Charlotte has been awarded the BOKU Talent Award for her master thesis “Meat Politics. Analysing actors, strategies and power relations governing the meat regime in Austria.”
The idea for the thesis came from her work within the SDG 2 Group of the UniNetz Project and was supervised by Melanie Pichler (Institute of Social Ecology). Together with colleagues at IDR, they are currently working on a scientific publication.
In her thesis Charlotte traced political actors, interests, strategies, and power resources that influence meat consumption in Austria. She found that meat politics in Austria are contested between producers, civil society, and food retailers. These currents were abstracted into three policy projects. One that primarily seeks to maintain the consumption of national products in order to stabilize domestic production. It appeals to the national identity of consumers and benefits from close relations with the state. The second project, driven by civil society, is increasingly gaining influence by questioning the dominant project and presenting alternatives. It calls for active state participation in care systems and questions the excessive responsibility attributed to consumers. Both of these projects, are increasingly being absorbed into the third. The high market concentration and penetration of the food retail sector enables it to effectively use its strategy of vertical integration to drive economic and ecological rationalization. This tendency has already been identified at a global level by Hugh Campbell, among others, and referred to as the corporate food regime.
The BOKU Talent Awards are funded by the Jubiläumsfonds der Stadt Wien and awarded every year to excellent Master’s theses and dissertations.
Photo credits: Christoph Gruber - Medienstelle BOKU-IT