Activities of new CSA cooperatives in Germany can be seen as seed innovations; they support a transformation that transcends the traditional urban-rural divide, where urban residents engage in intense social activities, while sensitising themselves to farm-life and nature through self-organised forms of governance in rural areas.
DAISY will focus on emerging examples of collective land acquisition, which challenge private property, often with the motivation to be able to influence food-related decision making, and sometimes develop new ways of more equitable shared living and co-existing.
The trend has accelerated in recent years in Germany, with young people from urban areas often finding ways to acquire farmland, otherwise not directly accessible to individuals without agricultural backgrounds.
These processes manifest personal transformations in the way individuals come to appreciate alternative social relations over private property, profit and capital, despite the formal difficulties of doing so.
The emerging commons are also often motivated politically – advocating for collective self-determination, rule-making, and overall seeing the value of more intense building of social relations around the place of living and working.
Overall however, the examples stand out most by their focus on practical, applied action – which provide space for debating, designing, and institutionalising new social norms that consider the interest of involved individuals, the group, and place.
While it is relatively well-known that in such cooperatives there is a strong emphasis on sustainability and localisation of food production, it remains largely under-researched to what extent concerns for nature, environment and biodiversity explicitly or implicitly motivate such transformations.
Through WP4 activities, DAISY also aims to understand to what extent and how these largely bottom-up initiatives succeed in institutionalisation of their practices through a multiplicity of advocacy strategies and winning-over top-down support.
Representatives of relatively new CSA cooperatives, businesses and similar self-organised initiatives in the Halle-Leipzig area (e.g., Solidarische Gärtnerei Landsberg bei Halle GbR, Rote Beete eG, KoLa Leipzig eG) and their nationwide networks will serve as the key stakeholders in this case study.
While DAISY will benefit by documenting and uncovering the key biodiversity-relevant drivers and processes of these transformations through commons governance, the representatives of the selected case studies will be supported in identifying amplification strategies (including especially amplification ‘beyond’ in terms of institutional reach).
They will have access to the international network of practitioners as well as rich academic knowledge on commons assembled within the project and beyond (e.g., MLU team lead serves as the regional co-coordinator of the European Chapter of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), while Torsten Wähler from MLU will be employed as the expert to work on CSAs).
