Food Waste Prevention and Local Policymaking: A Case Study Analysis of Food Waste Reduction Strategies in the City of Toronto and the City of Vancouver

Local governments are emerging as critical actors in the implementation of food waste interventions and are increasingly prioritizing the issue on local policy and planning agendas. However, systematic examination of policy instruments and evaluation procedures used by local governments to tackle food waste is lacking, particularly for Canadian cities. This paper presents a case study analysis of food waste strategies implemented by the City of Toronto and City of Vancouver to assess which policy instruments are being used. The findings demonstrate that although cities use a wide array of policy instruments, information-based instruments are the most common and are used to modify consumer behaviour and attitudes towards food waste. The findings also show that determining which policy interventions and instruments are most successful has been obscured by inconsistent or absent evaluation criteria. Accordingly, the potential for municipal policy interventions to be scaled and applied across other urban contexts remains underexploited.