Molly Anderson is the William R. Kenan Jr Professor of Food Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is interested in multi-actor collaborations for sustainable food systems, food system resilience, human rights in the food system, the right to food in the US, and bridging interests and concerns of academicians and community-based activists. She participates in Vermont’s Farm to Plate Network; the Food Solutions New England network; the national Inter-Institutional Network for Food, Agriculture and Sustainability; and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). She earned an interdisciplinary PhD in Systems Ecology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Chantal Clément is Coordinator of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). She holds a PhD in Political Science from Carleton University, where she taught undergraduate courses on the politics of food (2014–15). Her doctoral research considered collaborative governance schemes to support sustainable local food systems at the municipal level in Canada and the EU. She obtained her MA in German and European Studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research interests include co-governance methods for food system transition, local food systems, and community food security.
Olivier De Schutter teaches at UCLouvain and Sciences Po. Between 2008 and 2014, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and is currently co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and a Member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
Jessica Duncan is Assistant Professor in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University (the Netherlands). She holds a PhD in Food Policy (City University London, 2014). Jessica researches the practices of actors across food policy spaces and the mechanisms (formal and non-formal) that mediate these interactions. Recent co-authored journal articles include: ‘Politicizing Food Security Governance through Participation: Opportunities and Opposition in Food Security’ (2018, Food Security) and ‘Do We Need to Categorize It? Reflections on Constituencies and Quotas as Tools for Negotiating Difference in the Global Food Sovereignty Convergence Space’, (2018, Journal of Peasant Studies), (both with P. Claeys).
Harriet Friedmann is Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Toronto. She co-developed the historical food regimes approach and contributes to debates on family farming. Her recent publications focus on emergent food system governance in the context of food system transformation across social/natural scales. Harriet is a Toronto Food Policy Councillor, past Chair of the Political Economy of the World‑System Research Section of the American Sociological Association, and participated in the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement award of the Canadian Association for Food Studies.
Steve Gliessman is Professor Emeritus of Agroecology at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he held the Heller Endowed Chair of Agroecology for over 30 years. His research covers the broad area of the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design, management, and transition to sustainable food systems. He has a BA, MS, and PhD from UC Santa Barbara, and has been a Kellogg Foundation Leadership Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow. He is Editor of Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and his textbook Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems (2015, CRC Press/Taylor and Francis Group) is in its third edition and has been translated into multiple languages.
Jody Harris is a researcher with an interest in the politics and ethics of food and nutrition policy. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at IDS with a visiting fellowship to the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, and she has previously worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute and with various academic institutes and non-governmental organisations. Jody holds a PhD in Development Policy, and an MSc in Public Health Nutrition, both from the University of London. She has over ten years’ experience in international development research and programming in various contexts in Asia and Africa, particularly Zambia.
Naomi Hossain is a Senior Research Fellow in the Power and Popular Politics Cluster at IDS. Her research focuses on the politics of development, with a focus on food, public service delivery, and women’s empowerment. Recent books include The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Development Success (2017, OUP) and Food Riots, Food Rights and the Politics of Provisions (2017, Routledge; co-edited with Patta Scott-Villiers).
Philip H. Howard is an associate professor in the department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. He is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and a former president of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. He holds a PhD in Rural Sociology from the University of Missouri, and is the author of Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat? (2016, Bloomsbury Academic).
Melissa Leach has been Director of IDS since 2014, and a Fellow at IDS since 1990. A social anthropologist and geographer, her interdisciplinary, policy-engaged research in Africa and beyond links food, environment, agriculture, health, technology, and gender, with interests in knowledge, power, and the politics of science and policy processes. She co-founded and co-directed the ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre (2006–14). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded a CBE in 2017 for services to social science. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES‑Food).
Charles Z. Levkoe (BA (Hons), MES, PhD) is the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Food Systems, Lakehead University. His community-engaged research uses a food systems lens to better understand the importance of, and connections between social justice, ecological regeneration, regional economies, and active democratic engagement. Working directly with a range of scholars and community-based practitioners across North America and Europe, he studies the evolution of the broader collective of social movement networks that views the right to food as a component of more sustainable futures. Charles is the co-editor of Civil Society and Social Movements in Food System Governance (2019, Routledge).
Desmond McNeill is a political economist (BA Cantab.), PhD (University College London), and former Director at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway. His books include: Development Issues in Global Governance: Market Multilateralism and Public–Private Partnerships (with B. Bull), (2009, Routledge) and Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: The Role of Multilateral Organisations (with A. St. Clair), (2012, Routledge). He was a member of The Lancet–University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health (2014) and is currently a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES‑Food).
Ana Moragues-Faus is a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Places Institute, Cardiff University. She combines a set of critical theories such as political ecology and participative justice to support the development of more just and sustainable food systems. Her research interests revolve mainly around sustainable agri-food systems, governance, and food security, having developed most of her work in European countries and Latin America. She is currently researching through participative processes the emergence and unfolding of urban food governance initiatives across the globe and exploring their role in transforming the food system.
Nicholas Nisbett is a Research Fellow at IDS and co-leader of the Health and Nutrition Research Cluster. His work currently focuses on the political economy of nutrition policy and programming at national and community levels and more generally on bringing critical social theory into the study of nutrition. Trained as an anthropologist and geographer, his doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on the anthropology of internet use and IT-based employment in India. Before coming to IDS, Nicholas worked for the British Government, where he led policy teams and projects on agricultural trade reform and food security.
Emily O’Brien is the Policy and Partnerships Manager at Brighton and Hove Food Partnership. The Partnership is a national and international trailblazer, pushing the boundaries on local food work, and what can be achieved on a city-wide basis. It regularly collaborates with colleagues in the academic community. There is a list of current research requirements seeking collaborators at https://bhfood.org.uk/food-strategy. The Partnership has undertaken a range of practical research projects and produced several reports and publications, which can be browsed at https://bhfood.org.uk/resources-archive/.
Cecilia Rocha, PhD (Economics) is a Professor of food policy at Ryerson University and a researcher at the Centre for Studies in Food Security (Toronto, Canada). Considered an expert on the approach to food security in the city of Belo Horizonte, Cecilia is the author of a number of papers on food policy and programmes in Brazil. She has also conducted research on food security conditions among immigrant populations in Toronto, urban food insecurity in South Africa, food sovereignty in an indigenous settlement in Brazil, and small-scale processing of complementary food for undernourished children in Vietnam. She has been a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) since 2015.
Patta Scott-Villiers is a Senior Research Fellow at IDS. She is a political sociologist whose research interests focus on ruly and unruly political struggles of people on the margins in relation to food, land, work, and other essentials of life. She uses an action research approach and also undertakes larger-scale qualitative participatory work linking local to global. Recent publications include Food Riots, Food Rights and the Politics of Provisions (2019, Routledge; co-edited with Naomi Hossain).