collaboration logics

22 Apr, 2026

There is a widely repeated assertion in food systems and sustainability transformations literature that different actors, or different stakeholders¹, need to collaborate to make change happen. Feeling like this is often taken for granted as a self-evident truth, or different sources may have different underlying reasons: today it felt worth interrogating the bundle of assumptions that structure this, and following some of the threads that unravel.

Why do different actors need to collaborate? Because the food system is a complex adaptive system, and no one actor or group has the knowledge or right or power to shepherd it to a sustainable² state.

1a. We need to collaborate because we can’t do it alone

Or, collaboration is necessary because we need to pool our resources.

A subset of this is all about recognising the different and situated knowledges that diverse people have. What a farmer knows about community, and adapting to drought across the land they work with; what a civil servant knows about navigating bureaucracy and politics; what a campaigner knows about public sentiment and leverage points for systems change; what a single mother trying to feed a family on an estate where the local shop stocks no fresh produce knows about care and agency and trade-offs. What researchers know about yields or pests or coastal erosion rates or soil carbon sequestration or how industrialisation of animal farming relates to changing meat-eater palates and preferences.

Who brings this all together, and how? Who gets to see the big picture? Who hosts, sets the table, sends the invites, gets invited? Here we have all the considerations of knowledge politics too.

1b. We need to collaborate because we need to share our knowledge

Underneath that I think the assumptions are

1. knowledge is an input for innovation or problem solving;
2. different people, practices and experiences mean different knowledge;
3. there’s some way we can bring it all together that is better – more fair? more complete? – than if we only look at things from one perspective.

Part of it is born from the recognition of the limits of scientific and technical understandings; and the fighting that certain groups, like indigenous peoples, have had to do, for survival, and recognition of the right to existence of how and what they know about the world. That also often gets justified in terms of it being useful knowledge for remedying social-ecological ills. Underneath that? Knowledge being instrumental, being useful, being applied for "problem solving"...

There’s also a sense that we need all the different “stakeholders” involved because we need buy-in, we need negotiation, we need to sort through who will be the winners and the losers as things inevitably change. And if we’re fair and good and lucky we can ensure the winners aren’t more of the same few people who keep winning, and the losers take it gracefully, with lots of love and support, with hope and the spirit of adventure, not bitterness and desolation and despair.³

2. We need to collaborate because we are all affected, if unequally responsible

Often this is when there is talk of trade-offs, of just transition, and of the necessity of cooperation not just coordination and information sharing.

This is about participation, inclusion, for various reasons and in different contexts. Whether needing to involve the peripheral, minoritised, marginalised, disempowered, poorer; and/or the core, elite, powerful, richer.

With underlying assumptions including

1. “nothing about us without us”, or in other words, people should be able to participate in decision-making that affects or will affect their lives;
2. it is possible to govern change proactively rather than be at the whims of emergent change;
3. change is a question of redistribution of resources;
4. people will try to hold on to what they have and it’s a bargaining/negotiating thing to try and win any redistribution;
5. we need to have buy-in for motivation to act.

And then, in the lineages of political economy and systems thinking, there are arguments that start from the recognition of the complexity of a system and its self-sustaining dynamics.

3. We need to collaborate because we have to intervene in many parts of the system at once.

A good exposition of this I recently encountered is from Olivier de Schutter (2019, from p.17).⁴ The inertia – or persistence – of food systems is a result of “the co-evolution of a number of elements, that – because they are the product of a shared history and fit under the same dominant narrative – perfectly fit with one another and have become mutually supportive”. Including storage, processing, and communications infrastructures that are tied to major commodity production; research focus on a limited number of now-key commodity crops; large economic actors being best able to benefit from developments e.g. through achieving economies of scale, network effects, standard-setting and accessing expanding, globalising markets; and “the mass production of refined grains and of processed foods allowed by these developments fits perfectly well with lifestyle changes, and the new appetite of consumers for foods that are tasty and easy to prepare”.

Such that “each component of the system can be perceived as legitimate, even though the system as a whole is perceived as unsustainable”. And crucially, it's a cycle where "habits and practices cannot change without the whole system changing. The problem is systemic, the political economy approach argues: so should be the solutions”. I may be extrapolating a bit but I think it follows easily from there that collaboration is then critical – at the very least in terms of coordinating coherence across different policies, regulations and government departments.

Most simply, there is the basic logic that we are social creatures and collaboration is just how we get things done.

5. There is no choice except to collaborate.

This is possibly a bit too generic to be useful in the context of talking about collaboration dynamics for food systems transformation. I think it's similar if your position is just that collaboration is intrinsically good and desirable for that reason, but for completeness let's include it in the list:

6. Collaboration is desirable because it is intrinsically good

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So, there is a mix of values-based and practical/instrumental reasoning for the “why” of collaboration for food systems change, and for now I'm grouping them as distinct but interrelated logics...

Of course, these different reasons for collaboration all coexist and overlap. People’s valorisation of collaboration isn’t going to neatly map to this and it's a first draft anyway.

And on top of that,

• It’s not even always “collaboration”. Sometimes it’s “co-production”, “participation”, “deliberation”, “consensus building”.
• There are so many different contexts where similar dynamics may be being felt, and it seems that they’re roughly analogous, but when people come together they might be talking at cross-purposes if they don’t recognise the different contexts. Like between academic disciplines; academia and policy; community development; civil society organisations and activists; different types of companies and businesses.

One way that abstract discussion about collaboration dynamics can get quickly sticky is around the "who". Who needs to be involved in a given space, considering unequal power and wealth (see section 2). In general there are considerations of how to facilitate a space when people are coming from different ~strata. It's different having a discussion about e.g. action on local water pollution where you really need to landowners in the room, versus a local community organising space in the same area where having them there serves no purpose or actively undermines creating a sense of safety, empowerment or affinity.

In other words: for my purposes here I'm happy to identify the general logic of including people => collaboration. Needing people to be involved for some reason because of who they are or what position they represent in the system/network. But when it comes to specific cases, this could go in different directions: strategic inclusion or exclusion. Thinking about it in terms of Gaventa's power cube might well help (e.g. closed vs invited vs claimed spaces).

But that's enough for now! I started off thinking the why of collaboration might be fairly straightforward and then I could get into thinking about the how. Turns out there's a few different Whys! I'm interested to think more in future about how this help understand conflict dynamics - if people have come in to collaboration with different logics, expectations, objectives.