Case Study
The Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) serves as a platform for systemic innovation, bringing together diverse stakeholders to address food insecurity and sustainability challenges in the region. By facilitating dialogue and experimental interventions, SAFL works to transform food systems through collaboration and adaptive learning.

Aim
The study aims to explore how SAFL fosters transformative change in food systems by acting as a space for emergent change, where narratives, relationships, and practices interact to shape new possibilities. By examining SAFL’s role in facilitating systemic shifts, the research seeks to understand the conditions that enable meaningful change.

Theoretical Framework
Grounded in process-relational perspectives, the study conceptualizes transformative change as an ongoing, dynamic process shaped by intra-actions among actors, materials, and discourses which constitute assemblages. The concept of attractors, such as shared narratives, trust-building processes, institutional norms, and emergent collaborations, may be used to analyze how particular trajectories gain momentum and reconfigure food systems.

Methodological Approach
The study follows a knowledge co-production approach, engaging directly with SAFL participants to theorize from the inside. Through participatory research and collaborative sense-making, the research aims to capture the lived experiences and relational dynamics that drive systemic transformative change.

Research by Anil Singh
Collaborators: The Transmod team