Individual food choices have a considerable impact on public health and the environment. The incidence of nutrition-related diseases has been continuously increasing during the last decades. Diets higher in plant-based foods have shown to be healthier and more environmentally sustainable.Many urban social innovation projects based on citizen engagement and community building are able to influence food consumption habits. However, there is a large variety of projects, which target specific population groups and focus on different sustainability issues. To understand how social innovation projects located in Germany, and especially Berlin, use citizen engagement and community creation to encourage nutritious and sustainable food choices, the research team conducted a qualitative research study consisting of semi-structured interviews and participant observations. The results were compared and validated using different social change, social innovation, network and leadership theories. When people with various backgrounds come together over a shared purpose and interact with each other, they can influence each other’s opinions and behaviors. A physical community setting was shown to be efficient to create awareness about sustainable and nutritious food choices. In order to include all population groups, citizens need to feel heard and understood, and have to be directly engaged in the decision-making process. A need for a leadership figure or a democratic leadership group is highlighted, and a combination of ‘transformational leadership’ and ‘authentic leadership’ styles proved to be the most effective. Urban food social innovation projects tend to cooperate with each other, as well as with other leaders and organizations, influencing them and serving as role models. These findings can help social innovation projects that implement citizen engagement and community building practices to efficiently promote nutritious and plant-based food choices among an urban population. Since this study is based on a limited number of organizations in Berlin and other regions of Germany, further research in other urban and/or rural environments is needed.

L’agriculture familiale apparait comme une alternative pour lutter contre la dépendance aux transnationales et au flux des marchés mondiaux de produits agricoles. Aujourd’hui, de nombreuses études montrent l’efficacité économique de l’agriculture familiale, de son dynamisme et de sa capacité à innover et à s’adapter sans oublier bien sûr, sa capacité à fournir des emplois à plus d’un milliard d’habitants dans les pays du Sud et à contribuer au PIB de ces pays.Ce travail analyse la place qu’occupe l’agriculture familiale rurale au sein d’une économie locale et son rapport avec les acteurs économiques, la population et le marché mais il va aussi essayer de faire ressortir l’influence de cette activité sur les rapports sociaux et sur l’évolution de l’agriculture elle-même. Ajoutons à cela les nouveaux défis qu’elle a à relever : tels que son nouveau cadre juridique, la question foncière, la gestion de l’eau, la pluriactivité, la polyculture, les flux migratoires et leur impact sur les communautés paysannes. L’objet de cette recherche porte sur la région de Jijel que nous connaissons pour l’avoir étudiée pendant nos études de graduation. L’importance de l’agriculture familiale dans cette région a attiré notre attention autant par la population concernée que par le type d’agriculture, sa variété en cultures maraichères, son arboriculture, son apiculture et son élevage. Le problème du dépaysannement du monde rural local, ces dernières années, généré par plusieurs facteurs va prendre aussi une place importante dans notre travail. / Family farming appears to be an alternative to tackling dependence on transnational companies and the flow of global markets for agricultural products. Today, many studies show the economic efficiency of family farming, its dynamism and its ability to innovate and adapt. Without forgetting, of course, its capacity to provide employment to more than a billion people in the southern countries, and its contribution to the P.I.B of these countries.This work will demonstrate the role of rural family farming in a local economy, and its relation with the economic actors, population, and the market. But also, on one hand the influence of this activity on social relations. And the influence exerted by societal changes on family farming, on the other hand. Adding to this, the new challenges it must free; such as: the new legal framework, the land issue, water management, pluriactivity, polyculture, migratory flows and their impact on peasant communities.The Jijel area will be our ground for this study. This field we know well, thanks to the work that we carried out during our graduation studies. The importance of family farming in the region has attracted our attention, through the existence of different vegetable crops, arboriculture, olive growing, beekeeping and various livestock farms. The problem of disorientation of local rural areas in recent years driven by several factors will also take an important place in our work.

This study examines the impact of rapid and multi-faceted change (both domestically and inter-nationally over the past four decades) on the Dutch Reformed Church. 2 February 1990 is taken as a water shed date in the history of South-Africa: a speech in parliament of former president FW de Klerk put South-Africa on a course of fundamental change in all spheres of society. The research problem deals with loss the Afrikaans community experiences as a result of societal change. The result of change and loss is long-lasting, collective grief. Grief is defined as the nor-mal, spontaneous reaction to change and loss. Unresolved grief and nostalgia saps a lot of energy and tends to turn a congregation’s attention to itself, thereby contradicting the sound reformed ecclesiology. There is no appropriate practical theological theory to help congregations address unresolved grief. Change, loss and grief are made focus points for theological reflection and empirical study. The guiding hypothesis states that efforts to build up the local church are more likely to succeed, once the “black holes” of unaddressed grief have been dealt with by a collective and on-going process of mourning. Mourning is defined as an intentional and courageous process of letting go of different losses. It is hard work, but the result of deliberate mourning is growth – and eventually a more appropriate, new identity. Unresolved grief causes congregations to get stuck in survival mode, in stead of reaching out to the nations with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Mourning is an antidote (Hamman 2005:35). The research model of G Heitink (1993) is employed to generate fresh practical theological thinking on the research problem: that congregations fail to live according to their missional identity. The hermeneutical cycle explores the “new” practical theology in the framework of a post-Einstein epistemology, as well as the theory of building up the local church in the framework of an ecosystemic meta-theory. The hermeneutical cycle is concluded with the study of contemporary theories of loss, grief and mourning. The empirical cycle reports the results of a qualitative empirical study in three local congregations of the Northern Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church. A rich description is given of 31 respondents’ experience of loss and grief in the new South-Africa. It is established that unresolved grief indeed impacts negatively on efforts to build up the local church. The strategic cycle searches for practical theological wisdom and for a theory that can guide congregations to more productive responses to change and loss. The research boils down to twelve strategic suggestions for local congregations on how to make collective mourning a normal and on-going part of their ministry. The study concludes with the hypothesis that practical theology can serve the church by developing a theory that integrates intentional mourning and grief work as a necessary and normal aspect of ministry. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

Die immer offensichtlicher werdende Verflechtung der vielfältigen sozialen und ökologischen Krisen stellt Risikogesellschaften weltweit vor der Herausforderung, grundlegende Transformationen der vorherrschenden gesellschaftlichen Modelle und Lebensweisen vorzunehmen, welche sich an den kulturellen Vorstellungen des wohlhabenden globalen Nordens orientieren. Bisher haben sich jedoch sowohl internationale als auch lokale Versuche, globale Entwicklungspfade in Richtung „faire und nachhaltige“ Zukunft zu lenken, als weitgehend erfolglos erwiesen. Der weltweite Ressourcenverbrauch und die Degradierung der Biosphäre haben sich weiter verschärft und beschleunigt. In Anlehnung an die deutsche hermeneutische Tradition sowie an den französischen Poststrukturalismus und den amerikanischen symbolischen Interaktionismus versucht diese theoretische und empirische Dissertation, die strukturellen Zwänge zu modellieren, mit denen individuelle change agents konfrontiert sind, und sie daran hindern, sozial-ökologische "reale Utopien" (Bloch) voranzutreiben. Darüber hinaus nimmt diese Dissertation eine Typisierung möglicher Wege zur Überwindung solcher Einschränkungen vor, nämlich durch Eingriffe einer bestimmten Art von auf der meso-gesellschaftlichen Ebene operierender Agency, die wir als Para-Governance bezeichnen. Die Dissertation schließt mit einer Reflexion über die sich verändernden Formen und Funktionen von Governance im Anthropozän, die über herkömmliche, eng definierte rationalistische und institutionalistische Ansätze hinausgehen. / The increasingly apparent imbrication of the multiple social and ecological crises creates an imperative for “risk societies” worldwide to undertake fundamental transformations to the currently prevalent model of social organization shaped after the cultural imaginaries of the affluent Global North. So far, however, both international and local attempts at bending global developmental trajectories towards “fair and sustainable” futures have proven largely futile, with global resource-consumption and biosphere degradation further reinforcing and accelerating. Drawing on the German hermeneutic tradition, as well as on French post-structuralism and American symbolic interactionism, this theoretical cum empirical dissertation seeks to model the structural constraints weighting over ‘change agents’, thus preventing them from advancing social-ecological “real utopias” (Bloch), and typify possible ways of overcoming such constraints through interventions of a specific kind of agency identified as operating at the meso-societal level, which we refer to as para-governance. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on the changing forms and functions of governance in the Anthropocene beyond conventional narrowly defined rationalist and institutionalist approaches.