Facing the continuous loss of family-run farms across Europe, farmers are seeking new pathways to sustainability. One such pathway is involvement in local food supply systems. Often, this requires new forms of cooperation among farmers and with consumers. Little is known, however, about how this cooperation works in practice and how it might be better fostered. This paper aims to illustrate various forms of cooperation in relation to small-scale farming and the establishment of local food supply. It sheds light on challenges farmers are facing and on the potential measures they can adopt to tackle these challenges. By means of an Austrian case study, researchers applied a participatory method (Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation) and conducted workshops with farmers. Research shows that local production, processing and distribution infrastructure becomes more affordable when farmers collaborate with each other and with consumers and institutions. Furthermore, sharing and collectively developing know-how helps to optimise local farming and food supply systems. However, farmers often lack the knowledge and time to establish new collaborations and to re-organise labour, logistics and communication processes. They would benefit from the availability of cooperative schemes that help facilitate such processes and innovations.

Drawing on transition theory, we conceptualize local food networks as innovations that initially function and develop in local niches within a given food regime. As niche-innovations local food networks induce socio-ecological changes on the local level and they have the potential to foster wider transformations of the dominant food regime. Many local food networks adopt the concept of food sovereignty as a kind of “leitmotif”. At the core of this concept lies the question of how to create an agro-food system that, (i) allows for democratic participation and civic engagement in food production, and (ii) sets up new relationships that avoid social inequity and the exploitation of both humans and nature. In this paper we shed light on how the Austrian local food network “SpeiseLokal” addresses the challenge of operationalizing the concept of food sovereignty. The case study captures the strategies which local food networks embark on and depicts the difficulties they encounter. The paper aims to identify critical points of intersection that either strengthen or constrain local food networks from becoming established, operating, and up-scaling in the ways they wish; that is, in accordance with the principles and aims of food sovereignty, while avoiding a later assimilation into the dominant food regime.

Ester Boserup promoted a focus on women’s role in agriculture as a new perspective through which to understand the link among economic, technological and agricultural development. Her work has been considered a starting point in understanding the importance of women’s role in development globally. Her work remains important for analysing agricultural development and sustainability issues in Austria today. Time use is a crucial factor when making decisions on production strategies on Austrian farms. Currently, farmers aim to avoid having longer working hours and less income than employees from other sectors. Technological change can diminish the workload of farmers, but it does so mainly in regions that are favourable for large-scale industrialised agriculture. Sustainable agriculture with a focus on mixed production and the maintenance of cultural landscapes in a lively region must be attractive for young people, men and women alike, to keep them working on farms. The on-going structural change in agriculture, with its implications for ecology and society, is one of the well analysed and documented long-term socioecological changes in Austria. Building models is one way to use this scientific knowledge as well as experts’ and farmers’ expertise for developing future scenarios and regional strategies for sustainable development. This paper presents an agent-based model with single farm households as agents within the ecological and socio-economical setting of an Austrian region. The model assesses effects on land use patterns and socio-economic conditions induced by changes in the farms’ environment, such as changes in subsidies on the European and national level, changes in agricultural policy and changes in market prices of agricultural products. The decision-making process of each agent is simulated within a “sustainability triangle” of ecological, economic and social dimensions. Time-use data are used to integrate a gender perspective in the decision tree of farms, which was developed in a participatory process with agricultural experts and farm women of the region. Three scenarios were developed and analysed, as follows: a trend scenario, a globalisation scenario and a sustainability scenario. The current problems of decreasing farm activities and increasing forests could be reduced at a certain level with the measures assessed in the sustainability scenario. However, as the model results show, in the sustainability scenario the unequal distribution of workload on women farmers would increase. This result must be considered when thinking about ways to enhance the success of any effort towards sustainable development.