The path to sustainable development involves creating coherence and synergies in the complex relationships between economic and ecological systems. In sustaining their farm businesses farmers’ differing values influence their decisions about agroecosystem management, leading them to adopt diverging farming practices. This study explores the values of dairy and beef cattle farmers, the assumptions that underpin them, and the various ways that these lead farmers to combine food production with the provision of other ecosystem services, such as landscape conservation and biodiversity preservation. This paper draws on empirical research from Galicia (Spain), a marginal and mountainous European region whose livestock production system has undergone modernization in recent decades, exposing strategic economic, social and ecological vulnerabilities. It applies a Q-methodology to develop a values-based approach to farming. Based on a sample of 24 livestock farmers, whose practices promote landscape conservation and/or biodiversity preservation, the Q-methodology allowed us to identify four ‘farming styles’. Further analysis of the practices of the farmers in these groups, based on additional farm data and interview material, suggests that all 24 farmers valorize landscape and nature and consider cattle production and nature conservation to be compatible within their own farm practices. However, the groups differed in the extent to which they have developed synergies between livestock farming and landscape conservation. We conclude by discussing how rural development policy in Galicia could strengthen such practices by providing incentives to farmers and institutionally embedding a shift towards more diversified farming and product development.

The local turn to food is often claimed to be a way to increase the value-added component retained by primary producers and to provide healthy, fresh and affordable food to consumers. Rio do Grande do Sul in Brazil has several governmental support programs that aim to empower family farmers and open up new market opportunities for them. This article examines these programs, investigates how small-scale farmers engage with them and the resultant changes in farming and marketing practices that ensue. The article uses cluster and content analysis to identify and interpret the extent, and the different ways, in which these farmers engage with and make use of the local knowledge and innovation system. The results provide useful insights into how policy instruments improve the performance of family agribusinesses, helping them to make better use of the resources available to them, encouraging farm diversification, and strengthening local interrelations between producers and consumers.

Economic optimisation of the gross margin per hectare in agriculture reduces diversity, coherence and identity of cultural landscapes. Hence, landscape preservation calls for changes in the social–ecological organisation of places, which implies complex transitional processes towards new management regimes. These are supported by CAP reforms (Horizon, 2014–2020) that increasingly turn from individual production subsidies to farmers to the collective management of natural resources and the related ecosystem services. This article explores the opportunities for landscape preservation in Galicia, Spain. The central question is: ‘How to develop a successful planning approach in the context of a geographically peripheral area facing severe ecological, social and economic vulnerabilities?’ In the case study area, contrasting viewpoints on landscape preservation among rural dwellers, entrepreneurs and representatives of institutions point to power issues on control over the natural environment, but also provide input for the development of an actor-oriented approach to landscape preservation. This article provides a ‘tool’ for catching up with the EU objectives of sustainable, inclusive and smart growth and contributes to our understanding of how place-based development in EU programs can be combined with landscape management in Galicia.

The development of food production in cities has raised some important questions about the governance of these activities and the role of city‐regions. In this paper through four European case studies– Bristol (UK), Ghent (Belgium), Vigo (Spain), and Zurich (Switzerland) –we consider the ways in which food is governed at the city level. Our case studies demonstrate the role played by citizens in urban food and the challenges this brings to city‐region governance. Through horizontal networking, being inspirational to other cities and citizens, communicating their demands and successes very clearly, urban food activists have raised significant questions about how cities are governed. Using the creation of localized identities, which are inclusive and embracing but rooted in their city, these food activists are looking to a future controlled by a democratic impulse rather than the technocracy of professional city managers. This paper uses a range of Weberian influenced theory to explore the topic of urban agriculture not as one simply about environmental performance but of the construction of new civic identities.

This paper aims to expand current understandings on the relationship between forest commoning, citizenship and democracy. For doing so, it presents a case study of a community forest in the periphery of Vigo city (Galicia, Spain). Using interviews and historical records of the city and the neighborhood, the paper tells the story of the emergence of a forest commons in relation to citizenship claims and struggles. Through time, communal practices of care for forest forge care-tizens, a self-organized form of citizenship performed through mutual care and care for the commons. This care-tizenship was enabled by commoners’ affective relations to forests and more-than-human subjectivities. The conclusion underlines the mutually reinforcing relationship between commoning forests and citizenship, suggesting the importance of community forests as arenas to nurture alternative, expanded more direct, and ecological forms of democracy.