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Pro-poor tourism means managing a tourism business so that it makes business sense for the operator and at the same time benefits the poor. Based on the Pro-Poor Tourism Pilot Programme conducted in southern Africa, this article argues that 'mainstream' commercial tourism can do much to embrace pro-poor approaches. In particular, the tourism sector needs to go further in shifting from philanthropic approaches to pro-poor approaches that entail doing business differently, with more committed changes to strategy and business structures. The pilot programme case studies reveal a range of potential business benefits companies can achieve through pro-poor approaches, such as enhanced social licence to operate and increased brand recognition. They also show that implementing a pro-poor approach depends on the company's context and circumstances. Such a shift entails a number of challenges and companies need to commit to making the necessary effort.

Food insecurity in urban areas, particularly in developing countries, is a persistent yet poorly understood phenomenon. Food security interventions have primarily focused on ensuring food availability, a focus that has resulted in predominantly production-oriented responses that presuppose a rural challenge, overlooking urban food insecurity challenges. This view generally precipitates welfarist or project-driven interventions in urban areas that are predominantly reactive, lacking strategic focus. Within the context of converging and mutually reinforcing global transitions, including the second urban transition, the food system transition and the nutrition transition, alternative urban food governance innovations are emerging. Urban food governance innovations are particularly evident in the Global North, with an emerging trend in South American cities. A gap exists in understanding food governance processes in growing South African cities, in particular how these processes intersect with a wider discourse on food system change. This paper draws on original analysis of emerging food governance trends and posits that a food lens offers opportunities to explore innovative forms of urban governance, participatory planning and citizen-driven food policy formulation.

This paper examines African urban infrastructure and service delivery as an entry point for connecting African aspirations with the harsh developmental imperatives of urban management, creating a dialogue between scholarly knowledge and sustainable development policy aspirations. We note a shift to multinodal urban governance and highlight the significance of the synthesis of social, economic and ecological values in a normative vision of what an African metropolis might aspire to by 2030. The sustainable development vision provides a useful stimulus for Africa's urban poly-crisis, demanding fresh interdisciplinary and normatively explicit thinking, grounded in a practical and realistic understanding of Africa's infrastructure and governance challenges. ARTICLE HISTORY

Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such wicked problems is contingent of these differences being brought to the fore, being part of the conversation, as devices through which common positions can be discovered, where spaces are created for the realisation of new perspectives, but also, where difference is celebrated as opposed to censored.