The public acquisition of food as mechanism of development in Colombia

Abstract

Public feeding is a struggled field where collective actors, through their social skills, reconstruct norms and meanings to lead the emergence or stability of the politic. The objective of this study is to analyse how the public acquisition of food can be a mechanism of development in armed conflict zones in Colombia from the perspective of the Theory of Strategic Action Fields (SAFs) and from the possibilism approach by Albert Hirschman. Methodologically, the research corresponds to three case studies. Specifically, the forms of community and autonomous management are analysed as the modes of social organization of collective actors dispute conceptions of life-worlds, redefine rules and norms, and use multiple resources to form alliances, destabilize the field, consolidate their interests and reproduce socially. The results suggest that public policies of food are conceived under homogeneous structures that ignore and render invisible the forms of community and autonomous management. The community and autonomous management resists the homogenizing models of public procurement and supplying, and claims the necessity to redefine the rules and conceptions of the life-worlds in relation to quality and relationships that transcend the economic field. This is expressed as a more efficient and effective form of organization in response to the priority demands of rural populations. Likewise, it builds new meanings around the quality of food and the management of public feeding programs in a process of struggles for the reproduction of the multiple actors within the field.