While multi-stakeholder partnerships are emerging as an increasingly popular approach to address grand challenges, they are not well studied or understood. Such partnerships are rife with difficulties arising from the fact that actors in the partnership have different understandings of the grand challenge based on meaning systems which have distinct and often opposing assumptions, values, and practices. Each partnership actor brings with them their individual values as well as the values and work practices of their home organization's culture, alongside the wider meaning systems present within the sectoral spaces in which each organization is situated-public, private, or nonprofit. Yet, there is little understanding of how actors in multistakeholder partnerships negotiate multi-level meaning systems to reach partnership goals. In this 16-month ethnographic study, we take up a negotiated culture perspective to holistically examine the negotiation of multi-level meaning related to a focal grand challenge in a multi-stakeholder partnership established to end homelessness in Western Canada. Based on our findings, we contribute a process model to explain the ongoing negotiation of multi-level meanings in multi-stakeholder partnerships working to address grand challenges.

This article presents conversations across difference that took place among community partners and researchers at a week-long workshop in T’Sou-ke First Nation territory in 2019. The workshop launched the Four Stories About Food Sovereignty research network and project, which brings together food producers, activists, and researchers representing T’Sou-ke Nation in British Columbia, Wayuu Indigenous communities in Colombia, refugee communities in Jordan, and small-scale farmers in South Africa. We focus here on conversations that highlight global-local tensions in food justice work, the pressures of extractive economy, and pressures arising from climate crisis – challenges that some participants framed at the level of global extractivism and colonial-capitalism, others at the level of the soil. As the conversations reveal, there was more common ground than conflict in shared histories of dispossession, shared predicaments of extractive capital and its government allies, and shared concern to renew and reinvigorate ancestral practices of care for territory.

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