Narrowing the food supply-demand gaps between urban and rural areas within a regional space has today become a serious challenge due to the growing urban population. Resultantly, urban markets are increasingly being dominated by industrial food chains, despite their negative socio-environmental impacts. To address this issue, this paper discusses the need and significance of ‘Collaborative Food Alliances’ (CFAs), which promote the direct supply of food products from rural farmers to urban residents through improved producer–consumer relationships. Based on the literature survey, this study underlines that the current CFAs are confronted with several challenges including the small scale of functioning and limited financing. While the current research on CFAs is focused on theoretical place-based studies, this paper argues that institutionalization of CFAs at a large scale is highly important for enhancing food security in urban areas. It mainly deliberates on two key aspects: (a) The process of institutionalizing CFAs and (b) A feasible financing mechanism to support CFAs. This paper emphasizes that urban local governments have a central role to play in institutionalizing CFAs, either as a lead agency or as a facilitator. It concludes with specific suggestions on three key determinants of multi-stakeholder engagement, financial constraints and policy coordination at a regional level.

The increase of population in Malang City has a significant effect on environmental degradation in the buffer zone, Malang Regency. This regency provides natural resources and collect the remnants of human activity from urban areas experiences a declining trend in environmental carrying capacity, thus it makes difficult to meet the needs of its own population. This research was aimed at analyzing the water carrying capacity as the capital base for development planning in Malang Regency. The research method uses the Supply-Demand approach, which means the calculation of the carrying capacity of water based on future needs and current conditions. The result showed that the carrying capacity of Malang Regency indicated this region experienced a water supply deficit of 0.95% per year.

There is broad subject that ecosystem service influence human well-being (HWB), however HWB are unmeasurable variable, therefore it still not been integrated fully into ecosystem service assessment and spatial planning document in Indonesia. Provision of sustainable ecosystem services, especially food provisioning, is a challenge for Bantul Regency as it faces huge production deficits because of land conversion and urbanization, therefore, it will threaten the condition of its human well-being. It aims to determine the distribution of human well-being conditions as well as analyzing which capital is the basic capital for human development in Bantul Regency. This study evaluates and maps human well-being by using Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF), based on perspective of experts and stakeholders, then analyzed the spatial variation on landscape by mapping the area, and discussed how to achieve human well-being conditions by maximizing services from the ecosystem. Questioners were distributed to stakeholders that involved in development decision making in Bantul regency in Likert scale, then it was analyze to determine the scores of each indicator in every capital. Then regional boundary shapefile analysis in ArcMap was carried out to map the level of conditions of human well-being. Based on the analysis, Human Capital is the largest capital in the people’s welfare of Bantul, the highest condition is located in the Dlingo and Srandakan Districts. However, financial, physical and social capitals are located in the same area, which makes the Banguntapan, Sewon and Bantul Districts have the best human well-being conditions in all of Bantul Regency. This study also found that besides geographical conditions play an important role in producing different types of ecosystem services, social-economic factors is the most important factor in determining the difference in value of each capital in human well-being. Optimizing planning regulation has to consider these spatial patterns.