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

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.

Leveraging the potential of wild food for healthy, sustainable, and equitable local food systems: learning from a transformation lab in the Western Cape region

“…Such a process enables dialogue, sense-making, reflection, and reflexive learning, while supporting the reframing of issues in ways that allow solutions (or attempts to experiment and transform) to be co-created and co-realised (Sharpe et al 2016). Hence, the method we used for this process was a transformation lab or T-Lab (Charli-Joseph et al 2018;van Zwanenberg et al 2018;Ely et al 2020;Pereira et al 2020a).…”

“…Furthermore, T-Labs provide experimental niches in which people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, interests, and areas of expertise work together to understand complex systems and the problems they generate, and to identify, co-design, and prototype novel ways of addressing the underlying causes of those problems (Gryszkiewicz et al 2017;Olsson 2017). Therefore, a T-Lab is designed to afford a diverse group the opportunity for deeper engagement around complex issues to foster innovation and transformation within social-ecological systems (Pereira et al 2020a). By building knowledge, networks, and commitment, a T-Lab can help create a collective sense of the need for change (within and beyond the stakeholders directly involved), identify strategies for affecting change, and identify which actors have transformative power (Drimie et al 2018;Pereira et al 2020a).…”

“…Therefore, a T-Lab is designed to afford a diverse group the opportunity for deeper engagement around complex issues to foster innovation and transformation within social-ecological systems (Pereira et al 2020a). By building knowledge, networks, and commitment, a T-Lab can help create a collective sense of the need for change (within and beyond the stakeholders directly involved), identify strategies for affecting change, and identify which actors have transformative power (Drimie et al 2018;Pereira et al 2020a). In this way, the process can develop a change strategy that tests multiple solutions, which together could solve the challenge.…”

“…In essence, the transdisciplinary research approaches implicit in the T-Lab methodology seek to produce transformative knowledge outside academic institutions by forming collaborative partnerships with society (Pereira et al 2021). Previous work has shown that a T-Lab approach can be useful in bringing diverse stakeholders together to think of solutions in the context of food systems (Ely et al 2020;Pathways Network 2021), including the fraught South African food system (Pereira et al 2020a).…”

Co‐exploring relational heuristics for sustainability transitions towards more resilient and just Anthropocene futures

“…Due to interacting feedbacks, it is possible for small interventions or action to have large effects in relation to the dynamics of the system as a whole (or, in other cases, for large changes to have little effect on the overall dynamics of the system) (Nicolis & Nicolis, 2009). This understanding of how systemic changes in CAS happen has direct implications for how we engage with and intervene in SES to effect change (Abson et al, 2017;Pereira et al, 2020).…”