Collaborating with partners

Government (local, state and federal), communities, First Peoples, civil society and industry all have a role in planning resilient food systems. Understanding their roles can highlight who to collaborate with and why in planning initiatives to strengthen food system resilience.

Placing equity at the centre of collaboration and engagement with stakeholders is important in food resilience planning, because food systems are highly inequitable. Collaborative processes are an opportunity to promote equitable food system outcomes by addressing power imbalances and elevating the voices of stakeholders who might not typically have a seat at the table.

Power is concentrated in food supply chains in a small number of very large corporations that exert significant influence over other actors, including farmers, consumers and other smaller companies. [1]. Low rates of pay and insecure employment throughout food supply chains exacerbate inequity and undermine the resilience of food systems [2][3].

In 2022, around 8% of Victorians ran out of food in the previous 12 months and were unable to afford to buy more [4]. Prevalence of severe food insecurity is much higher in some population groups, including low-income households, people who are unemployed or unable to work, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, and refugees and asylum seekers [4-6].

The food systems of First Peoples in Victoria have been significantly undermined by ongoing processes of colonisation. Colonisation has denied First Peoples access to land, water and economic resources to practice agriculture and grow Aboriginal foods, and it has led to high rates of food insecurity in Aboriginal communities [7].

Place equity at the centre of collaboration and stakeholder engagement in planning who to involve and how to involve them.

Who to involve

• People most affected - have you included the communities, organisations and people likely to be most affected by the impacts of shocks and stresses on food systems?
• People with lived experience – have you included people with lived experience of food insecurity or other impacts of food system disruption?
• Diverse groups – have you included people from diverse groups across the community, including people from migrant communities, young people, people with diverse genders?
• First Peoples – have you included First Peoples in the region? Have you considered how the involvement of First Peoples will generate reciprocal benefits that support self-determination? Have you established processes for culturally safe collaboration?
• Small scale actors – have you included small as well as large scale actors across food supply chains e.g. small-scale farmers and independent retailers?

How to make collaboration inclusive

• Establish project timelines and budgets that allow for inclusion
• Co-develop projects that are reciprocal and deliver meaningful benefits to communities
• Build relationships and trust with communities before engaging
• Reimburse participants for the time and costs of involvement
• Address power imbalances
• Be transparent in communication
• Undertake self-education about equity and injustice and explore your assumptions as a team

Recommended external resources

Climate justice and resilience toolkit from Western Australia, which includes guidance on engaging First Peoples and people with lived experience

Maggolee website developed by Reconciliation Victoria to support engagement and partnerships between local government and Aboriginal communities

A guide to supporting equity in engagement from researchers at McMaster University in Canada

Co-design is a process for collaborating with people who are affected by problems to develop solutions that meet their needs. It is grounded in design thinking and it focuses on designing with rather than for people [8] [9].

Co-design processes have many advantages for designing initiatives to strengthen the resilience of food systems:

• Creative ‘design thinking’ processes can open up new ways of thinking about the challenge of building resilient food systems to generate transformative solutions
• Co-design workshops can involve a wide range of stakeholders from across food supply chains to develop integrated ‘food systems’ solutions to address the challenges
• Co-design can promote more equitable food systems through the inclusion of diverse groups of people in generating solutions to build resilience
• Co-design can support participatory governance by including citizens in the design of decisions and actions that shape food systems
• Co-design can address power imbalances in food systems by grounding solutions in inclusive processes that shift power dynamics between stakeholders
• Food with dignity approaches can be co-designed with people who have lived experience of food insecurity to develop solutions that meet their needs

Co-designing solutions to address food insecurity with people who have lived experience supports dignified approaches that are grounded in the human right to food. Hunger and food insecurity have been recognised as forms of social trauma [10], and a trauma-informed framework can support the development of inclusive strategies to address food insecurity. The principles of a trauma-informed approach include safety, trustworthiness and transparency, collaboration, empowerment, choice and intersectionality [11].

Recommended external resources

Advice on equity and co-design from Metro North Health in Queensland

Human-centred design tools from the Victorian Government’s human-centred design playbook

Guide to co-design a food hub with community from the Open Food Network

Actions are needed across food supply chains from farm to fork to strengthen resilience, so collaborate with stakeholders from across the local or regional food system to develop solutions at all stages of food supply chains. Consider involving stakeholders from outside the immediate region to include more stages of food supply chains e.g. in an urban area, consider including food producers from surrounding peri-urban or regional areas.

Map food system stakeholders across the local or regional food system. Include organisations and people from:

• Multiple stakeholder groups - communities, civil society, First Peoples, government and industry
• All stages of food supply chains – from production to consumption and waste resources
• Across sectors - including environment, health, planning, community development, emergency management, waste and recycling, and economic development

For more information about potential local and state government partners, see making the case

Potential stakeholders to involve across civil society, community and industry

Tools and templates

• A template for identifying food system stakeholders

Governance models that support collaboration across local and regional food systems can strengthen food system resilience. They can facilitate co-ordinated action across food supply chains and establish relationships across sectors that enable quick responses in the event of a food system shock [12].

Co-ordination across sectors and policy portfolios is an important part of a food systems approach to food resilience planning. A range of different models have emerged that promote multi-sector governance for local and regional food systems.

Food system governance models

Recommended external resources

Food partnership structures resource in the Sustainable Food Places Toolkit (UK)

[1] Clapp, J. (2021) The problem with growing corporate concentration and power in the food system. Nature Food 2: 404-408.

[2] Underhill, E. and M. Rimmer (2015) Itinerant Foreign Harvest Workers in Australia: The Impact of Precarious Employment on Occupational Safety and Health. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 13 (2): 25-46.

[3] Jones, N., Bellamy, J., Bellotti, W., Ross, H., van Bommel, S. and Lu, Y. (2022) A shock to the system: What the COVID-19 pandemic reveals about Australia’s food systems and their resilience. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 5: 790694

[4] VAHI (2024) Victorian Population Health Survey 2022. Victorian Agency for Health Information Available: https://vahi.vic.gov.au/reports/victorian-population-health-survey-2022

[5] Department of Health. Victorian public health and wellbeing outcomes dashboard.  Available: https://www.health.vic.gov.au/victorian-public-health-and-wellbeing-outcomes-dashboard

[6] Wood, J., Leech, R. and Margerison, C. (2024) The prevalence of food insecurity amongst refugees and asylum seekers during, and prior to, their early resettlement period in Australia: A cross-sectional analysis of the 'Building a New Life in Australia' data. Appetite 107273. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2024.107273.

[7] Carey, R., Murphy, M. and Behen, T. (2024) Planning a resilient food system for Victoria. The University of Melbourne. https://doi.org/10.46580/124375

[8] Blomkamp, E. (2018) The promise of co-design for public policy. Australian Journal of Public Administration 77 (4), pp. 729-743).

[9] Baxter, K., Kerr, J., Nambiar, S., Gallegos, D., Penny, R., Laws, R. (2024) A design thinking-led approach to develop a responsive feeding intervention for Australian families vulnerable to food insecurity: Eat, Learn, Grow. Health Expectations 27 (2) https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.14051

[10] Walker, C., Schan, H., Devlin, B., Plowman, D. and Wise, M. (2022) Hunger trauma: Understanding experiences of food insecurity and emergency food support. September 2022. University of Brighton.

[11] Hecht, A., Biehl, E., Buzogany, S. and Neff, R. (2018) Using a trauma-informed policy approach to create a resilient urban food system. Public Health Nutrition 21 (10): 1961-1970.

[12] Murphy, M., Carey, R., and Alexandra, L. (2022) The resilience of Melbourne’s food system to climate and pandemic shocks. University of Melbourne, Australia. https://doi.org/10.46580/124370