Youth civic power and food system governance: engagement, trust, and advocacy in the Global South

The field of food system governance in the Global South is undergoing a profound generational and technological reconfiguration as youth-led initiatives challenge entrenched hierarchies and introduce new modalities of civic and digital engagement. Demographically dominant yet structurally marginalized, young people across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia continue to face exclusion from land rights, agrarian policy, and decision-making. Traditional governance systems — often shaped by gerontocratic and corporate control — obscure youth participation under the guise of token representation, a dynamic increasingly recognized as “youthwashing.” Recent advances in political ecology, critical agrarian studies, and digital sociology have highlighted how young activists leverage connectivity, digital knowledge exchange, and cultural narratives to democratize food systems. However, the mechanisms through which digital mobilization translates into tangible governance and sustainability outcomes remain underexplored, underscoring a gap in interdisciplinary, cross-regional inquiry.

This Research Topic aims to foreground youth political agency as an essential and transformative force in food system governance across the Global South. It seeks to foster empirical and conceptual understanding of how digital tools, local knowledge, and civic networks intersect to shape new governance paradigms rooted in inclusivity, equity, and decolonial justice. Contributors are encouraged to trace the connective tissue between activism, technological agency, and policy reform — exploring how digital infrastructures enable or constrain youth governance participation. The Topic further intends to assess the role of trust, advocacy, and collective digital spaces in building more accountable and participatory food systems, paying particular attention to the structural inequities that define the contexts within which these movements emerge.

This Research Topic focuses on youth-led civic, digital, and agroecological movements that are reshaping governance frameworks within food systems across the Global South. It welcomes multi-scalar, comparative, and methodologically pluralistic studies engaging both theory and practice.
To gather further insights, we welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

Digital food sovereignty and decentralized governance models
Youth participation in agrarian reform, land rights, and seed legislation
Intersectional dynamics of gender, race, and class in youth food activism
The role of digital infrastructures in shaping inclusion and exclusion
Comparative case studies from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South/Southeast Asia
Methodological innovations: netnography, participatory mapping, and digital ethnography
Policy implications for co-governance and decolonial food justice frameworks