rhode Island’s food system to identify shared priorities, challenges, and perspectives on equity, decision-making, and accountability in urban agriculture. From these interviews, three visions emerged.
VISION 1. Fostering inclusive and participatory governance
Representative and accessible governance that shares decision-making power with communities, especially groups historically excluded from institutional power.
VISION 2. Redistributing power and ownership
Greater community influence over land, resources, ownership, and food production, including cooperative models and secure pathways to land access.
VISION 3. Building just and accessible food economies
Nutritious local food that is affordable and accessible, fair compensation for farmers and workers, and shared community benefit from urban agriculture.
Participatory co-design
We held a breakout session at the Rhode Island Food System Summit on January 13, 2026, and a workshop at the Warwick Public Library on February 2, 2026. Both events engaged about 50 participants who helped refine the visions, translate them into more concrete aims and indicators, identify ways to measure progress, and consider who should be responsible for advancing these visions.
Next Steps
From what we heard in the interviews and workshops, we identified eight priority aims for Rhode Island:
- Decision makers commit to co-governance
- Leadership looks like the community
- Governance is inclusive
- Urban agriculture is publicly valued
- Information on urban agriculture is easy to access
- Local food system is transparent
- Public budget allocations adequately fund urban agriculture governance
- Urban agriculture stakeholders are connected
We are in the process of asking community members to help us understand which of these ambitions they are most motivated to work toward, how realistic they are, how difficult progress would be to measure, and how much individuals and organizations can contribute to achieving them.
With this information, we hope to identify where there is shared motivation and capacity for action, where important gaps remain, and where future collaboration could help move Rhode Island toward a more equitable urban agriculture system.
Background Problem Statement:
Few city regions are covered by policies explicitly designed to govern equity in urban food systems, let alone specifically in the context of urban agricultural intensification. Yet many common policy domains—including, e.g., public health, commerce, city planning, transportation, environment—may provide partial coverage over important equity dimensions through policies that, for instance, zone parcels for particular land uses or subsidize food for those in poverty. To understand the extent to which this policy ‘patchwork’ may enable—or
discourage—active governance for equity in UAI, in Phase one, we propose to map and characterize existing policies within the “universe” of potential urban food policies to better visualize where and how an overarching equity and justice framework for sustainable consumption and production of food might be pieced together.
While local efforts to govern municipal and regional food systems in a fashion that integrates multiple stakeholders and perspectives have grown in recent years, see for instance in the rise of food policy councils in the US and Canada (Schiff 2008), research into the range of governing arrangements, policy aims, representativeness, and resilience of these governance networks remains sparse, especially in comparative fashion (Schiff et al. 2022). Recent research has documented the potential for Social Network Analysis (SNA) to illuminate these contours and enable more consistent and structured comparison across cases (Levkoe et al. 2021; McIntyre et al., 2018; Kurian et al., 2018), and we propose to extend these methods to map the breadth, depth, and membership of UAI governance networks in specific city region food systems in Phase two
Objectives:
To map urban agriculture policy landscape in Rhode Island
To map the urban agriculture governance network in Rhode Island
Research Team
Patrick Baur, PhD Patrick is an assistant professor of food systems policy and innovation in the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Program and Department of Fisheries, Animal, and Veterinary Sciences at the University of Rhode Island (URI). He leads the overall consortium activities and WP 6.
Melva Treviño Peña, PhD Melva is an assistant professor in sustainable agriculture at the University of Rhode Island (URI). She is a human geographer and a qualitative researcher who studies power asymmetries produced in natural spaces and their implications. She acts as an advisor for WP6.
John Taylor, PhD John is an associate professor in agroecology at the University of Rhode Island (URI). He researches urban and peri-urban food systems and holds degrees in crop sciences, landscape architecture, horticulture and philosophy. He acts as an advisor for WP6.
Rose Jennings, DrPH Rose is a postdoctoral fellow with Just Grow and the Baur Food Systems Lab at URI. Her background includes designing garden-based health promotion programs and expertise in maternal-child health and nutrition. She coordinates the six hubs and oversees the synthesis and dissemination of research findings.
Sheriff Aliu, MSc Sheriff Aliu is a doctoral candidate in the Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Program at URI. Prior to joining URI, he studied at Newcastle University and worked as a consultant on various agri-development projects. He leads stakeholder interviews and overall data collection and analysis for WP 6.
