From urban waste to urban farmers: Can we close the agriculture loop within the city bounds?

Abstract

As urbanisation intensifies in Brazilian cities, life quality in urban centres becomes a challenge for policymakers, and transitioning urban systems to sustainability is required. Circular economy concepts may contribute to face them, especially those owing to municipal solid waste (MSW) management. Curitiba, a Brazilian municipality known for its innovative initiatives towards sustainability. Despite a long tradition in recycling inert waste, MSW system struggles to promote composting even considering a decade in force national law. Decentralised composting through the Urban Agriculture Program (UAP) is the city’s strategy to tackle this struggle. This strategy faces difficulties as, even if urban agriculture facilities seem to be a promising context, closing the agricultural loop within the city bounds was not possible in the 24 urban farmers communities trained in composting techniques. The literature has shown difficulties in government experiments to promote practices in the long run and several experiences in Brazil are already described. This study reveals cultural barriers that influence adoption of domestic composting, by following a secondary data review on past experiences with interviewing and observing participatively urban farms communities. From the fieldwork, cultural perspectives from four different relevant actor roles in the UAP were elaborated and conflicts between them revealed cultural barriers hindering composting practices adoption. Recommendations based on these barriers argue for bottom-up approaches for transition experiments and recognising the sense material and technical support makes to practitioners.

Keywords

Composting cultural barriers narrative analysis social practices transition to sustainability urban agriculture

Introduction

According to the United Nations (UN, 2018), 55% of the world population lives in cities and, by 2050, this portion should reach 68% and Brazilian urban population rose from 36% to 87% in the 60-year period ending in 2018. Rising urbanisation levels makes life quality in urban centres a challenge for policymakers and transitioning urban systems to sustainability an urgent issue.

Curitiba is a southern Brazilian municipality long known for innovative initiatives towards sustainability. Despite this fame, roughly 800 thousand tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) are transported to a landfill every year. To reduce this figure, the municipality bets on composting: 35–50% of the MSW is compostable (ABRELPE, 2019).

Several barriers to composting where identified in previous studies: waste handling stigma (Puzzolo et al., 2016), the need for new processes and equipment (Kelebe et al., 2017) such as domestic composters, insufficient organic material flow (Bekchanov et al., 2019) for efficient composting and incompatibility between consumption and production (Bössner et al., 2019) make domestic composting adoption difficult. In this sense, urban agriculture facilities seem to be a likely context where composting practice can be promoted: beyond food security and sovereignty (CNODS, ENAP and IPEA, 2019), urban agriculture practices can change people’s relationship with food and waste.

Specialised composting plants would not eliminate handling impacts (Neto and Moreira, 2009) and centralised composting experiences in Brazil were not successful. Thus, the municipal Secretariat for Food Security and Nutrition (SMSAN, in Portuguese acronym) bets on urban vegetable gardens to include composting in daily lives and reduce MSW treated by the municipal Secretariat of Environment (SMMA, in Portuguese acronym). Composting trainings were carried out, but urban farmers did not adopt it. Some previous studies already show how government-imposed technologies can be quickly abandoned if they do not make sense to practitioners (Dickinson et al., 2018; Tigabu et al., 2015, 2017). This study aims to understand cultural barriers that hinder composting practices to be adopted in urban agriculture facilities in Curitiba. In doing so, we expand evidence to the argument in favour of bottom-up governance in transition experiments, especially dealing with circular economy-related practices such as MSW composting.

To achieve this goal, urban farmers, neighbourhood members and city officials were interviewed in a narrative method. Participant observations were carried out to complement a cultural description of four identified groups’ perspectives. From the analysis, cultural barriers to domestic composting adoption in the urban farming facilities were pointed out, from which recommendations to policymakers were drawn.

The article is organised as follows: the next section describes the theoretical perspectives; ahead, a brief review contextualising past decentralised composting experiments in the country; following, methodological principles of the study are presented; the results elaborate four different actors’ perspectives. Discussion is drawn from the conflicts between these perspectives, highlighting recommendations for the programme in the final section.

Theoretical framework

Socio-technical niches and their adoption

Ongoing changes to more sustainable production and consumption paradigms (Cunha et al., 2011) can be conveniently understood by a socio-technical transition framework, in which incumbent organisations’s action within a given system is influenced by social pressures that impose innovations in it. While considering the important role played by technology in this evolution, the transition framework also recognises social innovation relevance for sustainable models’ creation (Hargreaves et al. 2013). This process is noticeable in many economic system: mobility, in its path to electric vehicles, car sharing and micromobility; energy, is developing renewable generation technologies, microgeneration and smart grids; agriculture, searching for environmentally friendly techniques and initiatives that shortens supply chains, known as farm to fork and among which is urban agriculture. Transition to sustainability is a peculiar type of socio-technical transition capable of, through systemic innovations, promoting great leaps in environmental (Geels et al., 2004) and social efficiency.

Socio-technical systems are formed both by technologies and the socio-political environment in which practices are adopted and widespread (Turnheim and Geels, 2013). Incumbent organisations maintain a dominant practice and niches develop alternatives. In addition, a landscape imposes pressures over this dominant practice (Kemp and Rotman, 2005). Interaction between these three analytical levels explains transition development: while niches are the environment for innovations (Geels, 2002) due to lower pressures imposed on them (Smith et al., 2010), the regime is perceived as a semi-coherent set of practices, regulatory, cognitive and normative rules linked to each other that stabilise existing systems (Geels et al., 2004) continuously demanded by an exogenous socio-technical landscape (Geels, 2002) due to social, economic, political, ideological, cultural or paradigmatic changes (Smith et al., 2010).

In a socio-technical perspective, the growing concern with waste problems demands regimes to reduce its waste generation and improve its disposal. This leads to circular economy (CE) initiatives being incorporated by the regime in response to this pressure. Developed and improved in niches, most CE initiatives claim that efficient waste controls may hold production systems accountable for returning materials to the production circuit (Masi et al., 2017), reduce inputs needed, such as energy and raw materials (Ghisellini et al., 2016), and concatenate activities in a way that waste of the first is input the second.

While niches and regimes have fundamentally the same nature, the former are the unstable source of innovation and the latter, the aligned source of stability, due to developed infrastructures, sunk investments, competences, regulations and standards and stabilised routines (Geels and Schot, 2007). Public policies for innovation and sustainability may intentionally promote niche protection (Ramos-Mejía et al., 2018), supporting these ‘hopeful monstrosities’ – with sparse interrelations, immature technology and unstable guiding rules (Schot and Kanger, 2018) – until they become viable. Protection procedures are highly contested (Barbieri et al., 2010; Geels and Schot, 2007; Wieczorek, 2018), but the literature agrees that public policy intervention should not aim solely in promoting alternative niches. A process of niche acceleration (Kanger et al., 2020) should also be carried on to promote viable niche practices and technologies.

Nevertheless, even sufficiently developed government-imposed technologies can be quickly abandoned if they do not make sense to practitioners. Previous studies describe several cases of failure in niche development – even technologies clearly superior in every rational aspect (such as financial, sanitary and technical) than its contender – within government programmes, such as efficient domestic stoves (Dickinson et al., 2018) and waste biodigesters (Tigabu et al., 2015, 2017), abandoned as soon as public protection is removed, returning to, respectively, dung-driven stoves and wood energy use. Bottom-up approaches to niche management tries to overcome government experiments difficulties, departing from socially developed initiatives (Diercks et al., 2019; Schot and Steinmueller, 2019) and paying attention to learning processes in communities rather than the technology itself.

Designing public policies regarding practices that ‘make sense to practitioners’ involves understanding subjective underlying action mode. An adequate theoretical framework must be able to understand cultural logics that guide practitioner’s actions. Social practice theories can help explain how individual decisions are made (Köhler et al., 2019) and, thus, reveal cultural barriers to domestic composting adoption Curitiba’s Urban Agriculture Program (UAP) context.

Practical rationality as human action mode

Unlike rational decisions that rely upon deliberate thinking and strategic reasoning, practical rationality follows a cultural logic that subjects are unable to describe. Evidence that this is the normal action mode is the expression ‘rational action’: highlighting this particular mode reveals that it has a special nature. Practical rationality, however, goes unnoticed and its logic is hidden even from the practitioner who, when he behaves in an absorbed coping mode (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011), carrying a social practice that prescribe an ‘appropriate behavior’ recognised by the community (Nicolini and Monteiro, 2017). A social practice is a ‘coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to’ (as MacIntyre definition of practice presented by Czarniawska, 2015: 106).

Most practice scholars understand social practice as an array of activities embodied by subjects, in nexuses that guide the action, mediated both by natural objects and hybrid artefacts (Schatzki et al., 2005). There are no independent entities with intrinsic characteristics (Orlikowski, 2015), but a reality mediated by a fluid socio-material configuration of people, senses and materialities where the subjects act, searching for excellence. As Shove and Walker (2010) propose, this multi-level, hierarchical perspective of transitions can be alternatively explained by distinguishing between enduring practices and new practices and analysing how established practices disappear while new practices emerge and stabilise and infrastructure is only a particular kind of material arrangement that enables a practice to be carried on (Shove, 2017).

Socio-material field fluidity does not dispense a structure. Cultural logic expressed in subjects’ unreflective behaviour reveals this structure, composed of rules and knowings guided by a teleoaffective structure that relates actions and emotions to a practical intention (Schatzki, 2012).

Solid waste composting in Brazil and Curitiba

Landfills are still the dominant MSW destination in Brazil. These facilities replaced uncontrolled dumps in a socio-technical transition ongoing, strongly influenced by the National Solid Waste Policy (PNRS, in Portuguese acronym) coming into force in 2010. By law, composting is the preferred technique for organic waste management and responsibility for waste management is shared (Brasil, 2010) among the entire production and consumption chain – one of the CE premises. Despite this legal requirement, followed by state policies that also define composting as a preferred disposal (Pires and Da Ferrão, 2017), most composting initiatives that existed before the PNRS were deactivated (Siqueira and Assad, 2015).

The country holds fair recycling numbers: 13% of MSW volume is recycled (Silva et al., 2017); selective garbage collection is present in more than 70% of the municipalities (ABRELPE, 2018, 2019; Grisa and Capanema, 2018). Looking at the organic recycling, the picture is not pretty: while more than half of MSW is organic (IPEA, 2012), only 4% from 40% that could be recycled do not end in landfills (Pires and Da Ferrão, 2017), meaning that less than 10% of compostable waste is treated in the legally preferred way. Organic waste recycling faces difficulties identified in previous studies, such as lacking information, lacking technical capacity, communication failures with the population (Barbosa et al., 2016), lacking coordination between government levels and inefficient waste recovery (Grisa and Capanema, 2018).

Decentralised composting emergence

In 2008, Brazil already had 211 MSW composting plants (IBGE, 2008) concentrated in two states (IPEA, 2012). These centralised treatment units, dating from the 1980s, collected and treated MSW far from the waste generator, making composting compatible with MSW regime, but hindering citizen commitment with waste separation (Siqueira and Assad, 2015), increasing neighbourhood’s resistance (Barbosa et al., 2016; De Siqueira and De Abreu, 2016) and resulting contaminated waste that leads to fail in a short time (Collares et al., 2010). As composting is a more complex treatment than landfills, it adds to the costs figure and without changing MSW collection and transport needs, centralised composting negatively affects the system costs, discouraging local governments (Rodrigues et al., 2016). Decentralised composting practices emerged promising to overcome these barriers. This alternative, however, involves a significant change in the behaviour of people.

Initiatives involving decentralised composting usually serve specific communities. De Siqueira and De Abreu (2016) describe a project from the largest Brazilian city, São Paulo, composting waste from free markets; Barbosa et al. (2016) evaluate the composting promoted by the city in a small city in a region known for its tradition in composting organic waste. Both projects demonstrate composting initiatives feasibility when linked to well-defined communities. Similar results were found by Presumido et al. (2017) evaluating a composting awareness campaign at a regional airport.

The authors emphasise, however, the need for continued education so that the separation process is well-run by the community, which highlights the need for the practice to be embodied. This necessary engagement (Da Silva et al., 2012) involves changing practical rationality and the relationship with waste. Guermandi and Serra (2017) reveal in their study in a voluntary MSW composting project that community or domestic composting could be widespread in Brazilian cities: more than 75% inhabitants were willing to compost their material, even if it was necessary to take it to a collection point, as long as it was close to their home. The same number, however, does not separate its organic waste between compostable and non-compostable.

Curitiba: example in recycling, struggling in composting

Curitiba is among the 25% cities where selective collection is broader and well-structured (ABRELPE, 2018). Paper, plastic and metal recycling projects date from the late 1980s, and today, the city also offers an efficient toxic waste collection system.

This efficient non-organic recyclable waste management in Curitiba comes with an inefficient MSW value chain use. The long-run MSW treatment system organisation and, thus, relative socio-technical stability, may contribute to this inneficiency, as Da Silva et al. (2012) identify in a comparing Curitiba and Salvador – two Brazilian cities of similar size (around 1.8 million inhabitants). Incumbent companies’ power in the city’s MSW blocked MSW recycling, collection, treatment and disposal innovations (Kumegawa, 2018).

As the treatment system resists transitions, local authorities sought other approaches to improve the MSW management environmental performance. Following the PNRS, a municipal composting policy was developed, aiming benefits such as reducing MSW generated, atmospheric pollution by methane (Barton et al., 2008), and hydric pollution (Nunes, 2009), while generating job and income opportunities (Pires and Da Ferrão, 2017). Decentralised composting in neighbourhoods and in activities that generate a large volume of organic waste, such as condominiums, restaurants, fairs and supermarkets are the main focus of the city’s policy. Community gardens were defined as the key contexts for the practice diffusion for three reasons: (1) they are large organic materials generators, demanding MSW facilities; (2) they are fertiliser consumers, so can benefit from the composting product and (3) they are close to the communities, and can overcome centralised composting known difficulties.

Methods

A practice-based study seeks explanations given by individuals to the material reality in which they act, tracing a cultural description of reality analysed. Concrete evidence of these explanations is found embedded in practitioners’ narratives: the causal relations between real life elements that drive actions. Especially when narratives conflict one with another (e.g. in corruption against integrity dilemmas), cultural logic becomes more evident. Therefore, narratives produced in the field are the primary data source in this study.

The secondary data research carried out in previous studies that described initiatives encouraging composting carried out in Brazil, their difficulties and dilemmas was the starting point to understand cultural factors influencing composting adoption in urban agriculture facilities. Themes emerging from these previously described initiatives (quality of the fertiliser, waste separation, relationship with waste, pollution, bad smell and urban pests, for example) served as themes for narrative interactions with different roles related to composting. The city official’s perspective shows the policymaker viewpoint. However, the gardener’s perspective represents the practitioner’s viewpoint. Between these two actors, garden coordinators play a relevant intermediation role and have a viewpoint of their own. As previous experiences in composting show, the neighbourhood can arise against composting initiatives and form a fourth perspective. Differences in these actor perspectives reveal how sparse interrelations may thicken and sources of instability in guiding rules.

Interviews were conducted in an interactive approach (Adams et al., 2015). Interactions are not recorded and transcribed, given their conversational nature, and cultural perspectives related information was recorded in field journal immediately after each conversation. Interactive interviews were triangulated with participant observation sessions data, collected through photographs and filming.

Conversations with five community garden coordinators were conducted between September and November 2020, in addition to distance communication interactions to clarify information and validate the descriptions developed; gardeners from three different gardens, selected from the 24 which received composting training were interviewed, and participant observations in two gardens were carried out, in a total of 28 sessions ranging from 2 to 4 hours each. Twelve neighbours, from three different communities, were also interviewed.

Data analysis was carried with narrative analysis techniques (Czarniawska, 2004; Holstein and Gubrium, 2012). Explanations presented by the actors for their opinion about composting practices synthesised the four perspectives described. With the exception of the neighbourhood perspective, all descriptions were re-presented to the actors for validation. This concern is due to the problems of validity in the narrative analysis (Polkinghorne, 2007), especially to a methodological issue long debated of cultural explanations developed by the researcher in which practitioners do not identify themselves (Borland, 1991).

Finally, from these perspectives, a clash of consciences was established (Theodossopoulos, 2020) in order to highlight conflicts between these actors’ perspectives. Conflicts that show potential influence to promote or hinder domestic composting practice diffusion in the UAP context were identified and discussed.

Results

Curitiba joined an international commitment to the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals in 2017. Initiatives such as the UAP highlights how ‘cities participation is increasingly greater in the task of the Sustainable Development Goals and Curitiba’s priority is to think on the well-being of its future generations’ (Curitiba, 2017).

Among 100 gardens supported by the city’s programme (Curitiba, 2020), 40 are classified as community gardens. Mainly in humble neighbourhoods, communities are allowed to use urban empty spaces – both public and private – that, if left empty, are potential candidates to wasteland. SMSAN’s technical team provides technical assistance, in addition to material supply (mainly seeds, seedlings and fertiliser), machinery services and fencing, granting a ‘head start’ for gardeners.

Production costs vary from crop to crop. De Souza and Garcia (2013) present the cost structure for strawberries, okra, peppers, pumpkin, tomato, carrot, potato, garlic and sweet potato in rural organic gardens. In their study, the cost of labour represents an average of 40% of the total cost of the product (varying from 35% to 50%). Organic fertilisers, seeds and seedlings represent 35%, varying from 10% to 25% of the costs due to fertiliser and the remaining expend on seeds and seedlings. The remaining 25% are due to machinery costs (from 5% to 15%) and 15% are due to freight and packaging. In this way, the support from the city government represents a cost reduction in the gardens served by the programme in the order of 40%, as they fully meet the costs of machinery, fertilisers and, partially, of seeds and seedlings. Urban Agriculture costs must include utility bills, while no shipping and packaging costs are involved – at least in the UAP gardens.

A formal association and a coordinator responsible for intermediating gardeners and municipality staff communications are required. Some guidelines for cultivation and garden bed maintenance are received and must be followed. As public management tool, the SMSAN agrees with a previous study that identified the importance of community gardens to promote food sovereignty and food security by encouraging the production and consumption of fresh food, pesticide-free and providing space for social activity, sometimes even therapeutic, rescuing social and community values of agricultural activity (Curitiba, 2019; De Longhi et al., 2019).

The main concern of the programme is community self-sufficiency, reducing gardens dependence for the city’s material support. By the end of 2019, 24 urban gardeners’ coordinators were trained on composting practices to partially offset their fertiliser needs. Beyond treating organic waste generated by the urban agriculture activity itself, they were trained to be decentralised composting stations, once they are close to the community.

Training, although, was not enough for the gardens to adopt composting practices. This effect can be understood by a misalignment of the city official’s, garden coordinator’s, gardeners’ and the neighbourhood’s perspectives regarding composting, as shown below.

City official’s perspective

From the city official’s perspective, community gardens are a food production facility within the city that contribute to the nutritional security of the communities served by the vegetable garden, while generating income. The programme’s bottleneck is vegetable gardens’ dependence on the city’s material support. Reaching self-sufficiency by marketing production surpluses is what makes an initiative successful. Composting should, thus, be carried on to reduce costs. By producing their own fertiliser, SMSAN’s annual fertiliser donation would be unnecessary. Composting adoption depends on adequate training.

Self-sufficiency does not include going without the city’s technical support. The technician guides how to deal with production problems (such as pests), to plant and best garden management practices. This support is not seen as a bottleneck and may be able to promote composting. In this specific case, a training session was held to explain how to compost in windrows – a technique that can be performed directly on the ground. For this reason, from the city official’s perspective, there is no lack of knowledge or equipment and gardeners can develop this activity.

Other costs (such as water and energy bills, seeds and seedlings and small investments) are seen as low and not difficult to obtain. Therefore, self-sufficiency is possible with a coordinator that relates well to the community and is able to keep the garden organised.

Coordinator’s perspective

The coordinator is the community representative, responsible for managing the gardeners, keeping the garden accounting up to date and providing necessary materials for the work. In this sense, the coordinator is what can be expected from a manager.

In his perspective, the work in the garden must be monitored so that the programme rules are followed. Also, managing the garden implies keeping the relationship between gardeners friendly and fair. To this end, it is necessary to supervise what and how the gardeners plant, care for and harvest in their garden beds. Alternative fertilisation and pest management techniques are suspicious, leading to privilege in using the fertiliser donated by the city because of its source. Obtaining other fertilisers – such as manure or compost – demands to ensure they are compatible with organic agriculture. Likewise, pest control techniques gardeners use, such as home-made formulas are monitored by the coordinator. Finally, it is up to the coordinator monitoring bed usage: a bed empty for a long time requires the coordinator to exclude the related gardener from the programme.

This monitoring activity is not only related to programme rules, but also the gardeners’ conviviality. Passing along the guidelines on how and what to plant got from the city’s technician, the coordinator ensures that varieties or techniques for handling used by a gardener do not influence neighbouring beds. Although many gardens divide the beds into ‘owners’, the work is collective just because what a gardener does may affect neighbouring beds performance: for example, a stinky spray to fight a pest will spread to neighbouring beds.

Technical guidelines are subordinated to conviviality needs. Technical support quality is a controversial topic (in the garden’s everyday life emerges the perception that the city’s agronomist ‘comes once a year to take a picture’), limiting technician’s guidance legitimacy. As the technician’s guidelines are less legitimate, gardening activities are, ultimately, defined by the coordinator.

Composting is very difficult, because of space needed and the difficulty in using the fertiliser output. It would be necessary to give up planting in one or more beds so they can be used for composting, reducing available space and, consequently, gardeners count. As material support from the SMSAN is calculated on a gardener count basis, it will result in less seedlings received. Also, fertiliser produced cannot be easily distributed among the gardeners, leading to a conviviality difficulty. Furthermore, this new composting space, common to all gardeners, may generate conflicts between them, as communitarian flower beds and shared water tanks are conflict points to be managed.

Gardener’s perspective

Working in the garden is aimed to handle the earth, produce food ‘without chemicals’ and also social work. A few gardeners see this work as a profitable activity. A fair part is willing to spend some money to maintain their beds. Eventually, pro-rations are made between gardeners to afford a surprisingly high water bill or when it is necessary to buy tools. For general expenses, gardeners pay a monthly fee to the coordinator.

Work is seen as a collective activity: each one collaborates in the way he is able, as long as he does not negatively influence other’s work. A very strict activities division is even seen as a lack of team spirit, as when a gardener fails to help a neighbour’s bed in need of watering. Garden rules, established by the coordinator, should promote team spirit and hold the community together. A noticeable concern is the rules to prevent pests and diseases: they are far from unanimous on techniques, as each gardener has prior knowledge of how, when and what to plant. Most apply inadequate techniques based on a crop yield point of view.

Composting (or not) is among these techniques. It is rejected by the part of the community of gardeners not used the practice - often concerned with pests. As a result, even gardeners who agree with composting end up not performing it, due to the unanimity lack among colleagues or even coordinator’s imposition.

Neighbourhood’s perspective

The community is positive about the garden, seen as a clean land plot. Most gardens were installed on vacant lots, usually used as wasteland. It is ‘community’ property, although, makes it often interpreted as a public service to neighbourhood residents. Some neighbours even think that the coordinator is a city employee.

Those who acknowledge that the coordinator is not a city’s employee, commonly questions his legitimacy: his role managing gardeners and even selling – instead of giving – are a source of controversies related to the garden. When the coordinator is not legitimised, activities developed in the garden are also questioned and rejected. Complaints about the indiscriminate use of water, favouring ‘friends’ both in allocation and distribution become frequent.

Composting practices are also influenced by this factor. Some neighbours are concerned about sanitary risks resulting from the garden’s activity. Fertiliser used to garden can generate bad smells and reinforces this concern, especially in the immediate neighbours. Standing water in gardening tools and equipment favours mosquito’s proliferation, also reinforcing a ‘dirty’ garden feeling. Even mud on sidewalks and tall bushes are seen as a sanitary risk. Urban pests may be associated with the garden activities and composting, in this case, is seen as waste depositing.

However, the neighbourhood recognises the garden as a suitable destination for organic waste. Some inputs, such as coffee grounds and egg shells, used for cultivation in the neighbour’s perspective, are already separated and donated to the garden, showing that they are eager to separate and have their organic waste treated in the garden. The neighbourhood is willing to separate compostable waste to donate to the garden for two reasons: to help maintain the garden – in cases where the coordinator is recognised as legitimate – or to exchange for vegetables.

Discussion

Four cultural barriers to composting practices adoption in the UAP context can be drawn by confronting the four different actors’ perspectives: (1) motive of urban agriculture; (2) technical support and knowledge; (3) legitimacy and neighbourhood relation; (4) material support as a reward.

The first refers to differences in the desired result from a garden. The city’s perspective sees it as food production equipment; the gardener’s, a leisure and social work, loosely bound to productivity and output level; the neighbourhood, an urban maintenance initiative, with coordinators sometimes misinterpreted as a public server. Insofar as composting practices have different roles in each of these perspectives, people involved in the UAP cannot agree in their relevance.

The second conflict relates to composting technique. Good composting does not favour pests, crop diseases or bad smell, but poor composting technique may so. Technical support legitimacy issues leave little space for promoting any practice through it. By other hand, shared gardening work also hinders innovation by itself. To adopt a new practice, gardeners usually seek unanimity among them before even trying something new, unless the coordinator champions it. In the case of practices that rely on shared infrastructure (e.g. a shared toolhouse and shared composting pit), concerns for a friendly relationship between gardeners contradict a coordinator’s campaign for collective spaces within the gardens – as proposed for composting in small gardens.

The third is related to coordinator legitimacy. Getting out of the bounds of the garden requires a good relationship between the community and the coordinator. Waste generator proximity to treatment has already been identified as a key point to a viable composting treatment leading to neighbourhood engagement as a key concern.

Finally, material support related to gardener’s count effect is twofold. First, it does not promote food production efficiency, but the involvement of as many people as possible – even for leisure or social interaction. Composting conflicts with the coordinator’s perspective of losing bed space for one more gardener and, in consequence, receiving less material support. Second, the temporary support until the garden is able to ‘walk on its own feet’ – consistent with a niche management perspective – is seen by gardeners as reward for their work.

Recommendations

Departing from each conflict, we can outline some recommendations for composting practices promotion in UAP facilities. First, results reveal the need to align engagement motives in urban agriculture for different actors. This finding agrees with the limitation of top-down governance in government transition experiments. Overcoming this limitation has been described in transition literature by adopting a bottom-up governance that may be achieved by broadening the participants in the policymaking process as suggested by Schot and Steinmueller (2019) and including representatives of the perspectives described (among others that may be identified).

Second, given the sense of material support for gardeners and coordinators, finding linkages between support and crop yield is a key point. Binding the amount of seedlings donated to the number of gardeners in each community reinforces the contradiction between the city officials’ and coordinators’ perspectives. Communities should be ‘rewarded’ for their ability to produce, not only to engage more people. Past experiences, such as the ‘Horta do Chef’ programme, showed that there is room for support based on crop output.

Third, aiming to overcome distrust in SMSAN’s technical advice, a ‘closer to gardeners technical support’ approach, achieved by more frequent interaction especially with the coordinators who see the agronomists as someone that just shows up now and then, but also with gardeners. Recognising the bottleneck in technical support may be as important as the lack of material support recognition.

And finally, establishing clear rules for any citizen who wants to participate in the garden’s collective work – avoiding the sense that ‘only coordinators friends’ can participate – may avoid coordinator delegitimisation. Increasing volunteer participation in garden activities, in addition to the current ‘bed-assignee’ model, may improve community engagement.

Conclusion

In the case of the UAP programme, technical support provided by the city quality is contested. Although inadequate technical support does not prevent innovations and niche development, it certainly does not help to increase coherence in the protected environment. This coherence between different practices is relevant for the regime incorporation process, as it represents the alignment around a dominant design in niche acceleration. Learning processes in niches could be further promoted by more intensive technical aid.

Composting depends on both technical ability and engagement. Although the UAP presents a clear opportunity for composting practices inside the city bounds and overcome barriers for decentralised composting, without different actors’ perspectives alignment, cultural barriers will rise and even if all actors rationally agree on adopting the practice, there is no guarantee that they will subjectively agree on it.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Rafael Carvalho Machado

Sieglinde Kindl Da Cunha

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