Critical ReviewLocal food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges

•We engage with the challenge of scaling up in the food sovereignty movement.•We frame food sovereignty efforts as institutions and discuss their interplay.•Three interplay situations present challenges to the scaling up of food sovereignty.•We provide a framework for understanding and resolving these challenges.

The food sovereignty movement proposes a localist approach to meeting food security while delivering broader social, economic and environmental benefits. The movement is spawning multiple local projects of food sovereignty, whereby people are empowered to define their own culturally and environmentally appropriate food systems. As the number of enacted examples increases, the movement is also affecting change at national (and international) levels, with a number of countries creating national strategies or legislation for food sovereignty. We reflect on the challenges created by such scaling up within the existing food system. We propose a focus on issues of institutional interplay in order to identify and critique challenges. We highlight three interplay situations between multiple, diverse enactments of food sovereignty at multiple levels, and between food sovereignty and the broader institutional contexts within which they are embedded.