Urbal: Urban-Driven Innovations for Sustainable Food Systems is an international project that uses participatory research in eight cities to develop and test a holistic methodology to map the impact pathways that go from urban innovations to all dimension of sustainability of food systems.

The Provincial Government of the Western Cape in South Africa released its Household Food and Nutrition Security Strategic Framework in 2016. This document represented a dramatic departure from South African food security policy and programming, calling for explicitly transversal governance approaches to address food security through food system interventions. Not only was the approach within the document novel, but so was the approach to framework development. The strategic framework was extensively workshopped within government and beyond. The government then sought to develop an implementation strategy through a series of facilitated stakeholder engagements.

The work of this Urban Food Innovation Lab (UFILs) will focus on interviewing actors involved in the development of the strategic framework and its implementation plan. These interviews will focus on the rationale for the approach taken by Provincial Government, how principles of sustainability (with a particular focus on the governance sphere) informed the activities of the various stakeholders involved and what the stakeholder think have shaped the successes and limitation of the framework’s implementation. A stakeholder mapping exercise will be conducted on the basis of these interviews and findings from the interviews and mapping will be presented and discussed at the stakeholder workshop. The final output will be a report presenting findings and reflections from the two phases of engagement.