
Jill K. ClarkThe Ohio State University | OSU · John Glenn College of Public Affairs
Jill K. Clark
MS, PhD
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81
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Introduction
My current research interests are agrifood system policy and practice, centering on community and state governance of food systems, the policy process, and community engagement.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (81)
We investigate community members’ perceptions of their engagement with university researchers’ engaged research conducted in their neighborhoods. Analyzing interviews, first, we find perceptions are not simply developed from singular experiences, personal experiences, or even research experiences. Most interviewees did not, or could not, clearly di...
The process of developing food system policies (FSP) that comprehensively address systemic issues requires the inclusion of a diverse array of actors from all parts of the food system. Drawing on literature on collaborative governance, we argue that interpersonal relationships, and the factors that facilitate their development and maintenance, are...
This reflective essay explores power relations, with a particular focus on racialization, that flow through dominant forms of food systems governance, with an aim to create more participatory governance models. Four of the authors asked a group of five scholars, activists, and practitioners (also authors) who identify as Black, Indigenous or Pe...
There is a debate in the literature about whether one can address food system problems with market-based approaches while seeking food justice or food sovereignty. However, as part of a team of researchers and community leaders, we have found that this debate is less relevant in practice. The concepts are interrelated within real-world food systems...
"Anchor institutions are a part of a complex urban governance regime influencing policy, investment and programming in urban neighborhoods. Anchor land-grant educational institutions are questioning their role in conducting impactful research in and with the community. We find growing evidence of interest in community-based participatory research (...
To address the lack of research on institutional barriers to public participation, we examine participation environments by studying neighborhood commissions. Using the Strategic Action Field Framework for Implementation Research, we illustrate how city-level policies interact with commissions and organizational-level driving forces to create exper...
In her 2023 Agriculture, Food & Human Values Society (AFHVS) Presidential Address, Jill Clark reflects on the importance of “joy” in academic pursuits to confront the power of the conventional, industrial food system and generate power through our collective work. Clark addresses the various dimensions of power and their role in addressing systemic...
Development research and practice often use a capitals framework to study and encourage community improvement (Flora et al. 2015; Pender et al., 2014; Scoones 2009). This includes capitals such as human, social, natural, infrastructural, political, economic, and cultural. Despite robust scholarship on a variety of capital types, the conceptualizati...
As society experiences greater food- and agriculture-related crises, including those related to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to rethink conventional silos of hierarchical government. Know Your Farmer Know Your Food (KYF2) was an ambitious collaborative interagency model to address local and regional food system (LRFS) d...
National planning and health organizations agree that to achieve healthy and sustainable food systems, planners must balance goals across a spectrum of sustainability issues that include economic vitality, public health, ecological sustainability, social equity, and cultural diversity. This research is an assessment of government-adopted food syste...
The practice by which international actors consider and engage with negotiations that influence the food system — food systems diplomacy — has the potential to reframe the global food governance narrative to balance the health, social, environmental and economic domains of food systems.
There is a long-standing call for the use of deliberative
approaches in public participation—taking such forms as deliberative forums, deliberative polling, participatory budgeting, citizen juries, and collaborative planning—the merits of which have been written about extensively (Nabatchi 2010; Neblo 2015; Cooper, Bryer, and Meek 2006). Despite g...
This collaborative, open educational resource brings together a collection of short pedagogical texts that help new learners understand complex theoretical concepts and disciplinary jargon from the critical social sciences. Each entry "shows" an element of theory using an "illustrative vignette”—a short, evocative story, visual or infographic, poem...
Community-based systems dynamics (CBSD) integrates members of the public into food systems modeling processes in order to shape food policy and effect systemic change. Food systems present policymakers with many examples of persistent and challenging problems–food insecurity, food waste, diet-related chronic disease, access to healthcare for food s...
Background
The food system is a social determinant of health and leverage point for reducing diet-related racial inequities. Yet, food system interventions have not resulted in sustained improvement in dietary outcomes for underrepresented minorities living in neighborhoods with a history of disinvestment. Research is needed to illuminate the dynam...
Access to fresh and healthy food within a neighborhood has been identified as a social mechanism contributing to community health. Grounded in the understanding that challenges related to equity within a food system are both structural and systemic, our research demonstrates how systems thinking can further understandings of food system complexity....
Using a relational approach, this study investigates whether shopping close to home moderates the relationship between the proximate food environment and diet. To address this question, we develop the proximate food retail quality (PFRQ) score, an inverse-distance weighted measure of all food retailers within a resident's neighborhood that incorpor...
Living in a low-income neighborhood with low access to healthy food retailers is associated with increased risk for chronic disease. The U.S. Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) provides resources to support the development of infrastructure to improve neighborhood food environments. This natural experiment examined a HFFI funded food hub that...
Dominant food systems, based on industrial methods and corporate control, are in a state of flux. To enable the transition towards more sustainable and just food systems, food movements are claiming new roles in governance. These movements, and the initiatives they spearhead, are associated with a range of labels (e.g., food sovereignty, food justi...
The growth of interest in urban agriculture (UA) has paralleled an increase in municipal policy to enable, regulate, or otherwise support UA, particularly over the past decade. Yet, there has been no systematic documentation and characterization of the myriad UA public policies emerging across different cities within the United States (US). To addr...
The changing structure of agriculture strains the historically close relationship between commodity agriculture and rural development. Meanwhile, growth in consumer interest for differentiated, value-added products has the potential to create community economic development opportunities. However, the evidence regarding the benefit of value-added pr...
Community advocates and some scholars have argued that metropolitan food systems are central yet fragile food infrastructure. While recent events have suddenly laid this bare for many, it has been a matter of long-time concern to community advocates and scholars alike. Until recently, much of the food system has remained invisible to subnational po...
As lockdown and school closure policies were implemented in response to the coronavirus, the federal government provided funding and relaxed its rules to support emergency food provision, but not guidance on best practices for effectiveness. Accordingly, cities developed a diverse patchwork of emergency feeding programs. This article uses qualitati...
Research on public participation in community planning processes often focuses on the design of participation activities and the tensions therein. Past research, however, gives little attention to the question of who makes these design decisions, what public values they hold, and how those values impact decisions about design. Addressing this gap,...
The largest public assistance program in the United States, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), relies on private retailers for program access. We analyze geo-coded SNAP-authorized convenience and grocery stores in 2000 and 2010 to determine factors associated with their accessibility. Results demonstrate that accessibility was hi...
Food policy councils (FPCs) are an embodiment of food democracy, providing a space for community members, professionals, and government to learn together, deliberate, and collectively devise place-based strategies to address complex food systems issues. These collaborative governance networks can be considered a transitional stage in the democratic...
This chapter traces the governance of the design and implementation of a local food action-planning process, with keen attention to the use of power by different actors and the context within which power dynamics operated. This case is interesting because a civil society organization was on equal footing, despite power differentials, with a city he...
Interventions aimed at improving access to healthy food in low-income communities should consider the preferences of residents. Household food shoppers in two urban, low-income communities were asked about their preferences for vendors at, and qualities of, a potential nearby food hub. Universally, participants preferred availability of whole foods...
Background:
Diet is critical to chronic disease prevention, yet there are persistent disparities in diet quality among Americans. The socioecological model suggests multiple factors, operating at multiple levels, influence diet quality.
Objective:
The goal was to model direct and indirect relationships among healthy eating identity, perceived co...
This book offers insights into the governance of contemporary food systems and their ongoing transformation by social movements. As global food systems face multiple threats and challenges there is an opportunity for social movements and civil society to play a more active role in building social justice and ecological sustainability. Drawing on ca...
First paragraphs: Introduction It is time to shift the trajectory of how local governments engage in communities’ food systems. Local and regional government (LRG) involvement in food systems is essential and welcome, of course. However, recent experiences, as well as what is on the horizon, suggest that practitioners and scholars must reimagine t...
‘Food democracy’ suggests that building a policy environment within which a community food system can thrive relies on a politically engaged citizenry. Across North America, civic-oriented groups are conducting grass-roots projects to develop community food systems. Projects are addressing issues such as local food security, healthy food access, an...
Hardesty's 2010 Choices article describes the mainstreaming of local and regional food systems (LRFS) at the federal level. She highlights the passage of the 2008 Farm Bill, which included policies and programs "designed specifically to increase the supply of and demand for local food" (p. 1), and the creation of the USDA's 2009 "Know Your Farmer,...
The twin forces of globalization and devolution have created administrative circumstances that strain the problem-solving capacity of local governments and increase the importance of nongovernmental processes and institutions. The literature suggests that locally owned firms are more likely to engender higher levels of civic engagement critical to...
Researchers suggest that inequity and disparities in public participation in the policy-making process will go hand in hand unless public managers and community leaders are attentive to these concerns when they are designing participation opportunities. Previous research has considered how the design of participatory opportunities can address inequ...
Dietary patterns and food security is considered in four ways: Healthy Eating Index (HEI), food category consumption patterns, energy/macronutrient contributions of food categories, and sub-category caloric intake accounting for consumption patterns. 2005–2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data were grouped by What We Eat in Amer...
A marked increase in attention to equitable community food systems recently has resulted in demand to create local government policy environments in which these systems can thrive. But what determines policy 'readiness' to develop these environments? Through a critical examination of Growing Food Connections (GFC), we propose a theoretical framewor...
Transformation of the food system rests, in part, on changing the rules by which all actors play. Many of these rules take the form of public policy, whether they be laws, regulations, government spending or other tools used to impact markets. So concerns are raised when local groups in the food movement are reluctant to politically engage to chang...
Recent attention to communities ‘‘localizing’’
food systems has increased the need to understand the
perspectives of people working to foster collaboration and
the eventual transformation of the food system. University
Cooperative Extension Educators (EEs) increasingly play a
critical role in communities’ food systems across the
United States, prov...
The United Nations estimates that by 2050, more than 66% of the world's population will live in urban areas. In the face of continuing urbanization, how will communities meet the fundamental need for good food? What kinds of public policies, structures, and systems will ensure equitable and just access to food? We argue that urban universities have...
Various mapping methodologies have been used to explore complex social, economic, and environmental components of the food system. Planning scholars, geographers, public health officials, and community organizations have created maps to better understand disparities in the food environment. This review provides an analysis of the nature of geograph...
Interest continues to increase in respect to developing viable public and highly collaborative scholarship. Yet often community and university partners face significant barriers relating to diverse motivations of individual partners and different desired outcomes. The aim of this manuscript is to contribute to the scholarship on community-universit...
In the US, traditionally food policy has been considered a federal concern dealing with issues such as nutrition, anti-hunger, food safety, food labeling, international trade and food aid. In the 1970s, new concerns arose about the potentially deleterious consequences of the modern global food system. Social movement groups, often referred to as th...
In this commentary we very briefly highlight farming-and land-related historical injustices impacting African Americans, and outline useful ways for racially diverse food justice organizations, activists, and academics to collaborate on place-based interventions in an equitable and inclusive way. Place-based strategies to address inequity in the fo...
As demand for locally grown food increases there have been calls to ‘scale-up’ local food production to regionally distribute food and to sell into more mainstream grocery and retail venues where consumers are already shopping. Growing research and practice focusing on how to improve, expand and conceptualize regional distribution systems includes...
Typical measures of food access use spatial-only methods to identify nearby food outlets and the quantity, quality, and variety of food available. This measure of spatial access falls short in explaining the effect that the operating hours of food retailers have on food access. Our study aims to complement the spatial dimension of access measures b...
ood insecurity negatively impacts dietary intakes; however, a broader view of the underlying dietary patterns is needed to understand the health impacts. Dietary recall and food security status data for 16,625 adults from 2005-2010 NHANES were evaluated to assess the food sources of key nutrients. Dietary data obtained from 24-hour dietary recalls...
Interest continues to increase in respect to developing viable public and highly collaborative scholarship. Yet often community and university partners face significant barriers relating to diverse motivations of individual partners and different desired outcomes. The aim of this manuscript is to contribute to the scholarship on community-universit...
Many local governments have enacted land use policies to address farmland loss and farm viability by protecting large blocks of farmland from residential growth. While the rate of suburban "sprawl" has slowed since the burst of the housing bubble in 2008, these policies remain the dominant approach to agricultural land use policy. Given the importa...
As more interest is paid by researchers and community groups to food insecure communities and the associated health impacts for residents, interventions have been conducted to improve healthy food accessibility. Not much literature can be found, however, evaluating the healthy corner store programs implemented to improve the food environment and ch...
The geography of modern agriculture in the United States has been dramatically shaped by broader changes in the agri-food system, including standardization, commodification, vertical integration, globalization, and increasing concentration in the ownership and control of farm and food production. In peri-urban areas, these sectoral forces of change...
Despite population growth and development at the rural-urban interface (RUI), agriculture continues to persist there. This resilience is partially a reflection of land use policies and market support programs designed to protect farm and ranch land that is vulnerable to nonfarm development. Studies examining the RUI primarily focus on the diversity...
Agricultural geographers have long focused on farm adaptation to changing conditions. One frame for examining these adaptations is the modified political economy approach, which attempts to reconcile the conceptual tension between farmers as individual agents found within broader industry structures by focusing on adjustment strategies on the farm...
Recognizing the inherent pressures on farm families and farmland, USDA has been developing policies and programs that simultaneously attempt to retain existing farm families on the landscape, recruit new farmers, and create lasting economic opportunities rooted in agriculture. In this article we argue that to date there has been an overemphasis on...
The purpose of our article is twofold. First, we introduce a framework for U.S. Extension educators to measure the extent of food access at any scale when information about food carried by retailers is limited. Second, we create a baseline for the Ohio Food Policy Council so that work to increase food access in rural areas will have a benchmark to...
In this article we seek to identify how diverse community and economic development tools in the Extension portfolio might be adapted to the assessment of local food and farming developments. We report on an assessment of the economic development opportunities and impacts of local food system development in Knox County, Ohio. The data and analysis a...
Regionalization is offered as a solution to the challenges that both communities and farmers face in our globalized food system.
However, our research reveals that farmers’ willingness and ability to adapt to a regionalized food system are tempered by
social meanings of and social relationships with agriculture—or what farmers classify as ‘farming’...
Despite pervasive exurban development in the United States (US) over the last several decades, a lack of relatively precise data has hindered basic research, including classification of the types of emerging exurban settlement patterns. But because exurbia transcends the traditional dichotomy of urban versus rural and metropolitan versus nonmetropo...
Substantial U.S. population growth in relatively rural areas adjacent to large urban areas is sparking renewed interest in the rural-urban fringe. This research identifies some of the roots of the rural-urban fringe concept and reviews recent scholarly interest in the related exurban concept. Analysis of primary and secondary data is conducted to e...
Despite pervasive exurban development in the United States over the last several decades, a lack of relatively precise data has hindered basic research, including classification of the types of emerging exurban settlement patterns. To address this gap, we make use of a spatially explicit population database to examine exurban pattern. A typology of...
Exurbia is a settlement form that is receiving increased attention in both academia and the popular press. Researchers have developed an understanding of the magnitude of this settlement pattern; we turn our focus to the spatial pattern or configuration of this development. How can we characterize the spatial imprint of exurbia? Do metropolitan exu...