Food partnerships and the tensions of adaptive governance in local food systems

Local food governance in the UK is increasingly shaped by collaborative, cross-sector arrangements that operate alongside traditional state-led approaches. Among the most prominent are place-based food partnerships which convene diverse actors to develop policy, coordinate action and respond to complex food system challenges. Despite their growing prevalence, food partnerships have not yet been systematically examined through an adaptive governance lens, leaving open questions as to how governance is enacted amid complexity, crisis, and systemic change. This paper addresses this gap by analysing 1,216 documented cases of governance practice recorded by 57 UK-based food partnerships between 2019 and 2024. An interpretive analytical heuristic is developed and applied to examine how adaptive capacities are enacted or constrained in these cases, and how they are shaped by the institutional and relational conditions within which partnerships operate. The analysis shows that food partnerships enact adaptive capacities by acting as connective infrastructures in fragmented governance systems, producing shared direction through norm building and public participation, navigating accountability and disagreement without formal authority, and sustaining coordination under conditions of chronic resource precarity. However, the durability and influence of these practices are constrained by uneven institutional architectures and fragmented pathways for influence. Adaptive work often relied on intensive relational labour and remained episodic, limiting translation into durable governance arrangements and influence over macro-level food system levers. By foregrounding the interplay between relational networks and institutional conditions, the paper shows that adaptive governance emerges as a situated and fragile practice, with its reach and durability contingent on the governance environments in which it is embedded.