For some, the priority was resilience: keeping supply chains running through droughts, price spikes and political shocks. For others, those same supply chains were the problem and they needed to be transformed. For instance, they wanted a shift towards agroecological farming — working with natural processes instead of chemical inputs, and favouring diverse smallholdings over monocultures. This would have meant changing some of the very structures their partners were trying to protect.

This tension is not a quirk of one initiative. In a recent article, we argue that it is a common challenge for cross-sector partnerships. These are initiatives in which government, private sector and civil society come together to jointly address shared problems. They are the world’s favourite tool for tackling sustainability problems.

The logic is appealing. No single sector can fix food insecurity, water stress or climate change alone, so why not pool resources and act together?

But do they work?

Despite their obvious appeal, partnerships often flounder. One of the difficulties is that many partnerships face a version of the Food Lab’s question: what should be preserved, and what should be changed?

We are scholars who have studied cross-sector partnerships for many years. We are especially interested in how they respond to complex problems like food insecurity.

Two concepts have been central to this work. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb a shock and reorganise while keeping its essential structure and identity. Transformation is about changing that structure, so that the system becomes more just and less ecologically damaging.

The two are bound together because sometimes a system has to change in order to endure. But they can pull in different directions, because resilience emphasises what should be maintained, while transformation is about what must go.

We explore this relationship in our recent paper. It is based on a review of the literature, some of our previous research and case studies, as well as papers we included in the special issue of the journal Business & Society that our article introduces.

Our argument is that partnerships generally emphasise either resilience or transformation, especially if they are focused on a particular scale, such as a small town. Some partnerships do include both ambitions but this often involves focusing on one or the other at different scales or in separate programmes. Truly integrated approaches are rare and difficult.

We describe these common emphases and ambitions below. We then recommend three practices, through which partnerships can proactively manage this relationship between what should stay and what should change.

Common approaches

Our analysis suggests that partnerships tend to follow one of three pathways.

Some emphasise resilience. Take the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, founded in 2004 by the World Wildlife Fund alongside Unilever, the Malaysian Palm Oil Association and other companies. It is now more than 6 000 members strong, including growers, traders, retailers, banks and NGOs. Or the Marine Stewardship Council, founded in 1997 out of talks between the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, which now certifies fisheries with its blue label. Both aim to limit the damage of existing industries and safeguard supplies.

But critics point out that these schemes do little to move the industries away from extractive models. Greenpeace and a coalition of NGOs have gone further, accusing the palm oil roundtable of certifying business as usual.

Other partnerships are more explicitly about transformation. Oxfam, the anti-poverty confederation, works with the Stockholm Environment Institute, a research body. They track the emissions of the very richest individuals, finding that the richest 1% produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 as the five billion people making up the poorest two-thirds of humanity. And then they push for policies that confront the concentrations of wealth and associated environmental impacts.

Partnerships like these tend to meet resistance from the industries and governments whose models they question, and they struggle for funding, precisely because they challenge entrenched interests.

A third group does both, at different scales. For instance, CGIAR, the global agricultural research partnership founded in 1971, helps local communities adapt to climate change while pushing for transformative shifts in global food and trade policy.

That third path is promising, because local resilience and global transformation can feed each other rather than compete. It is also the hardest. What partners agree on at one scale can be unintelligible, or threatening, to people at another. For example, the European Green Deal, the EU’s plan to reach climate neutrality by 2050, set continental ambitions that collided with farmers protesting for their livelihoods and short-term security. Tractors blockaded Brussels in early 2024, and the European Commission rolled back several environmental rules.

What helps

Our review points to three practices that help partnerships hold the tension between what to preserve and what to change rather than be paralysed by it.

First, pay attention. Partnerships may notice social or ecological warning signs late. One study in our collection looked at France’s river basin committees, multi-stakeholder bodies of local officials, water users and state representatives, sometimes nicknamed “water parliaments”. It found they took years to start deliberating about climate change despite some early signals that basin temperatures had already begun to rise. Partnerships need to build in ways of noticing signals early, drawing in researchers and regulators who work at other scales, rather than waiting until the signals are impossible to ignore.

Second, argue honestly. Smoothing over disagreement may enable initial progress, but silencing awkward voices tends to backfire later. Power imbalances inside the partnership need to be named, and where possible rebalanced. The Food Lab is an example. Its convenors found that progress depended on moving beyond polite exchange to a deeper form of dialogue, in which the power imbalances between, say, black small-scale farmers and white corporate managers could be put on the table.

Third, follow through and persevere. It is tempting to harvest easy wins that look good in an annual report, but interventions matter when they match what the partners set out to preserve or change.

Another study in our collection follows a partnership in Milan that set up neighbourhood hubs to get food to people during the Covid-19 crisis. Rather than winding down when the emergency passed, the city, the food banks and private partners built the hubs into a lasting structure for tackling food waste and food insecurity together, and cut the city’s dependence on corporate food donations along the way. An initial emphasis on resilience carried through into an effort towards transformation.

The Food Lab’s argument over supply chains, in other words, was not a failure of partnership. It was the real work, surfacing the underlying differences in partners’ priorities in a dialogue.

The partnerships that will matter over the next decade are the ones willing to have that argument openly, and to decide together what is worth keeping and what must change.

Written by Ralph Hamann, Professor, University of Cape Town; Amelia Clarke, Professor of Sustainability Management, University of Waterloo; Domenico Dentoni, Professor of Business, Resilience, and Transformation, Montpellier Business School; Frank de Bakker, Professor of Business and Society, IÉSEG School of Management, and Martina Linnenluecke, Professor at UTS Business School; Centre for Climate Risk and Resilience, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.