Place-Based Approaches to Food System Resilience: Emerging Trends and Lessons from South Africa

Abstract

Food systems have outcomes related to three goals: food and nutrition security; livelihoods and economic inclusion; and environmental sustainability. Place-based approaches help to delineate the adequate territories in which coalitions of actors can address such goals. In the case of food, they facilitate food system resilience through identifying opportunities for adaptation to change and offer risk management to deal with external shocks. In many countries, local authorities and communities were central in the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The South African experience is illustrative of their potential roles in a time of crisis. Although South Africa’s provinces have restricted competency for food system governance, the Western Cape Province adopted a pro-active approach and developed from 2014 a food security strategy where it commits to a wide range of interventions. Related and following local debates provided a fertile context which allowed further engagement about ways to improve food governance. It facilitated the emergence of multiple community-led initiatives to address the loss of livelihoods and food insecurity during the crisis. This experience illustrates the potential to produce polycentric forms of governance that can progressively result in collaborative governance; it also reveals how embryonic territorial approaches addressing food system issues can emerge.

Navigating the politics and processes of food systems transformation: guidance from a holistic framework

“…As a normative, prescriptive tool, the framework outlined the actions and political choices that should be considered across the different domains and processes (the two axes of the framework) to ensure the transformation of the food system toward desirable, normative goals and values -such as, healthy diets, environmentally friendly food production and retail processes, equitable distribution of social and economic benefits, inclusive governance, and respect of cultural/local norms and values. In this regard, cognizant of the need for context-specific and place-based approaches (Caron et al, 2018;Ambikapathi et al, 2022;Losch and May, 2023), the framework should not be presented as a universal prescription; instead, we view it as an adaptable tool. As illustrated through the numerous empirical examples reviewed above, the nature of politics may vary across typologies of food systems (traditional, modern, consolidating), levels of development, or scales of consideration (international, national, sub-national, and community).…”