Partnerships face tension between stability and change
Summary and headline written by AI from the source article. How we work
Since 2010, the Southern Africa Food Lab has convened businesses, farmers, government officials, and community groups to address hunger and malnutrition in the region, but disagreements quickly arose about how to solve the problems.
Some participants prioritised maintaining existing food supply chains through disruptions, while others believed those same systems needed fundamental transformation toward agroecological farming.
This tension between preserving existing structures and enacting change is common in cross-sector partnerships, initiatives bringing together government, businesses, and civil society to tackle shared challenges like food insecurity and climate change. Researchers who have studied these partnerships for years found that they often focus on either resilience, the ability of a system to withstand shocks, or transformation, changing the system to be more equitable and sustainable.
While both are often necessary, partnerships frequently emphasize one over the other, particularly when operating at a local scale. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Marine Stewardship Council, for example, aim to lessen the harm of existing industries, while Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute work to challenge concentrations of wealth and their environmental impact. To manage this tension effectively, the researchers recommend three practices.
Partnerships should actively monitor for early warning signs of social or ecological issues, engage in honest discussions about power imbalances, and ensure that interventions align with long-term goals of preservation or change. The city of Milan, through its COVID-19 food hubs, demonstrated this by transforming a temporary crisis response into a lasting structure for addressing food waste and insecurity.
