Planning for change: Transformation labs for an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa

Laura Pereira,Olive Zgambo,Scott Drimie,Reinette Biggs

doi:10.1186/s42854-020-00016-8

Abstract

There has been a call for more participatory processes to feed into urban planning for more resilient food systems. This paper describes a process of knowledge co-production for transforming towards an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa. A ‘transformative space’ was created though a T-Lab process involving change-agents advocating for an alternative food system, and was designed to discuss challenges in the local food system from a range of perspectives, in order to co-develop potentially transformative innovations that could feed into government planning. In this paper, we describe and reflect on the T-lab in order to consider whether its design was able to meet its objective: to initiate an experimental phase of coalition-building by diverse actors that could feed into the provincial government’s strategic focus on food and nutrition security. Our findings indicate that T-labs have the potential to be important mechanisms for initiating and sustaining transformative change. They can be complementary to urban planning processes seeking to transform complex social-ecological systems onto more sustainable development pathways. However, as with all experimental co-production processes, there is significant learning and refinement that is necessary to ensure the process can reach its full potential. A key challenge we encountered was how to foster diversity and difference in opinions in the context of significant historical legacies of inequality, whilst simultaneously acting for ‘the common good’ and seeking ways to scale impact across different contexts. The paper concludes with deliberations on the nature of planning and navigating towards systemic transformative change.

Highlights

Cities are hot spots of change in the Anthropocene and are critical areas for engaging with sustainability transformations (McPhearson et al 2016)
Drawing on the Western Cape context, we propose that the following are some of the conditions under which a Transformation Lab (T-lab) may be an effective intervention: 1. There is a complex social-ecological system (SES) challenge to address 2
By focusing on two of the five thematic propositions put forward by Zgambo et al (2018)- looking at diversity (2) and action-oriented outcomes (3)- it is possible to see how these reflections on methods and outcomes connect to the more theoretical descriptions of T-lab processes as transdisciplinary sustainability research

Summary

Introduction

Cities are hot spots of change in the Anthropocene and are critical areas for engaging with sustainability transformations (McPhearson et al 2016). Sustainability transformations and T-labs A departure from current food system dynamics towards more sustainable urban food systems requires radical transformation (Bennett et al 2016; Pereira et al 2019a; Willett et al 2019) Such a process of transformation would entail deep systemic changes to existing ecological, social, economic or political conditions (Olsson and Galaz 2012; Folke et al 2014; Ely and Marin 2016). The concept of ‘transformative spaces’ is defined as ‘“safe-enough” collaborative environments where actors invested in transformation can experiment with new mental models, ideas, and practices that can help shift social-ecological systems onto alternative development pathways [ ...] they allow and enable dialogue, reflection, and reflexive learning, while reframing issues in ways that allow solutions to be co-created and co-realized’ (Pereira et al 2018b: 2). By focusing on two of the five thematic propositions put forward by Zgambo et al (2018)- looking at diversity (2) and action-oriented outcomes (3)- it is possible to see how these reflections on methods and outcomes connect to the more theoretical descriptions of T-lab processes as transdisciplinary sustainability research

Methods

Findings

Objective