Digital Food Justice: Equitable Governance of Food Platforms

Nevin Cohen
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Nevin Cohen: Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, City University of New York, USA

Politics and Governance, 2027, vol. 15

Abstract: Platform-mediated food systems are changing how food is provisioned, marketed, delivered, and governed in cities. Yet major urban food governance frameworks, including the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the FAO Urban Food Agenda, were designed before digital platforms became central to food access, labor, marketing, pricing, and logistics. This article develops digital food justice as a framework for understanding how platforms reorganize food inequity and what this means for a post-2030 urban food agenda. It identifies four connected features of digital food injustice: temporal asymmetry between rapid platform change and slower public governance; spatial decoupling of food provisioning from the visible places urban food policy has traditionally addressed; behavioral data extraction with racially and economically uneven harms; and algorithmic opacity, which makes consequential platform decisions difficult to see, contest, and regulate. Drawing on a qualitative case study of New York City and New York State from 2020 through early 2026, the article examines labor standards, land-use rules, food safety disclosure, digital food access programs, child data protections, and public food data infrastructure. It finds that subnational governments can govern parts of platform-mediated food systems, but that single-domain interventions remain vulnerable to platform adaptation. Effective digital food governance requires enforceable rules, public data capacity, worker and community power, and coordination across governance scales.

Keywords: algorithmic opacity; digital food justice; food justice; food platforms; platform governance; post‐2030 agenda; public data infrastructure; urban food governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2027
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v15:y:2027:a:12764

DOI: 10.17645/pag.12764

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