Research, part of a special feature on Seeds of Good Anthropocenes: Envisioning and Exploring Pathways toward Transformative Futures

INTRODUCTION

Improving urban sustainability requires tackling intertwined social and ecological challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and rising inequalities (Herrero et al. 2021, Krueger et al. 2022). Addressing such wicked problems will, in turn, require radical, systemic, and accelerated change (Olsson et al. 2014). Such transformations toward sustainability involve fundamental changes in how we live in and understand the world (Westley et al. 2011), qualitative changes in societies’ values, practices, and institutions (Sharma 2007, O’Brien and Sygna 2013, Loorbach et al. 2017), and deep and structural alterations of current unsustainable systems (Geels 2011, Pereira et al. 2020).

In cities around the world, people are putting their visions of a sustainable society into practice (Wittmayer et al. 2019) by creating small-scale, locally rooted initiatives that experiment with alternative and innovative ways of thinking, doing, organizing, and engaging with the world (Gernert et al. 2018, Lam et al. 2020). These “Seeds of Good Anthropocenes” (hereafter called “seed initiatives”) present hopeful solutions to persistent problems in an effort to create more equitable and sustainable cities (Bennett et al. 2016). Many researchers believe that such seeds are likely to play a key role in catalyzing sustainability transformations toward brighter futures in the world’s cities (e.g., Sellberg et al. 2020, Hebinck et al. 2021, McPhearson et al. 2021).

Research on sustainability transformations has advanced understanding about how promising seed initiatives emerge, experiment with alternative pathways and innovations, and self-organize into networks to create momentum for transformation (Pereira et al. 2018). Less is known about how the shift from experimentation to the institutionalization of innovations occurs in reality, and about how seed initiatives interact with other actors and their interventions to support or hinder transformative change during this shift (Elzen et al. 2012). The institutionalization of innovations, which broadly refers to their widespread diffusion and embedding into new regimes, is critical for attaining longer-lasting impacts and realizing broader systemic change (Wamsler et al. 2014, Gorissen et al. 2018, Pereira et al. 2018).

The overarching objective of this study was to deepen empirical understanding about institutionalization at a local scale and in the context of urban sustainability transformations. Specifically, we sought to better understand how seed initiatives interact with other actors and interventions that engage with and shape the process of institutionalization, while responding to calls for paying greater attention to the influence of local governments in guiding transformative change in cities (Bulkeley et al. 2011, Bolton and Foxon 2013, Fudge et al. 2016). We conducted a case study examining the institutionalization of urban agriculture linked to a local government-enacted policy in a borough of Montréal, Québec, Canada.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

Institutionalization in the context of sustainability transformations

Research in the field of sustainability transformations is primarily centered on theories of bottom-up change (i.e., catalyzed by seed initiatives) occurring over multiple phases of transformation. For example, Pereira et al. (2018)’s “Seeds of Good Anthropocenes” theory of transformations builds on the socio-technical transitions (Geels 2002) and the social-ecological transformations frameworks (Olsson et al. 2006, Moore et al. 2014) to describe different phases of transformations from preparation to navigating change to consolidating change (Fig. 1). This popular theory of change posits that transformations begin with a preparation phase, during which isolated seed initiatives emerge and experiment with alternative pathways and innovations to solve persistent problems or to challenge the dominant regime (Loorbach et al. 2020). As seed initiatives self-organize to create and mobilize networks, they gather momentum for transformation. A crisis or anticipated crisis, which can exacerbate the weaknesses and dysfunctionalities of existing systems and institutions and take various forms from a natural disaster to a democratic election, creates an opportunity for institutional change, opening a window to the second phase of navigating change (Moore and Westley 2011, Newig et al. 2019). New innovations (referred to as “proto regimes” in Fig. 1) become partly institutionalized in this second phase and may go on to become widely institutionalized in the third phase of consolidation. The third and last phase has three potential outcomes: transformation (innovations become widely institutionalized into new regimes), disruption (innovations become incorporated into the dominant regime), or capture (innovations are “squeezed out” by the dominant regime).

Although a great deal of attention has been paid to identifying seed initiatives and learning about the early preparation phase of transformations, empirical examples depicting the institutionalization of innovations in the turbulent phase of navigating the transition are lacking, making for a limited understanding of this key transformational process (Elzen et al. 2012, Wamsler et al. 2014, Gorissen et al. 2018, Pereira et al. 2018). Furthermore, the term “institutionalization” is rarely clearly defined in the literature on sustainability transformations and is sometimes conflated with other similar concepts (e.g., “acceleration,” “anchoring,” “scaling,” “mainstreaming”). Many researchers have highlighted that enhancing our theoretical and empirical grasp of institutionalization is crucial for advancing the future implementation of urban sustainability transformations (e.g., Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2014, 2016, Raven et al. 2016, Barnes et al. 2018). Recent research on social innovation and socio-technical transitions, drawing on institutional theory, has advanced understanding of institutionalization as a transformational process. However, new insights have yet to significantly influence the literature on sustainability transformations and mainly pertain to larger scales, national and regional, where conditions differ markedly from those at local city scales (e.g., Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2016, Raven et al. 2016, Krueger et al. 2022).

In this study, we conceptualize institutionalization as a transformational process that shifts innovations out of the experimental phase (Moore and Westley 2011, Westley et al. 2013), by diffusing innovations among a wider array of adopters and integrating them into emerging or existing regimes. This process enhances the legitimacy, coherence, and stability of the innovations through the diverse interactions and actions of various actors (Tolbert and Zucker 1983, 1999, DiMaggio and Powell 1999, Anguelovski and Carmin 2011, Clegg 2012, Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2014, Pel and Bauler 2014). Legitimacy is increased by integrating an innovation into broader institutional structures such as norms, regulations, and policies. Coherence is enhanced as actors develop a shared understanding of the innovation, while stability emerges when diverse stakeholders invest resources to support it (Tolbert and Zucker 1999, Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2014).

During institutionalization, the innovations, ideas, and visions of actors involved in transformation tend to grow more and more alike, becoming increasingly compatible with one another and with the outside world (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, Beckert 2010). This constraining process of homogenization is generally referred to as institutional isomorphism, and although it can be useful to accelerate the rate of decision making and change processes, it can lead poorly adapted ideas and innovations to draw on limited resources and rapidly spread at the expense of other novel alternatives (Moore and Westley 2011). Institutionalization also risks stifling the potential for disruption and transformation by blunting the innovative edge of seed initiatives (Ehnert et al. 2018, Gernert et al. 2018). As they become entangled with broader-scale systems and structures, seed initiatives may be coerced into meeting the demands and interests of a dominant regime. Transformative impulses risk being captured and domesticated when seed initiatives no longer exist on society’s margins or in protected niches, but instead operate within the very institutional structures they seek to change (Pel and Bauler 2014). They can easily become compelled to “fit-and-conform” with existing and possibly restrictive frameworks and institutions in exchange for support and resources (Smith and Raven 2012). By moderating innovation and quelling radical creativity, institutionalization shifts transformational pathways toward less dramatic, more incremental changes at best, and dead ends at worst (Geels 2005, Turnheim and Sovacool 2020). Studies on sustainability transformations tend to favor success cases and often misrepresent struggles and misalignments as mere setbacks in cases of “transformations in the making,” rather than acknowledging these as conditions for failure or unsustainable and unjust transformation (Turnheim and Sovacool 2020). Developing a more holistic understanding of the nuanced dynamics of institutionalization is therefore warranted.

The role of local governments in institutionalization

Governments tend to be associated with an overly simplified “homogeneous regime” (Seyfang et al. 2014, Fudge et al. 2016) that is assumed to compete against innovation in order to maintain the status quo (Fischer and Newig 2016). Yet researchers across a number of disciplines have shown that governments can respond to, and interact with, bottom-up seed initiatives by taking an innovative and collaborative approach to institutionalizing transformative changes (e.g., Abels 2014, Amundsen et al. 2018, Macedo et al. 2020, Bradley et al. 2022). Policy makers are recognizing that incremental adaptation through conventional top-down measures is insufficiently nuanced for tackling wicked urban sustainability challenges (Fudge and Peters 2009). Instead, change efforts that blend top-down approaches focusing on structural change with bottom-up innovative actions (an approach called “dual track” governance) may prove more effective (Elzen et al. 2012, Fudge et al. 2016).

Governments are well positioned to drive structural change by drawing on mechanisms that contribute to the institutionalization of innovative ways of doing, thinking, and organizing. Such institutionalizing mechanisms, that is, actors and processes that are capable of bringing about or preventing change in the system (Bunge 1997, Hedström 2005), include the development and enactment of policies, strategies, and action plans and the creation or reforming of regulations (Anguelovski and Carmin 2011, Pasquini and Shearing 2014), the formation of strategic partnerships (Westley et al. 2013, Ehnert et al. 2018), the creation of jobs and the establishment of new committees or bureaus to support the innovation (Barnes et al. 2018, Gernert et al. 2018), and the allocation of resources to seed initiatives (Yin 1981, Roberts 2008, Westley et al. 2013). Some of these institutionalizing mechanisms draw on resources that are exclusive to governments (e.g., legislative resources), such that government involvement may be required for introducing additional or different and previously unavailable resources to the process of transformation. Because governments typically have more resources and political agency than seed initiatives, they could take the lead on experimenting, developing, and institutionalizing potentially transformative innovations to gain the support of the broader regime and have a disruptive effect (Pereira et al. 2018, Sellberg et al. 2020).

Local governments are uniquely positioned to intervene in transformations by building on the bottom-up efforts of seed initiatives, having greater sensitivity to local social, cultural, and economic contexts that shape local challenges and their potential solutions. In certain cities, including Montréal, the most local level of government operates at the scale of boroughs. Boroughs are governed by elected mayors and councilors. They are allocated budgets and made responsible for various aspects of city life, including local urban planning, roadways, cultural and social development, and parks and recreation. Local governments, being closest to where the impacts of environmental change are felt (Pasquini and Shearing 2014) and at which responses are put into action (Betsill and Bulkeley 2005) are more likely to empower individuals to actively engage in efforts toward, and discussions about, sustainable living and sustainability transformations (Fudge and Peters 2009, Elzen et al. 2012). Given that local governments stand to play an important role in supporting urban transformations toward sustainability, we should seek to learn more about how they interact with bottom-up seed initiatives in the process of institutionalization, and how their interventions bolster and constrain the possibility of realizing transformative change (Bulkeley et al. 2011, Bolton and Foxon 2013, Fudge et al. 2016).

Actors’ roles and their strategies for institutionalizing innovations

During institutionalization, the actors engaged in the process of change become increasingly diverse (Tolbert and Zucker 1999, Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2014). Different actors occupy different roles, employ different strategies, and have access to different resources in the pursuit of complementary or competing goals and interests (Avelino 2011, Farla et al. 2012). Understanding institutionalization therefore requires understanding the multi-actor dynamics involved in the process (Ehnert 2023a, 2023b), and navigating institutionalization requires mediating and linking across these different actors (Loorbach et al. 2017).

Beyond seed actors and governmental actors, whose potential roles in institutionalization we have already discussed, many scholars have highlighted the importance of intermediaries for navigating multi-actor interactions through mediation (Fischer and Newig 2016). Namely, intermediaries can “span boundaries” to integrate different worldviews and thought styles, translate visions of transformation, link activities, skills, resources, and storylines across actors who do not regularly interact (Hermans et al. 2016, Kivimaa et al. 2019a, Hilger et al. 2021). Hybrid actors are also gaining attention in the literature on transformations. They are insiders to more than one group and thereby assume various roles, which allow them to deploy diverse strategies and leverage different types of resources, transferring them across sectors such as government and the civic sector (Garud et al. 2007, Kivisaari et al. 2013, Elzen et al. 2012, Smink et al. 2015). Both intermediary and hybrid actors require good interpersonal, networking, and trust building competencies (Williams 2002). Institutional entrepreneurs are especially important for scaling the impact of seed initiatives and triggering cascades of change by tackling the broader institutional context (Dorado 2005, Gladwell 2006). Their ability to recognize ripe opportunity contexts in the form of political, cultural, or economic demands for change enables them to connect innovations to opportunity (Burgelman 1980). Leveraging strong social and political skills, they sell promising, yet disruptive, innovations to decision makers and, in turn, mobilize resources to support the flourishing of innovations (Westley and Antadze 2010).

In Kivimaa et al. (2019b), the functions of intermediary and hybrid actors across the different phases of transformations are outlined. Similarly, Westley et al. (2013) identify strategies employed by change agents in each phase of transformation, including seed actors, governmental actors, and people exercising the function of an institutional entrepreneur. Both articles show that actors shift their approach (i.e., the strategies they employ to mobilize resources in the pursuit of certain goals and interests) according to the phase of transformation. Synthesizing across the two articles, we identified three broad categories of action tied to institutionalization: (1) mobilizing for change, (2) managing relationships, and (3) capacity building. Mobilizing for change involves raising awareness about an innovation, creating common visions and setting shared goals, building legitimacy for the new pathway or innovation, lobbying for visibility and resources, establishing intermediary roles and organizations to help navigate the transition, and strengthening political and institutional space to support experimentation and innovation. Managing relationships involves translating between actors and “spaces” or sectors, creating community cohesion across shared aspirations, aligning different perspectives, and integrating diverse ideas. Capacity building involves developing multi-actor coalitions, creating and protecting safe spaces for interaction and collaboration, spreading knowledge, and expanding expertise to fit the needs of the transformation.

The deployment of these strategies is necessarily messy as they characterize a collaborative approach to institutionalizing innovations that requires interaction and negotiation between actors and across sectors (Fuenfschilling 2019). Although increasing the diversity and heterogeneity of actors involved inevitably complicates the process of change, it may also bolster transformation by enabling the coordination of previously isolated actions, the complementary combination of resources, and the formation of productive partnerships that support capacity building (Anguelovski and Carmin 2011, Krueger et al. 2022). A collaborative approach to institutionalization is more likely where seed initiatives address pressing issues innovatively, but without threatening incumbent interests (Frantzeskaki et al. 2014, Ehnert et al. 2018). Although seed initiatives may be pressured to align with the interests of influential actors, this alignment can integrate them into decision-making processes, increase resource access, and empower broader (but possibly less radical) change (Heinrichs and Laws 2014).

To date, institutionalization has been under-conceptualized in the literature on sustainability transformations (Wamsler et al. 2014, Xie et al. 2022). We looked to related disciplines, including the field of socio-technical transitions, to understand how this fundamental process occurs, but found that studies have mainly investigated institutionalization at national and regional scales (e.g., Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2016, Raven et al. 2016). Empirical understanding about institutionalization at the local level, and about the interplay of different actors and their strategies for mobilizing resources, remains limited (Pasquini and Shearing 2014, Barnes et al. 2018, Adams et al. 2023).

To address this knowledge gap, we explored a real example of institutionalization in Montréal, Canada, where urban agriculture is playing an increasingly important role in the city’s ecological transition (“transition écologique”) objectives (Ville de Montréal 2021). These include achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 and tackling environmental and social issues by adopting new ways of consuming, producing, working, and living together (Montréal 2021). We explored interactions between seed initiatives and the actors and interventions associated with a local government policy to institutionalize urban agriculture in the borough of Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles (RDP–PAT). The overarching research question is: How do seed initiatives’ interactions with other actors and their interventions to institutionalize urban agriculture shape pathways to transformation?

CASE STUDY

Urban agriculture in Montréal, Canada

Urban agriculture, the production of food in cities, shapes and is shaped by a city’s economic, social, and ecological systems: its activities often use city resources (e.g., land, urban organic wastes, water) and are influenced by urban conditions (e.g., policies, competition for land) as well as climate and environmental conditions. In turn, urban agriculture produces food for residents and affects multiple dimensions of city life, from food security to urban biodiversity (Mougeot 2000, Langemeyer et al. 2021). Urban agriculture is increasingly being formalized via local (borough and municipal) government interventions aimed at improving urban livability, resilience and sustainability, and achieving mixed success, especially in terms of social justice (Vale 2014, Hammelman 2019, Horst et al. 2024).

In Montréal, urban agriculture is flourishing. From 2010 to 2021, the number of urban agriculture initiatives in Montréal grew from 75 to 240 (Ville de Montréal 2021). Many of these are collective grassroots initiatives that eventually gained the support of the municipality, which has a history of active civic engagement (Bach 2016, Bhatt and Farah 2016). Urban agriculture was integrated into the city’s plans for the first time in its 2010–2015 Community Sustainable Development Plan (Ville de Montréal 2010), following demands by residents and NGOs for increased municipal leadership in supporting emerging and existing urban agriculture initiatives. In 2011, over 25,000 signatures were acquired through a petition calling for a public hearing on the state of urban agriculture in Montréal (OCPM 2012). In response to this rising momentum for urban agriculture, a permanent urban agriculture committee was created in 2013 (Sloan 2014).

The Montréal 2030 Citywide Strategic Plan and the Montréal Climate Plan 2020–2030 have given borough governments the impetus to align their actions with the city’s objectives (Rueda et al. 2021). Since 2021, these plans have included a multi-year urban agriculture strategy designed to contribute to Montréal’s ecological transition (Ville de Montréal 2021). A recent comparative study of 10 cities showed that Montréal’s global and borough-level urban agriculture strategies and policies are unmatched, emphasizing the importance that urban agriculture occupies in the city’s politics (Druine and Duchemin 2023).

The borough of Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles, Montréal

We based our study in Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles (RDP–PAT) because it was the first borough in Montréal to enact an urban agriculture policy, as well as being a lower-income borough (Pampalon et al. 2012) that has received less research attention. As the city’s second largest borough, RDP–PAT spans 43.2 km² and is located on the northeastern outskirts of the island of Montréal (Ville de Montréal 2018; Fig. 2). The borough’s administrative boundaries encompass two demographically, culturally, and economically distinct neighborhoods: Rivière-des-Prairies (RDP) is materially deprived (inadequate access to necessities; Direction de santé publique 2011) and culturally diverse, with a high immigrant population, particularly of Haitian and Italian descent (Montréal en statistiques 2017a). Pointe-aux-Trembles (PAT) is socially deprived (exclusion from social opportunities and networks; Direction de santé publique 2011) and home to few immigrants (Montréal en statistiques 2017b). Once a dynamic agricultural region, RDP–PAT underwent rapid industrial and residential development in the first half of the 20th century (RDP–PAT 2019). Today, there are 90 hectares of un(der)used land in the borough’s industrial zones, representing a unique potential for development (RDP–PAT 2019). Importantly, RDP–PAT is a food desert. Much of the population lives more than 500 meters away from the nearest supermarket and has limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, possibly contributing to the borough’s lower life expectancy relative to the Montréal average (Florent 2017). The development of urban agriculture in this borough is an opportunity to tackle issues of food insecurity, cultural division, and social isolation, while providing a vocation for vacant lands. The 2019 urban agriculture policy demonstrates the borough government’s willingness to support what it calls a “plural and innovative urban agriculture” (RDP–PAT 2019; see Box 1).

The urban agriculture seed initiatives we identified in RDP–PAT hold promise for improving conditions in the borough and possibly catalyzing a broader transformation by challenging and replacing institutionalized unsustainable values and beliefs, practices, and structures that feed ongoing issues in the borough, such as food insecurity, gang violence and youth vulnerability, lack of social cohesion, social isolation and a weak community fabric. The nature and objectives of RDP–PAT’s urban agriculture seed initiatives are diverse, but each of them seeks to influence residents’ relationship with and connection to place, to one another, and to nature, through the cultivation and sharing of food and the exchange of knowledge. Many of RDP–PAT’s seed initiatives (see Fig. 2) promote collective activities and learning, from gardening, to sharing green spaces with eco-grazing sheep, to picking fruit from public trees. Others build awareness and educate the community about sustainability issues through, by example, the integration of urban agriculture activities and learning in daycare, school, and summer camp curriculums, and the distribution of compost and edible plants to residents, promoting a sustainable lifestyle (see Table A1 in Appendix 1 for the complete list and descriptions of the seed initiatives identified in this study).

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

We adopted a qualitative case study approach, allowing for an in-depth and contextually rich description and interpretation of the institutionalization of urban agriculture in RDP–PAT (Eisenhardt 1989). We integrated in-depth semi-structured interviews (n = 46; as a primary data source) with participant observation and document analysis (Given 2008) to describe and interpret the multi-actor dynamics and implications of institutionalizing urban agriculture in RDP–PAT via a government-enacted policy.

The lead author led the data collection and analysis with an insider perspective as a native French speaker born and raised in Montréal. Despite this familiarity, they were an outsider to the specific experience of living or working in the borough of RDP–PAT. Participant observation through an internship at a local organization allowed the lead author to gain a deeper understanding of the local context in which the events and dynamics under study occurred.

Participant observation

From June to November 2023, the lead author completed a 200-hour internship with ÉcoUrbain (a pseudonym), an organization based in RDP–PAT that leads activities and manages urban agriculture initiatives started in collaboration with residents, local organizations, or the borough government. This internship created opportunities to participate in urban agriculture events, share informal conversations with the local community of urban agriculture practitioners, visit project sites, meet project leaders, and sit in on private meetings, all of which deepened contextual understanding for the study and generated insights about seed actors’ motivations, challenges, and overall experiences with starting projects in the borough. Data was collected in the form of field notes that were later translated to memos, as well as photographs (with consent from participants), but these were not systematically coded and analyzed. Rather, we used participant observation as a method for obtaining a deep contextual understanding of our case, based on first-hand observations of conditions in the borough, and to identify and recruit study participants while building rapport with RDP–PAT’s community of urban agriculture practitioners (Saldaña 2011).

Document analysis

We thematically analyzed 24 documents produced between the years 2012 and 2024 (see Appendix 1 for the full list of documents). We developed a narrative on the institutionalization of urban agriculture in RDP–PAT and placed it within the larger context of Montréal’s citywide plans for urban agriculture development using RDP–PAT’s 2019 urban agriculture policy and its first associated action plan, Montréal’s urban agriculture strategy and 2030 climate action plan, and an organizational report on the state of urban agriculture in Montréal, prepared in 2012. We also consulted these documents, alongside government web pages and media articles, to gather insights on governmental interventions linked to urban agriculture policies. With the help of a research assistant, we reviewed ÉcoUrbain’s annual activity reports from 2012 to 2022, along with project-specific documentation provided by seed actors, to identify and collect information about urban agriculture seed initiatives and events in the borough. We also used these documents to enhance the credibility of our analysis, by corroborating findings across data sets (Bowen 2009). For example, to enumerate the seed initiatives in the borough over time and determine the establishment date of all known seeds, we compared the data derived from interviews against that of documents.

Interviews

Semi-structured interviews were the primary data source for this study. Individuals were selected based on two criteria: whether they had started or led seed initiatives in the borough, and whether they had contributed to developing and implementing the borough’s urban agriculture policy and actions in the first plan associated with the policy. We then categorized participants based on whether their involvement with urban agriculture in the borough was primarily (1) through a role in government, (2) through their employment in a non-governmental or community organization, or (3) as independent actors.

We started by contacting all 16 members of the RDP–PAT urban agriculture policy’s coordination committee (RDP–PAT 2019). This committee was intersectoral, involving governmental actors from several departments and divisions, non-governmental organizational actors, and one resident of the borough. We successfully recruited and interviewed nine members of this committee.

Next, we identified seed initiatives based on the following criteria: any initiative that promotes or facilitates the practice of urban agriculture in RDP–PAT, led and managed (at least partially) by community actors including citizens and citizens’ groups. This included initiatives that were co-led or co-managed by the borough or city government. Interventions initiated by the borough government exclusively, such as regulatory reforms and the creation of new committees, are not considered seed initiatives in this study; we refer to them here as government-led interventions. We gathered an initial list of seed initiatives using a map of urban agriculture projects in RDP–PAT published by the borough administration (RDP–PAT 2022). If contact details were not available online, we relied on our participation in borough agricultural activities to make connections. We recruited project leaders and initiators for interviews to obtain their perspectives on, and experiences with, sowing the “seeds” of an urban agriculture transformation in the borough. Additional participants and seed initiatives were identified through participant observation and during interviews using a snowball method, until saturation was reached, and no new names were offered (Bernard 2006a, Parker et al. 2019). This approach guarded against excluding from the study any individuals and organizations playing key roles in the development of the borough’s urban agriculture scene.

We stratified between different types of actors (Bernard 2006b) to capture diverse perspectives on RDP–PAT’s urban agriculture transformation. Our final participant population included local governmental actors (20%), non-governmental organizational actors (57%), and independent actors (28%; see Appendix 2 for detailed information about interviews and participants). Two participants belonged to two of these actor-categories, fulfilling dual roles simultaneously or at different moments in the borough’s transformation.

Between July 2023 and January 2024, the lead author conducted semi-structured interviews with 46 participants. We recruited interview participants in person, via email, or by phone, and explained the study’s objectives, the reason they had been identified for participation in the study, their rights, and the measures in place to ensure confidentiality. We provided each participant with a written consent form before the interview, in addition to asking for oral consent at the start of the interview. The study was approved by McGill and Guelph Universities’ research ethics boards (REB # 23-04-099 and 23-07-028). The interviews followed a guide consisting of open-ended questions but remained flexible to allow interviewees to freely express themselves (Hay and Cope 2005). We collected information on interviewees’ perceptions of the borough and its evolution since the policy’s enactment, their involvement with the 2019 urban agriculture policy, its implications for their activities, the goals and conditions that motivated their actions, and the limitations they faced in realizing these goals (see Appendix 3 for interview guide). Interviews were conducted at project sites or at participants’ homes or workplaces and ranged between 30 minutes and 1.5 hours. Most interviews were conducted in-person (31 interviews), but when this was not possible, they were conducted online using the platform Zoom (14) or by telephone (1). Participants had the choice of being interviewed in French or English by the bilingual lead author (only one interview was conducted in English). Interviews were recorded, then transcribed using the software program Sonix.ai. Transcripts were cleaned and cross-checked for accuracy using the audio recordings of the interviews.

Data analysis

We conducted a thematic analysis of interview data that iteratively combined deductive coding (based on the pre-established themes that informed our interview questions) with inductive coding (based on themes that emerged from the data; Guest et al. 2012, Saldana 2021). Applying codes to raw data facilitates later analysis by organizing text according to the concepts and themes that characterize a study (Guest et al. 2012). Our initial collection of codes consisted of descriptive and thematic codes (and sub-codes) based on interview questions (e.g., “borough conditions,” “personal motivations,” “influential actors”; see Table A2 in Appendix 4 for interview questions and coding process). We performed a first round of deductive coding using this initial collection of codes, while allowing new hypotheses to emerge and inform our coding process (i.e., inductive codes; Miles et al. 2014). Emergent ideas and themes encountered broadly related to theoretical discussions around the interplay between “actors,” their “strategies,” the “resources” they do and do not have access to, and their “willingness to act” in support of transformation (Avelino 2011, Farla et al. 2012, Borrás et al. 2023). These new parent-codes formed the basis for this study’s analytical framework, and we derived additional, theoretically informed sub-codes using literature exploring key actors, strategies, and resources for institutionalization (Table 1). We categorized “actors” according to their role in the borough’s urban agriculture transformation, as seed leader, governmental actor, intermediary actor, or hybrid actor. We coded for strategies according to four broad categories of action: mobilizing for change, managing relationships, capacity building, and fostering experimentation. We determined the first three categories by combining Kivimaa et al.’s (2019b) functions of intermediaries and Westley et al.’s (2013) strategies of change agents. We selected these two articles as the theoretical basis for our analysis of the strategies that actors employ to advance their goals during institutionalization because both identified key strategies (or “functions”) according to the different phases of transformation. We extracted the strategies linked to institutionalization and conservation (Westley et al. 2013) and to acceleration and embedding (Kivimaa et al. 2019b). The last category, fostering experimentation, emerged inductively during our first round of coding and was verified against the chosen articles. Although both articles linked the promotion of experimentation with earlier, more exploratory phases of transformation, our interview data showed that experimentation remained a key strategy for advancing change throughout institutionalization. Our interview data also showed that access to certain types of resources determined actors’ ability (or inability) to act. We inductively coded for resources, indicating whether actors could access these resources (coded as “have”), or were limited by them (coded as “have not”). Many scholars have acknowledged that access to resources is key to advancing transformation. For example, Westley et al. (2013) describe the need to leverage limited resources and identify new sources of funding as a key strategy for preparing and mobilizing for change. Kivimaa et al. (2019b) identify the pooling of resources as critical to accelerating change, the transition phase typically associated with institutionalization. We based our categorization of resource types on an article by Borrás et al. (2023) exploring how actor’s roles, skills, and resources interact to generate transformative capacity. Once we expanded and organized our collection of codes according to this emergent analytical framework, we performed a second and final round of deductive coding (see Table A3 in Appendix 4 for codebook). Segments were coded more than once to identify relationships between the different concepts investigated (i.e., a single segment coded as one or multiple actors, strategies, and resources). The quotes presented in the results were translated from French to English using the translation software DeepL, then verified by the lead author. Pseudonyms were used to maintain the anonymity of people and organizations.

RESULTS

Although we present institutionalization as a series of events juxtaposed onto the different phases of transformation, from preparing for change to consolidating change (Fig. 3), these events and the actors involved interact and influence each other. This interaction makes institutionalization a nonlinear and dynamic process that can be narrated from multiple entry points, without a defined start or end, as many of these events either overlap in time or occur iteratively as a continuum.

Re-imaging the borough: from dissatisfaction to a space of opportunity

RDP–PAT is an industrial neighborhood that “is collectively imagined as polluted and associated with refineries” (I18), and where residents’ “sense of belonging is not strong” (I4). Interviewees described RDP–PAT using words such as “contaminated,” “neglected,” “asleep,” “not trendy, nor progressive.” Many interviewees commented on the borough’s lack of community life, pointing to causal factors such as poor walkability reducing the likelihood of chance encounters, marginalized cultural communities, gang violence, disparity between rich and poor, and division between the RDP and PAT neighborhoods. Amid widespread dissatisfaction with current conditions in RDP–PAT, interviewees expressed hope that their borough could transform into a good place to live. This hope was fueled by the borough’s enormous potential for urban agriculture development, which many interviewees saw as an opportunity for transformation. “When many oil refineries recently closed, there was a need to find a new vocation [for the borough],” explained the leader of a collective garden (I10). A community garden president (I6) said: “as the only borough with so much vacant land still available ... we had enormous potential.” The director of ÉcoUrbain (I1) claimed that “recognizing this potential sowed a seed in people’s minds.” As explained by a city councilor and former urban agriculture coordinator working in the borough (I2), the development of a plural and collective urban agriculture on un(der)used territory would help the borough address its issues of food insecurity and social isolation by enhancing access to fresh foods, promoting intergenerational exchange, educating youth, and bridging the divide between cultural communities. It would provide an opportunity to change people’s perceptions of the borough because, as stated by an urban agriculture professional (I18), “if we can grow vegetables, it means that the territory is not so contaminated anymore.” These quotes illustrate the perception of a ripe opportunity context for urban agriculture’s development in the borough in the period leading up to the enactment of an urban agriculture policy.

Isolated seed initiatives draw the attention of decision makers

Interviewees indicated that before the 2019 policy, individualized forms of urban agriculture, such as backyard gardening, prevailed over community-based activities, and only a small number of collective urban agriculture seed initiatives existed in the borough (Fig. 4). Interviewees’ accounts of seed initiatives established in the borough before the adoption of an urban agriculture policy were verified via internet research and by reviewing ÉcoUrbain’s annual reports and a local artist’s published account of the borough’s community gardens (Chabot 2013). Before 2019, the borough had its six community gardens, still active today and co-managed by dedicated gardeners and the borough government, the Rivard-Paquette greenhouse providing horticulture education and a safe space to vulnerable youth, the MAVI collective garden promoting food security and urban biodiversity, and shared planter boxes called free-zones for urban agriculture, which were strategically located in public spaces (see Table A1 in Appendix 1 for more information about seed initiatives). Alongside these community-based initiatives, governmental actors with a background in horticulture or a keen interest in sustainability reported incorporating urban agriculture into their work. A cultural agent involved in the policy’s development (I38) said, “there were a number of small actions carried out by every [government] division, but it wasn’t consolidated.” They described urban agriculture activities in the borough at this time as “one-off, piecemeal projects,” adding that “there wasn’t necessarily any money attached to these actions.” Seed initiatives in the borough before the policy were described as mostly isolated, unconsolidated, and undercapitalized. In isolation, they were unlikely to bring about a cascade of changes, despite generating positive impacts for a relatively small range of beneficiaries.

Still, the passionate dedication of seed actors attracted the interest of local governmental actors and is likely to have played a role in inspiring the creation of a policy, by showcasing urban agriculture’s potential for improving life in RDP–PAT. In an interview with a local media outlet, a city councilor said: “it was the presence of these passionate gardeners that initially motivated us to get involved in urban agriculture politics and took us further, because we can see the positive impact” (Largier 2023). The leader of the borough’s first and largest collective garden (I10) expressed disappointment when the garden’s role in inspiring the policy was “a bit overlooked. When they announced the policy, they never named the garden as an integral part of that project. On the other hand, when they needed to shoot a video on urban agriculture, they asked to come and shoot it here, because it was the only place there was.” Since the garden’s establishment in 2012, this seed actor actively sought the attention of local decision makers to obtain additional funding and to showcase their positive impact in the community. They (I10) said: “every year we had a festive event for the gardens, and we always invited the elected representatives. There was at least one city councilor who turned up regularly.” When asked whether they believed there was a link between their seed initiative and the borough government’s interest in adopting an urban agriculture policy, they said: “I certainly think [we] played a role, I would hope. The gardens are beautiful, they were very productive, even if we didn’t manage to make a profit, it’s impressive.”

A key actor mobilizes for change

One individual, referred to hereafter with the pseudonym Mélanie, played an outsized role in the institutionalization of urban agriculture in RDP–PAT. When interviewees were asked to identify actors championing change in RDP–PAT’s urban agriculture, Mélanie was constantly named as an especially influential player. Mélanie’s role shifted, keeping pace with changes occurring in the borough, as she went from working at a grassroots level to working in government.

In 2016, she took up the position of urban agriculture coordinator for ÉcoUrbain, a local environmental organization engaged in a partnership with the borough. In this position, Mélanie was involved in community outreach, drawing new and harder-to-reach individuals to discover and engage with urban agriculture, generating interest and creating momentum for urban agriculture activities beyond the existing core of practitioners. According to one interviewee (I9), Mélanie was “the driving force behind the mobilization of local residents.” Mélanie (I2) explained that she had a direct link to influential governmental actors: “there were people who were mobilized, but maybe they didn’t have such a strong link with the borough [government],” a position that enabled her to be a voice for RDP–PAT’s urban agriculture community. The president of a community garden (I28) said: “I signed a petition about the chicken project. Of course, I went to the immediate person I knew, which was [Mélanie], because they were the bridge between the city and our citizens.” Upon hearing of the borough’s intent to enact an urban agriculture policy, Mélanie explained that she requested the mandate of leading public consultations and surveys, a task she was well-positioned to carry out given the positive relationships and trust she had built in the local community. In the years following the policy’s adoption, Mélanie was elected as city councilor for Pointe-aux-Trembles (PAT). An urban agriculture professional working across Montréal (I9) observed that “since Mélanie moved into municipal politics, [urban agriculture] has become much more institutionalized.” In her new position, Mélanie continued to advocate for an urban agriculture transformation, shifting her efforts toward bringing about institutional changes. She formed an “ecological transition” committee to advise the government on aligning urban agriculture with the borough’s broader development plans. According to the director of ÉcoUrbain (I1), the committee is a first of its kind in Montréal, notably for its inclusion of citizens. As urban agriculture became increasingly institutionalized in RDP–PAT, the borough’s transformation needs and conditions evolved. Mélanie’s leadership and hybrid role enabled her to steer the system toward the next phase of change and accelerate this transformation by leveraging new and different types of resources to support urban agriculture.

Decision makers seek to build relationships with seed initiatives

Early in the process of developing the urban agriculture policy, the government in RDP–PAT sought out the expertise of seed actors. For example, local officials solicited the advice of a devoted teacher who co-founded a high school greenhouse in 2004 working closely with the community, for the benefit of the community. The Rivard-Paquette greenhouse operates at the intersection of the government’s efforts to alleviate social problems, including gang violence, and its co-founder’s mission to create a safe educational space for vulnerable youth. The co-founder (I8a) explained this by saying: “our young people are afraid to leave their homes, so we have to offer them places where they feel safe. The greenhouse has been there for 20 years and there’s never been any damage or vandalism. Why is that? Because the word has always gotten out that this place is ours and is for doing positive things. I find that fascinating because there have been a lot of broken windows on the school, graffiti on the school, but never on the greenhouse ... Here, [students] found a place where they could relax and listen, a place where they feel comfortable.” However, their feeling of inclusion in the borough’s efforts to amplify urban agriculture had stopped there: “there’s no link with all that anymore ... we still work too much in silos. It would be great to continue sharing in these wonderful initiatives” (I8a). The director of a community organization (I5) echoed this view, stressing the importance of sustained, continuous collaboration between the government and local actors: “intensity has to be maintained over time and we have to persevere to achieve interesting results ... it’s a fault of city policies; they mobilize at the start ... but afterwards, it falls into oblivion ... To keep residents, community organizations and partners involved, you need to update them on a regular basis.” These observations illustrate the need for sustained collaborations between seed initiatives and local government in efforts to implement transformative change. Engaging a diverse range of actors may demand greater effort because of the negotiation of visions and changes occurring through co-creation processes. However, this approach also amplifies resources and enhances experimentation, thereby accelerating transformation (see Fig. 3).

New space is created for multi-actor collaborations

From development to implementation, RDP–PAT’s 2019 urban agriculture policy invited diverse actors operating in separate societal spheres to find one another, share ideas, and work together. According to Mélanie (I2), co-creating a policy with the help of the community is less about producing a formal document, about which she says: “It’s there, but I don’t think people are going to consult it,” and more about bringing people together, which builds momentum: “it’s the fact that you talk about it, even before [the policy] is finalized. You have a survey, you have consultations, which leads people to get together and realize that they’re not the only ones who are passionate about gardening. There’s this whole effect.” She notes the importance of including diverse actors in the process: “You can never make policy without asking the people it’s going to affect. And often, civil servants have their own vision and good ideas, but that doesn’t mean they’re gardening ... one doesn’t know the other’s reality ... it allows us to exchange ideas [and] to think about all the aspects we hadn’t considered before.” A member of the policy coordination committee (I40) felt that taking a collaborative approach to policy making enhanced the policy’s credibility, saying: “If there are 16 people around the table with as many organizations represented, it carries a lot more weight than if there were three or four. Each organization has a strength and brings an extra voice of reflection.”

Although collaboration promoted inclusivity, involving a greater number and diversity of people and perspectives in the endeavor complicated the process of change. The environmental organization ÉcoUrbain, in its regular activities, was a bridge between the community and the local government. Thus, in the policy making process, ÉcoUrbain was strategically positioned to serve as intermediary, translating across actors and groups that seldomly directly interact to help realize shared objectives. An employee of ÉcoUrbain (I27) said: “We try to listen, to be attentive to the issues, challenges, worries, questions, concerns and ideas of residents ... and then to share them with the borough when they ask for our opinion. We try to help [residents] realize their vision and bring it into line with the borough’s vision. That’s our implicit mission.”

Thus, the interviews showed that RDP–PAT’s urban agriculture policy created new opportunities for multi-actor collaborations, which contributed to determining the trajectory of change by crafting new relationships and informing the policy’s orientations and goals. The need for intermediary actors arose, who could help navigate this collaborative process by translating between actors and managing delicate relationships.

Negotiating visions

From public consultations welcoming all residents of RDP and PAT, to meetings of the policy coordination committee, “there were encounters that enabled us to open a discussion on the different visions of urban agriculture and ask what did we mean by urban agriculture?” said a cultural agent (I38). Mélanie (I2) explained that during one of the committee’s meetings, the vision of transforming RDP–PAT “from chimneys to gardens” emerged, based on the song “sous les cheminées” (under the chimneys) by singer songwriter Richard Séguin, who grew up in the borough. This vision reflects a sentiment expressed by many interviewees, which a resident and active member of the gardening community (I6) worded as follows: “it would be great, for changing perceptions, to come along and say, now our borough is going to be the champion of urban agriculture after having been the champion of petrochemical pollution.” Collective, multi-stakeholder visioning exercises unified the community around a shared desire to transform the borough by expanding its urban agriculture offerings. The director of a community development center (I5) explained that one of the policy’s goals, to make residents dream and give them cause for action, was achieved through these gatherings. The quantitative target and timeline stated in the policy document—to convert 30 hectares of RDP–PAT’s territory to urban agriculture by 2030 (referred to as the “2030 vision”)—represents the operationalization of the community’s broader vision of a garden borough, by the organization mandated to write the policy. The 2030 vision reflects a top-down impulse by the borough government to have a measurable and practical objective, and while it was largely unpopular among interviewees (most were either unaware of this vision, or unenthusiastic about it) people appreciated the government’s intent to transform the borough, and the resources allocated to this objective. The 2030 vision provided a framework by which the interests of seed initiatives and other actors engaged in the borough’s transformation could be met, by making resources available to support activities that would foster both the absolute target of 30 hectares by 2030, and the broader vision of transforming RDP–PAT “from chimneys to gardens,” which just as well outlines a direction of change that implies a radical shift from current trends.

Some seed actors’ efforts are consolidated and legitimized

Some motivated seed actors, including progressive governmental actors, saw their actions become consolidated and legitimized under the awning of the 2019 urban agriculture policy. An employee of the borough government (I38) felt compelled to align their efforts with the urban agriculture policy’s goals and vision, explaining that “consolidating everything into a policy ... created a certain sensitivity to including urban agriculture ... in design, rehabilitation, and development projects ... it gets everyone involved, makes everyone feel concerned, so that it doesn’t look like an add-on, but is instead integrated into [future] development ... so it’s more meaningful and unifying.”

The responsibility to contribute to the 2030 vision was diffused across different administrative divisions. The research agent responsible for overseeing the 2020–2022 action plan’s implementation (I35) worked across many divisions, including social development, parks, urbanism, and economic development, culture, sports and recreation, and communications. The policy encouraged each division to prioritize urban agriculture, leading, as an example, the parks division to planting mainly edible species of nut and fruit trees following the policy’s adoption. Working in the division of culture, sports, and recreation, an agent said of urban agriculture: “It was clear to us that this was what we wanted to do” (I12).

The policy had the effect of legitimizing urban agriculture in the borough. An urban agriculture professional (I9) explained: “a municipality or a borough will have access to many more means of action. When they speak, people listen.” For example, a public works supervisor (I15a) used the policy as fodder to justify their decision to prioritize the maintenance of urban agriculture initiatives, like shared growing zones, over tending to other tasks. The policy’s mere existence helped them coerce resistant colleagues to incorporate urban agriculture into their work and responsibilities, for example, by letting sheep replace lawn mowers in certain sections of public parks (a practice called eco-grazing). They said: “I’m always telling my boss and my colleagues that ... we can’t go against the policy and say we don’t have time to do it. No, the borough has made this one of its priorities, so we must lend a hand and get involved in these projects.” The policy thus legitimized efforts to amplify urban agriculture and imposed it, as a practice and a set of values, on resistant institutional actors by requiring that activities and organizations be reconfigured to integrate urban agriculture.

New actors and resources bolster experimentation

The adoption of an urban agriculture policy and the commitment to a three-year action plan further institutionalized urban agriculture in RDP–PAT (Table 2) and fostered experimentation. After 2019, seed initiatives proliferated in the borough and “became much more diverse” (I10), marking a new phase of experimentation that was characterized by greater governmental intervention and increased resources available for seed initiatives. Importantly, the borough didn’t resist experimentation; it supported new ideas in the community and carried out its own experiments. Many interviewees shared the view that “since the policy, the borough has shown a lot of openness,” (I1). Interviewees mainly discussed the government’s openness in relation to two interventions: regulatory reforms and calls for projects.

(1) Lowering barriers to experimentation through regulatory reforms

The borough government’s key interventions included regulatory reforms that removed barriers to innovative and previously untried methods of practicing urban agriculture, thus supporting experimentation. In 2020, a regulation requiring that front yards be mostly covered with well-maintained grass was modified, enabling residents to plant edible gardens (regulatory reform 1 in Fig. 4). In 2021, in response to a petition by residents, the government launched a pilot project authorizing 12 residents to keep egg-laying hens on their property (regulatory reform 2 in Fig. 4). This second reform was a first for the city of Montréal, requiring the approval and participation of the municipal government’s legal affairs department. When other boroughs showed interest in this initiative, it became a collaborative inter-borough effort. Under the new regulatory framework, hen-keeping required a permit, the completion of a mandatory training course, and the occasional monitoring of installations in one’s backyard. Hen-keepers interviewed supported these measures; one of them (I33) said: “I think it’s important to provide a framework. We’re in a city here, so not just anyone can do anything ... it’s good to give people guidance to avoid things getting out of hand or being done in the wrong way. I don’t feel the tone is controlling, it’s more supportive.” In support of this view, the director of an organization that builds pollinator gardens and beehives (I9) said: “When you take a perspective like the RDP–PAT action plan, which is more resident-oriented, if you provide the means, if you say “yes, you can do it,” people will often do. If you use the tools you have and say “we’ve just changed the regulations so that we can authorize you to plant tomatoes and zucchinis in your front yard,” in my opinion, you benefit both sides and recreate the link [with residents] that’s sometimes harder to make.” Thus, the government mobilized legislative resources to lower (rather than create) barriers to practicing urban agriculture in innovative and experimental ways.

(2) Connecting ideas to resources through calls for projects

Another key intervention of the borough government was its 2022 launch of the “call for projects” support program, designed to stimulate experimentation by incentivizing, through financial and knowledge support, the creation of urban agriculture projects (seed initiatives) for the benefit of the wider community. Because the borough was limited by its human resources, it struggled to start new projects. A former government employee (I37) explained that “it’s very demanding in terms of energy for the borough, for the benefit of citizens ... we don’t necessarily have the time to support them as much as we’d like.” Instead, the government leveraged more readily available resources (money and access to knowledgeable experts) to bolster experimentation in the form of new seed initiatives created and managed by the local community. People seeking to transform their ideas into concrete projects that would deliver benefits to the local community could apply to the program. Project ideas were selected by a committee of governmental and non-governmental actors, which also included some residents.

One project leader (I41) described the program as “a pretext for an urban agriculture project, a catalyst.” Another (I29) described it as “a model that enabled us to say that we’re going to go for it, we’re going to do it.” The initiator of a seed initiative dedicated to benefitting vulnerable youth (I34) said: “my idea was there, but there was nothing concrete, so the call for projects really made it all happen ... the grant helped us achieve our objectives and have a positive impact.” It did so in large part through capacity-building, involving the transfer of technical knowledge (i.e., horticulture) and experiential knowledge (i.e., how to navigate bureaucracy when starting projects in collaboration with the borough). A former sustainable development research officer (I37) explained that “coaching is necessary to support people who are inspired to start projects, but don’t have the knowledge ... Otherwise, if they have a bad experience, they’re not going to do it again the following year, even if they’ve made certain investments ... If you’re well supported in the process, it will help to keep the experience positive and give you the desire to start again.”

Over two years, the calls for projects supported the creation of 12 seed initiatives in the borough. An employee of ÉcoUrbain mandated to coach new seed initiatives (I27) observed that “it’s having a knock-on effect. The more people develop projects, the more others think ‘Cool. This school did this, I can do that too.’” Interviews also showed that a key success factor for many of these projects was the mobilization of human resources in the community, taking the form of ideas, time, and voluntary participation. The calls for projects thus enabled diverse actors to combine their resources in complementary ways, contributing to advancing the policy objective of dedicating new space to urban agriculture while involving new seed actors, and more beneficiaries, in the borough’s transformation.

Although interviewees’ opinions of the program were mostly positive, many pointed to the program’s eligibility criteria as a major shortcoming. Because the borough was not legally authorized to finance citizen-led projects, eligibility was restricted to seed initiatives associated with, or led by, an organization. Additionally, because the borough struggled with securing access to land for establishing new projects, institutional projects were favored over those led by citizens. One seed initiative led by a group of citizens was awarded “funds conditional on obtaining land” (I41), but their garden project never saw the light of day. The project’s leader (I41) said: “it just becomes effort in a vacuum, so I think from then on it becomes a bit demotivating,” explaining that “we’ve never been able to do [our project] because we’ve never had access to land ... the call for projects is not able to support citizen groups with initiatives that go a little beyond the general framework.”

DISCUSSION

A less linear pathway to transformation

By examining how the dynamics that institutionalized urban agriculture in RDP–PAT shaped the borough’s pathway to transformation, we discovered that transformation does not always follow a linear trajectory of experimentation followed by institutionalization (Pereira et al. 2018). Instead, it may adopt a more circular pathway with no distinctive starting point, whereby iterative cycles of co-produced, emergent, and potentially transformative changes drive forward the process of transformation (see Fig. 3). This less linear and more iterative framing of transformational pathways accounts for the feedback we observed between transformational processes (e.g., experimentation and institutionalization), which results from the interactions of multiple actors entering the process of change at different moments in time or at different stages of the transformation and employing different strategies to mobilize different resources.

Prevailing theories on transformation suggest that institutionalization begins later, responding to destabilizing bottom-up pressure for change created by seed initiatives in the preparation phase (e.g., Rotmans et al. 2000, Olsson et al. 2004, Moore et al. 2014, Pereira et al. 2018). However, our case study contradicts this assumption, instead supporting the notion that actors operating at the level of the regime such as local governments can intervene early to participate in the co-creation of transformative change (Rotmans et al. 2001, Kivimaa et al. 2019a) in a collaborative rather than confrontational manner (Ehnert et al. 2018) that favors the creation of resource, governance, and social synergies (Frantzeskaki et al. 2014, Fischer et al. 2020). Such a “friendly” and co-beneficial institutionalization is more likely when the interests and goals of seed initiatives are symbiotic with those of the government (Geels and Schot 2007). In RDP–PAT, such symbiosis in actors’ ultimate goal, to make the borough a better place to live through the expansion of urban agriculture, led the government to intervene in support of urban agriculture at an early stage in the transformation, even in the absence of a strongly mobilized and coordinated network of seed initiatives building pressure for change (Irvine and Bai 2019, Borras et al. 2023).

Contrary to the commonly held theory that experimentation in the preparation phase must precede institutionalization in the navigating and consolidating phases, our case showed that institutionalization can be triggered by and also bolster experimentation. In RDP–PAT, government interventions further institutionalized urban agriculture while harnessing the innovative potential and resourcefulness of the local community (Westley et al. 2011), paving the way for more experimentation. Experimentation evolved to become more heterogeneous by involving new actors and new resources, which reinforced seed initiatives’ chances of persisting (Krueger 2022). Opportunistic individuals responded to calls for projects and started seed initiatives in their community that would benefit harder-to-reach individuals and create new beneficiaries of the transformation. This had a trickle-down effect, inspiring new seed actors to learn from others’ experiences and partake in the transformation, causing the number and diversity of seed initiatives to multiply and further diffusing the practice of urban agriculture across the borough’s population of potential adopters (Fischer et al. 2020). Thus, in this story of change, experimentation and institutionalization were iterative and positively reinforcing processes. Institutionalizing urban agriculture through mechanisms such as making a policy, setting goals, and developing an action plan (Pasquini and Shearing 2014) supported experimentation by lowering regulatory barriers, incentivizing seed actors, and supporting the practice of new forms of urban agriculture in the borough. In return, this heightened experimentation drove further institutionalization, leading to a more strongly capitalized, more consolidated and coherent process of transformation.

In this study, we observed three interrelated phases of transformation. In the preparation phase, existing seed initiatives in the borough recognized a need for change; they had a shared problem perception (Brockhoff et al. 2022) which led them to experiment with alternative ways of producing food that could benefit their community. However, their efforts were isolated rather than directed toward a shared objective. A common tactic used by seed initiatives to scale up their impact to higher institutional levels is to open dialogue with government representatives and invite them to visit their initiatives (Lam et al. 2022). In RDP–PAT, this type of “lobbying” inspired decision makers to intervene politically in the borough’s urban agriculture. The local government took up the role of seed actor in this first phase, by carrying out innovative experiments that were either completely new to Montréal (e.g., the raising of egg-laying hens), or borrowed from other boroughs and contextualized for RDP–PAT (e.g., eco-grazing with the help of sheep in public parks). Contextualizing initiatives that have been tested elsewhere is a form of innovation because it involves the mobilization of actors, resources, and institutional arrangements, enables learning and leads to uncertain outcomes (Peng et al. 2019). A study by Lam et al. (2022) found, as we did, that governments can be key to building momentum for transformation in the preparation phase by supporting seed initiatives financially, building their capacity, and creating new strategic collaborations to help them grow their impact. In other studies on transformation, the government’s role included linking innovative ideas in the community to resource opportunities (“management up-down”; Westley et al. 2013), supporting and coordinating actors (Peng et al. 2019), and mobilizing stronger collective action (Qiu et al. 2024, Zhou 2024). In RDP–PAT, similar interventions by the government contributed to amplifying bottom-up transformative impulses that, alone, were insufficient to create the cascades of changes required to produce transformative outcomes. A case study on urban food initiatives in the Stockholm city-region (Sellberg et al. 2020) found that lack of political will and knowledge was a major barrier to realizing visions of more sustainable food systems, and conversely, the involvement of local governments in sustainable food systems advanced transformation. Similarly, we found that the local government of RDP–PAT played an indispensable role in this first phase of transformation, by assuming the role of seed actor and intervening to support the emergence and flourishing of seed initiatives.

During the middle phase of navigating the transition, the co-creation of a policy made space for new collaborations, enabling groups, structures, and opinions to form, and leading people to cluster around re-imagining the future of their borough (Moore and Westley 2011). This process of articulating visions and ideas enhanced consensus on the value of urban agriculture as an innovation for social and ecological sustainability and embedded it in the borough’s new identity as a “garden” borough (Naber et al. 2017). Having a collective vision for the borough built transformative agency within the community of RDP–PAT (Westley et al. 2013), mobilizing (Gernert et al. 2018) and empowering people to act (Feola and Nunes 2014) by creating social ties and generating a sense of community (Grabs 2018), which interviewees felt was lacking in RDP–PAT.

During the last phase of consolidation, fuzzy and only loosely coupled actions became more consolidated and legitimized, leading to more alignment and interrelation between actors and their actions (Fuenfschilling and Truffer 2016). The policy built stability for urban agriculture’s presence in the borough, firstly, by asking governmental departments to reconfigure their activities to further incorporate and prioritize urban agriculture and secondly, via the creation of new committees (e.g., policy coordination committee, ecological transition committee, and selection committee for the calls for projects). The stability of an innovation also increases through its diffusion among potential adopters (Lawrence et al. 2001); RDP–PAT’s urban agriculture policy drew hundreds of actors to engage in and shape the pathway to transformation, including early seed actors, local decision makers, and diverse governmental and non-governmental actors and residents who co-created the policy and continue their work to implement the policy’s action plan and realize the shared desire of making RDP–PAT a good place to live. After the policy’s enactment, however, the borough government failed to adequately uphold relationships with local actors it had involved in policy making. A recent study on amplifying actions for food system transformation (Lam et al. 2022) found that ongoing, adaptive approaches to collaborating with local actors is important given the complexity of transformative change, and failure to do so risks reinforcing current system dynamics.

Reconceptualizing actors’ roles in transformation

The strategies required in the phases of preparing, navigating, and consolidating change are not static; they evolve and shift in relative importance as the transformation progresses (Loorbach et al. 2017, Kivimaa et al. 2019b, Wang et al. 2024). The strategies employed by intermediary and hybrid actors were particularly important for driving and supporting collaborative institutionalization. ÉcoUrbain, as a partner organization to the borough government and active player in the borough’s transformation, played an intermediary role. They mediated between community and governmental actors by translating across their different viewpoints and negotiating their interests (Fischer and Newig 2016). We identified two hybrid actors that alternated between the positions of engaged community actor and city worker, building the capacity of seed initiatives while driving ambitious change within their government divisions. We focus our discussion around Mélanie, a hybrid actor and institutional entrepreneur, because she challenges the notion of governments as monolithic or as passive agents of change (Avelino 2011, Farla et al. 2012). One of our goals in this study was to explore how local governments (and, by extension, local governmental actors) might contribute to transformation, by looking beyond implicit and existing assumptions of the functions that actors perform (Hilger et al. 2021).

Mélanie established herself as a leader for the expansion and diversification of urban agriculture activities in RDP–PAT. Before the urban agriculture policy and through her work at ÉcoUrbain, Mélanie aggregated place-based knowledge and built trust in the local community, which later helped her spearhead a collaborative policy making process (Wang et al. 2024). She embodied the role of an institutional entrepreneur by leveraging her good relationships with the local community and government to request the policy making mandate. She recognized the ripe opportunity context in RDP–PAT for urban agriculture’s development and had already made, over the years leading up to the policy, significant efforts to grow and diffuse this practice (Westley and Antadze 2010). She connected the bottom-up innovative impulses of a small community of urban agriculture practitioners to opportunities for change (the policy) and to actors with capacity to provide additional resources (the government), by embodying and voicing their ideas, their enthusiasm, and their values (Wolfram 2016), and by holding space for the expanding community of urban agriculture supporters throughout the process of urban agriculture’s institutionalization. There is disagreement in the literature on whether institutional entrepreneurs have special qualities and abilities that enable them to perform this function, or whether it is their position, and the embedded agency they gain from it, that determines their ability to mobilize resources and allocate power and social capital in transformation (Fuenfschilling 2019, de Koning 2024). We found that Mélanie’s hybrid position helped her to succeed as an institutional entrepreneur, in part because she carried the learnings and lived experience of a grassroots position into a governmental position, where she unlocked a whole new set of resources to support her goals. Mélanie’s example supports the notion that actors’ roles, like the phases of transformation, often overlap in practice and exist on a continuum, rather than being entirely separate and distinct (Wittmayer and Schäpke 2014, Horlings et al. 2020). It also blurs the distinction between seed and governmental actors, emphasizing the value of analyzing actors’ agency in transformation (Smith et al. 2005) and adopting a more fluid, less static view of actors’ roles (Holtz et al. 2008, Werbeloff et al. 2017).

Narrowing the scope of ideas and the risk of co-optation

An inherent risk of institutionalization is the co-optation or appropriation of seed initiatives and the process of transformation by incoming, more powerful actors. In RDP–PAT, government-led interventions to institutionalize urban agriculture set new boundaries for experimentation and determined the conditions under which the transformation process could unfold (Smith 2007, Avelino and Rotmans 2011) As resources are committed and tied up in ongoing work to institutionalize some innovative seed initiatives but not others, the scope for new ideas begins to narrow (Westley et al. 2013). Developing the policy required that a handful of individuals collectively rationalize urban agriculture by determining what it is (and is not), what forms it can (and cannot) take, and how it should (and should not) be practiced in the borough. The visions that emerged were of a transformation focused on terrestrial systems; aquatic systems and activities (e.g., urban fishing) were an after-thought, receiving fewer resources and less support. Gardening initiatives, specifically, began to dominate “spaces” of experimentation. Meanwhile, those led by organizations with available plots of land had a significant advantage over informal citizen-led initiatives. The policy also set the normative bounds of appropriate behavior in terms of practicing urban agriculture in the borough (McClintock et al. 2021), for example by introducing a new framework for keeping egg-laying hens, an activity that was not previously regulated or legally authorized. In this way, institutionalization can limit the degree of radicalism that seed initiatives can afford, while still benefiting from the support of incumbent actors such as local decision makers. Thus, every iteration of experimentation with innovations that have been institutionalized will be different than the last, partly because institutionalization changes the rules of the game.

Institutionalization is likely to have important implications for how transformation unfolds, but these can be difficult to predict, in part because institutionalizing innovations involves diverse actors and strategies that pursue possibly conflicting or competing interests and goals (Pel and Bauler 2014). During institutionalization, we may embark on multiple potential pathways of change, some that may create systemic transformation, and most that are likely to lead to system reproduction or produce only incremental, shallow changes (Abson et al. 2017, Barnes et al. 2018). The seed initiatives we identified contribute to transformative potential, which may or may not be fully realized in the future, through their contribution to altering structures, cultures, and practices (Frantzeskaki and De Haan 2009). By providing the community with the know-how, the spaces and the opportunities to produce their own healthy food, (re)connecting people with nature, building the community’s social fabric, and through their various other impacts, these seed initiatives are disrupting a more traditional, unsustainable food system and therefore have the potential to play a critical role in transforming the local food system. Still, it remains unknown whether seed initiatives’ work alongside government-led efforts to institutionalize urban agriculture will result in broad systemic transformation by way of genuinely disrupting previous pathway dependencies and doing things fundamentally differently (Blythe et al. 2018, Turnheim and Sovacool 2020). It is only once we have the benefit of hindsight that we will be able to determine whether the changes taking place in the borough of RDP–PAT truly led to transformative outcomes (Westley et al. 2016, Dorninger et al. 2020).

RESEARCH LIMITATIONS

The findings of this study are based on the qualitative analysis of a single empirical case, which limits the generalizability of the conclusions. Local context partly determines the success of seed initiatives and shapes the enabling conditions and the capacities of local governments, which vary even under a single municipal regime (Krueger 2022). Such variance limits the ability to predict whether the outcomes observed in one borough or city will be replicated elsewhere. Although few studies to date have specifically examined the institutionalization of seed initiatives through multi-actor processes and dynamics, we sought to address the single-case limitation by situating our findings with respect to those of other studies examining processes of institutionalization or the role of local governments in urban food system transformation. Our study is also limited by the relatively short duration of data collection and analysis. A longitudinal approach extending over several years would have provided a more comprehensive understanding of the long-term impacts and evolution of institutionalization. This extended time frame would allow for the observation of changes and developments that occur gradually, offering deeper insights into the sustainability and resilience of the transformations initiated. Nonetheless, our research provides novel insights into, and an alternative framing of, the process and dynamics of institutionalization at a local scale, which we identified as a gap in knowledge about sustainability transformations. Additionally, our case underscores the pivotal role of local governments in leading and supporting efforts to achieve transformative change at the scale of a place-based community, where the behavior of individuals can be most directly influenced (Burch 2010). We highlight the idea that interventions led by local governments, including the enactment of policies, can be effectively designed in collaboration with a broad and diverse community of change-makers to generate impacts for stakeholders across a multitude of life domains (Barnes et al. 2018).

CONCLUSION

A plethora of studies have explored urban food initiatives, alternative agri-food initiatives, and urban agriculture (e.g., Alkon 2008, Aubry and Kebir 2013, Jacobson 2021) and found them to be key levers for transformative change in cities (Hebinck et al. 2021) where biological, economic, political, social, and health systems intersect (Babo 2010). Many of these studies focus on identifying and describing seed initiatives to better understand what makes them innovative, how they disrupt current systems and dominant regimes, or how they organize into networks to build pressure for change (e.g., Landman 2011, Davies et al. 2022). There exists widespread consensus on the importance of institutionalizing these seed initiatives to bring about broader transformation, and some studies have sought to explore the scaling and embedding of seed initiatives in the wider food system and urban planning (e.g., Paganini et al. 2018, Guerrero et al. 2019). However, institutionalization remains a black box in the literature on social-ecological transformations and more specifically in studies adopting the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes framework.

Our case study contributes to the scholarship on sustainability transformations via a deeply contextualized exploration and analysis of local-scale institutionalization focusing on the interactions of seed initiatives with other actors and their interventions to institutionalize innovations. We produced novel insights on the dynamics of institutionalization, contributing to a more complete and nuanced understanding of how sustainability transformations unfold in reality.

Our results highlight three key ideas. First, the institutionalization of innovations for sustainability (such as urban agriculture) can support collective efforts of transformation. In the case of RDP–PAT, institutionalization was triggered by local government intervention in the absence of sufficiently coordinated and mobilized action in the community, and helped to mobilize collective action toward a shared objective of dismantling current unsustainable and dysfunctional conditions (e.g., food insecurity, lack of community life and social cohesion), while paving the way for improved social and ecological sustainability (Geels 2011, Pereira et al. 2020). Early policy intervention by the local government to institutionalize innovations in urban agriculture by working alongside, and together with, other seed actors experimenting and embracing innovation propelled transformation. Such a collaborative approach to institutionalization contributed to mainstreaming new social-ecological lifestyles (Loorbach et al. 2017) while driving a larger movement of change, providing new opportunities for multi-actor collaborations that facilitated shared learning and exchange (Björklund 2016, Markey 2017), and helping seed initiatives to be financially viable, thus enhancing their transformative capacity (Moore et al. 2015).

Second, the actors and interventions that contribute to institutionalizing an innovation by building its legitimacy, coherence, and stability may also create favorable conditions for more experimentation. This suggests that experimentation and institutionalization are not entirely distinct processes of transformation, but may instead reinforce one another, with the risk that institutionalization stifles some, while bolstering other, innovative impulses. Institutionalization is therefore not a linear process succeeding experimentation and ending with system change, but rather an iterative and dynamic process that can span across every phase of transformation. The phases and processes of transformative change may be less linear, less clearly defined, and instead more interrelated and iterative than depicted in existing models of transformation (Ehnert et al. 2018, Westskog et al. 2021).

Third, existing notions of actors’ roles in transformation are static and simplistic and fail to consider how roles might evolve throughout the process of institutionalization in line with the changing needs of transformation. Actors’ ability and willingness to act in the present may be influenced by previous experiences and the positions they have held or alliances they have formed in the past or in other contexts.

Our study invites us to conceive of institutionalization as a series of interactions between diverse actors who embody unique capacities for initiating and facilitating transformative change, in the pursuit of goals that, if in good alignment, support a collaborative process leading to emergent and co-produced changes. Local community and governmental actors in RDP–PAT playing different but key roles have shown that aligning strategies and combining resources to seed and navigate change can bolster experimentation and institutionalization, while supporting efforts of transformation.

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