Redes agroalimentarias y gobernanza territorial. Un enfoque conceptual

This paper provides a conceptual contribution to the study of agri-food systems based on three central objectives: first, to establish social actor networks, productive processes, and spatio-temporal scales as analytical frameworks for a relational understanding of agri-food systems; second, to differentiate the behavior of agri-food networks within agro-industrial systems and territorialized alternative systems; and third, to foreground territorial governance as an “arena” for the management of alternative systems. Methodologically, the study employs a critical-interpretative reading of bibliographic and periodical sources, alongside a review of alternative Latin American cases. This approach avoids rigid or closed protocols, i.e., seeking to explore the subject without assuming a definitive or conclusive stance on the agri-food issue. Indeed, the reading reveals that networks of actors with varying degrees of power (producers, corporations, governments, associations, institutions, research centers, consumers) make heterogeneous decisions that mobilize dissimilar and complicated processes (regulation, technologies, knowledge, production, transformation, circulation, consumption) at unequal spatial (local, regional, global) and temporal (short, medium, long term) scales. The networks described generate different conceptualizations of agri-food systems. While agro-industrialists focus their attention on production chains in a linear or quasi-linear sequence of interconnected phases—from primary production to the final consumer—territorialized alternatives grant centrality to productive activities linked to the territory. In this context, territory is viewed as a space of relational multiplicity that actors reclaim through processes of economic and cultural appropriation. In this sense, the proposed triad provides a conceptual framework that highlights the complexity and diversity of agri-food systems, given to actors, processes, and scales form webs or meshes subject to forces of closure and openness, ruptures and overlaps, and permanencies and continuities that are non-constant in time and space. Territorial governance—as a setting for collective, collaborative, and agroecological management—emerges as a suitable analytical framework for understanding the functioning of alternative networks, especially when local territories evolve into glocalized communities through the consolidation of learning pathways among their actors.