Beyond “technical evaluation”. Monitoring, governance and “food democrature” in urban food policies

Recent contributions to the literature on urban food policies increasingly frame evaluation as a core component of public policymaking, rather than as a purely technical exercise. At the same time, there is growing demand for monitoring and evaluation frameworks capable of supporting strategic decision-making and policy learning, against the backdrop of persistent fragmentation across impact dimensions. Drawing on a systematic literature review, this article examines the main approaches used to assess the environmental, social, and economic impacts of urban food policies. The findings reveal a marked imbalance across dimensions, with environmental impacts being more consistently evaluated, while social and especially economic assessments remain underdeveloped, often relying on proxy indicators and lacking comparability. Integrated evaluation frameworks remain limited and methodologically heterogeneous. Beyond methodological gaps, the analysis highlights structural challenges related to governance. First, the literature and evaluation practices tend to adopt an implicit urban-centric perspective, underestimating the role of peri-urban and agricultural areas despite the growing relevance of City-Region Food Systems. This limits the territorial integration of policies and contributes to the marginalization of key socio-economic actors, including small-scale producers and peri-urban farmers. Second, participatory processes - widely promoted as central to urban food governance - are exposed to dynamics of elite capture, whereby actors with greater resources and organizational capacity disproportionately influence decision-making. In this context, the article proposes to interpret such configurations as hybrid forms of governance that can be understood, in an analogical sense, as “food democratures”: settings in which formal mechanisms of participation coexist with a substantial concentration of decision-making power. This perspective allows for a critical rethinking of monitoring and evaluation not only as technical tools, but as governance devices capable of making power asymmetries visible and supporting more equitable decision-making processes. The notion of food democrature is therefore developed as a heuristic-conceptual lens rather than as a rigid analytical category. It is intended to draw attention to situations in which formally participatory food-governance arrangements may coexist with persistent asymmetries in agenda-setting, technical capacity, access to resources, and decision-making power. The article concludes by proposing an integrated monitoring and evaluation framework grounded in a socio-ecological understanding of food systems, aimed at strengthening institutional capacity, policy learning, and the inclusiveness of urban food governance.