With less money being distributed from the federal and state governments to city agencies, local governments have had to scramble to find alternative funding sources. Public-private partnerships are often formed in this context, but their viability as a replacement for the aid offered by the prior welfare-state remains in question . In this newfound and neoliberal context, local nonprofit organizations often have greater control of resources than local elected officials . However, community organizations may not operate as defenders of “use-value” as the urban growth machine model suggests. Instead, community-based organizations may operate largely in the interest of their own survival and growth—even if they appear to organize local residents politically. To this end, community-based organizations that partner with local government may craft their clientele as a reliable constituency and trade votes for government service contracts . Alternatively, they may deploy technologies of participation that stall resident opposition rather than addressing it . Thus, in the neoliberal era, community organizations cannot be viewed simply as representatives of civic and therefore local resident interests; it is important to look more closely, investigating how such organizations engage in local politics—especially as it relates to whether and how they cultivate civic participation among their members. Urban agriculture organizations are no exception; community gardens in particular require the coordination of many individuals, whose participation may or may not extend into civic action.
Lyson has developed the concept of “civic agriculture” to describe the strengthening of local food systems, rolling flood tables and at the same time community social ties, through operations such as farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and community gardens. Participants in these projects tend to be more involved in politics and their communities than the general population . Food-based organizations with a justice orientation can act as places of learning in which participants gain civic skills and critical perspectives . Civic agriculture initiatives build conscientious alternatives to the corporate-dominated industrial food system , and community gardens can further orient participants to challenging development models that exploit their neighborhoods . However, Passidomo cautions that more research is needed to understand how and when such projects promote greater civic participation in disinvested communities specifically. This focus is especially important in light of the finding that many urban agriculture projects actually work to support existing socio-economic structures and the neoliberalization of cities: by promoting a neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility , bolstering narratives used to justify reduced city services , filling in gaps left by the roll-back of the social safety net , or helping to brand a city as “green” and “sustainable” in the global competition to attract tourists and wealthy residents . Simply put, some urban agriculture projects organize participants to challenge and change prevailing socio-economic structures, and others do not. Attending to these distinctions is important because community-based organizations can in fact do a great deal to increase civic participation among their members and clientele.
Community-based organizations can use civic participation as a resource in their efforts to survive and succeed, both as a source of legitimacy and as a base of power from which to seek funding, contracts, or favorable policies . The outcomes of successful civic participation may benefit the organization, the individuals involved, or both. As urban agriculture organizations must establish legitimacy for their unconventional spaces, attract resources needed to maintain the sites, and win favorable land use policies, they may come to view the civic participation of their gardeners as a valuable resource. Many community gardens are located in low-income neighborhoods, and like other CBOs that provide services in these neighborhoods, they may stabilize their own operation by teaching neighborhood residents skills to interface better with bureaucracies. For instance, Marwell describes how some housing cooperatives teach low-income residents to manage meetings and interface with the city as well as the private sector, such as by paying taxes and collectively managing their utilities. In this way the organization’s overhead is reduced, some of the residents learn valuable skills, and the organization simultaneously builds its legitimacy as a site where residents learn such skills. Other CBOs promote democratic participation among their members by teaching them to flex collective power and engage directly with funders and decision-makers. This democratic participation may be conceptualized narrowly for the organization’s specific purposes, or it may be developed more broadly as a “public-goods politics” that seeks to educate voters on defining problems and demanding new, more community-based solutions if the current system isn’t working for them .
In other words, there are multiple logics through which community-based organizations like gardening programs can promote “civic engagement” among their constituents, and researchers should be careful to assess the nature of political participation at work rather than treating it as a flat, present-or-absent feature . Regardless of their strategies for engaging members, attracting resources, and building legitimacy, civil-society groups such as garden programs and other CBOs must navigate a challenging organizational environment. While many of these organizations have expanded in size and scope under roll-back/roll-out neoliberalization, funding for the work of social service provision is still limited and the competition for it is strong. For organizations based in low income communities, tension may develop between maintaining legitimacy in the local community and building a professionalized reputation with funders and policy-makers . In a local political environment unresponsive to grassroots community pressure, organizations are unlikely to engage in efforts at civic participation at all . Furthermore, receiving funding from government sources may lead nonprofits to moderate their advocacy tactics, engaging in more insider and less outsider strategies [though see also Fyall and McGuire 2015]. Thus, a study of community gardening programs should examine the extent to which garden organizations hew to the priorities of funders versus gardeners themselves, and analysis should also pay close attention to the tactics chosen for engaging with city leaders. The same dynamics have been identified for social movement organizations at various scales, which have been found to survive and succeed in their goals by navigating shifting political opportunities while continuing to mobilize resources from their environment . Especially for movements of the poor, the choice to formalize an organization may bring greater access to resources, but it can also constrain protest tactics . Systems that control power and resources largely function to conserve the existing institutional arrangements that afford them this control , in part through the influence they exert directly on policy making, and in part through their role in resource allocation . Ultimately, flood and drain tray any organization working to shift the balance of resources and power in society—such as revising land use policy in a way that limits development—must navigate the constraints of an organizational environment in which better-resourced and more powerful entities will resist such change.In spite of the inertia imposed by powerful forces in the organizational environment, social relations do change over time, and social movement organizations are influential to this process. As it relates to urban gardens, community groups have organized to challenge the urban growth machine, bring equity to the food system, or counter other processes they perceive as harmful to them through activism and social movements. Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as contentious action by a group of less powerful people who use “dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate, action-oriented cultural frames” to maintain their collective action toward desired ends even as they come up against more-powerful opponents. This definition serves to distinguish social movements from elite political manipulations and from less confrontational forms of organized civic participation—all of which are forms of action that occur in the varied landscape of urban agriculture and the organizations that promote it. In studying the effectiveness and long-term viability of social movements, theorists have identified several important analytical dimensions. Political and discursive opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and framing interact in both the emergence and development of social movements . Conceptualizing the socio-political environments in which movements must operate, “political opportunity structures” describe the legal and institutional infrastructure that enables or constrains various forms of political action , while “discursive opportunity structures” refer to cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate, forming the context in which social movement claims and actions will be received by the wider public . Social movements are more likely to succeed when they can take advantage of favorable opportunity structures, but they also need to draw in sufficient resources to maintain their functioning such as material support, legitimacy, information, leadership, and active participation from movement supporters . One critical strategy for a movement to attract supporters, elicit active participation, and sway decision-makers to support their agenda is through strategic framing. “Framing” refers to the negotiation of meaning and the deployment of collective action frames that work to persuade a greater share of the public and/or decision-makers that the social movement’s goals should be met .
While opportunity structures are largely exogenous conditions that structure movement possibilities, social movement leaders and participants can significantly influence resource mobilization and framing processes through their choice of actions. Research has shown that the success and survival of both CBOs and social movement organizations is partially contingent upon the organizational environment in which they operate, and that an organization’s ability to attract resources from its environment – including both material resources and legitimacy – has a significant influence on outcomes . The quality and decisions of leadership also matter for harnessing the opportunities and resources that exist in the organization’s environment. Legitimacy is a critical resource for all types of organizations, not just those that are part of social movements. Initially, organizations seek legitimacy to gain credibility with their target audience and organizations in their environment; to do so, they need to establish a clear meaning for their activities . Legitimacy that builds credibility is necessary for organizations to gain passive support for their existence, and organizational scholars argue that a conceptually distinct aspect of legitimacy is that which affords continuity as organizations work to motivate “affirmative commitments” from at least some people— employees, customers, grantors, and others who keep the organization functional . Thus, motivating action that will sustain the organization requires not just gaining but maintaining legitimacy—processes requiring different strategies that must be tailored to the organizational environment . For urban agriculture organizations, both gaining and maintaining legitimacy present challenges. Since the act of growing food in cities has fallen outside many people’s expectations, gardening organizations have needed to engage in public-facing efforts to make their activities legible and legitimate. Once they have credibility, urban agriculture organizations must employ additional legitimation strategies to ensure continuity, as gardens require consistent labor to maintain to keep up their legitimized appearance as a garden rather than a weed patch. Critically, building and maintaining legitimacy is a process “dependent on a history of events” , which decreases the possibility for organizations to change their own practices and narratives of meaning without risking a loss of legitimacy. While organizational scholars have articulated the challenges involved in gaining and maintaining legitimacy, as well as in challenging and responding to challenges of legitimacy, little research investigates what happens when changes in external conditions necessitate new forms of legitimacy to maintain existing activities and operations. For urban agriculture organizations, this is especially relevant when real estate conditions change and gardens that have been legitimized as temporary spaces are threatened with development. If organizations seek to overcome elite interest in repurposing the land, they face the challenge of reshaping themselves from community-based organizations providing services into social movement organizations staking new claims and demanding change in a policy or paradigm. While both CBOs and SMOs have been defined and widely discussed in the literature, little research exists that explores the extent to which their activities overlap. Minkoff develops the concept of “hybrid organizational forms,” but does so specifically in the context of identity-based organizations born of social movements that adapted to an increasingly partisan environment. The concept has not been applied or analyzed for organizations with other origins, such as those that begin as service organizations and take up social movement work later on. Similarly, Sampson et al. urge the use of a social movements lens to analyze civic participation, describing an increase in “blended social action” that combines protest with civic action. While this research finds that collective action events tend to occur more often in neighborhoods with a higher density of nonprofit organizations, the authors do not examine the role of organizations in mobilizing blended social action.