Analysis of a citizen-empowerment initiative to fight against food insecurity in Bondy (France) : Lived experiences and expectations from food-insecure residents participating in a local instance of citizen participation

Sammanfattning

This study explores how residents experienced the Assessments, Analysis and Proposals laboratories (CAP labs) participatory process in Northern Bondy, a Priority Neighbourhood for City Policy (QPV) marked by food insecurity and its linked challenges. A main focus point has been to investigate the enhancement of residents’ pouvoir d’agir, a term similar to empowerment, in the context of local food governance, one of the main objective of the organising association. Due to the project being in its early stages, this study examines mainly the short-term effects of participation, particularly the mobilisation of citizens around food security issues. Adopting a feminist standpoint approach, the research prioritises the lived experiences and perspectives of residents, especially those more often marginalised, as well as dimensions of epistemic justice, fairness and power. Data were collected through qualitative methods, including participant observation, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews, to capture both what participants gained from participation and what they expected from the process. Findings suggest that participation fostered confidence, knowledge exchange, and collective reflection within a safe and inclusive space, while also highlighting uneven benefits (time- and person-dependent). Residents’ expectations extended to concrete outcomes in local food environment, from raising awareness, gaining decision power, addressing food insecurity and building collective action, echoing many of the association’s objectives. However these results appeared conditional to the continuity of the association’s commitment and reflexivity regarding governance models and transparency. The CAP labs emerge as a situated, experimental citizen participation framework, striving to address epistemic injustice. This study contributes to debates on participatory governance by showing how processes grounded in lived experience can open spaces for agency, collective deliberation, and short- term empowerment, while highlighting that empowerment cannot be thought in a one-shot initiative, but rather a continuous process tailor-made to follow citizen’s participation culture and appropriation.