Who gets to govern local food? Knowledge, power, and participation in a post-socialist urban food system

Urban areas face intersecting challenges related to environmental sustainability, food security, and climate resilience, raising questions about who has the authority to define food-related problems and translate them into urban policy action. This study examines a community-led participatory governance process in Kraków (Poland) and explores how multi-stakeholder dialogue makes local food governable through unequal forms of knowledge, authority, and institutional positioning. Drawing on three structured workshops (February-May 2025) involving farmers, market organizers, municipal officers, public institutions, NGOs, and researchers, we ask: (1) What themes and priorities emerge from multi-stakeholder discussions on local food markets and urban environmental governance? and (2) How do stakeholder groups’ institutional positions, resource dependencies, and claims to legitimate knowledge shape the priorities they articulate and the governance options they treat as feasible? Using Framework Analysis, we identify six thematic frames – market infrastructure, institutional governance, consumer awareness, economic viability, promotion, and quality assurance/certification – and analyse how their salience differs across stakeholder groups according to actors’ institutional mandates, resource dependencies, exposure to risks, and claims to legitimate knowledge. The findings show that participatory food governance does not simply aggregate diverse priorities. It reveals how actors differently positioned within the food system seek to make their risks, responsibilities, and knowledge claims visible, while uneven authority shapes which problems appear actionable, which forms of expertise are recognised, and which governance options remain marginal or invisible. The Kraków case contributes to urban food governance debates by showing how general dynamics of participatory governance under capitalism intersect with post-socialist conditions of fragmented mandates, uneven trust in collective organisation, and weakly institutionalised food policy.