The Southern Africa Food Lab has brought businesses, farmers, government and community groups together since 2010 to help address the problems of hunger and malnutrition. When these diverse groups first came together, everyone agreed that the region’s food system was in trouble. The disagreement came next.
For some, the priority was resilience: keeping supply chains running through droughts, price spikes and political shocks. For others, those same supply chains were the problem and they needed to be transformed. For instance, they wanted a shift towards agroecological farming — working with natural processes instead of chemical inputs, and favouring diverse smallholdings over monocultures. This would have meant changing some of the very structures their partners were trying to protect.
This tension is not a quirk of one initiative. In a recent article, we argue that it is a common challenge for cross-sector partnerships. These are initiatives in which government, private sector and civil society come together to jointly address shared problems. They are the world’s favourite tool for tackling sustainability problems.
The logic is appealing. No single sector can fix food insecurity, water stress or climate change alone, so why not pool resources and act together?
