What inclusive food governance looks like in practice: reflections from FoodCLIC’s African cities

Food is often framed as a national issue, shaped by agricultural policy, trade agreements, or global markets. But for most people, food is experienced locally. It is accessed through informal markets and supermarkets, along public transport routes and street corners, in school feeding schemes and waste systems. In practice, cities and their surroundings play a significant role in shaping how food is produced, distributed, accessed, and consumed. This is particularly true in African cities, where urban populations are growing rapidly due to both population growth and rural–urban migration. As cities expand, they increasingly influence what food is available, how affordable it is, and who benefits from food-related livelihoods.

Yet despite this growing influence, food governance is rarely located at city level. Responsibility is usually spread across multiple municipal departments with no single “home” for food. This fragmentation creates both challenges and opportunities. It is within this space that FoodCLIC has offered a useful way of thinking differently about how cities can engage with food by strengthening coordination, inclusion, and shared understanding across existing systems. ICLEI Africa coordinates the FoodCLIC work in the African Broadening city-regions: Ebolowa, Cameroon; Fort Portal Tourism City, Uganda; and eThekwini Municipality, South Africa. This role addresses a specific outcome: supporting city-regions to co-develop food strategies that reflect their realities, priorities, and constraints. At the heart of FoodCLIC is a framework built around four core values, the ‘CLICs’: connectivity, inclusiveness, linkages, and co-benefits. In simple terms, this means recognising that food systems are made up of many interconnected parts; actively involving different voices, knowledges, and experiences.

In the African Broadening city-regions, the framework was applied through a series of facilitated workshops designed to be iterative and participatory rather than extractive or one-off. The first workshop in each city focused on building a shared understanding of the local food system. Participants drawn from local government, civil society, academia, and other food system actors worked together to identify key food-related challenges, map existing initiatives and policies, and explore where efforts overlapped or where gaps were emerging. This shifted inclusion from an abstract principle to a practical concern. The second workshop marked an important transition in the process: from understanding the system to collectively imagining its future. This phase focused on co-developing a shared vision for the city-region’s food system. Rather than presenting participants with a draft vision to comment on, the process was deliberately creative and collaborative. Working in mixed groups, participants used visuals cut from magazines and newspapers to express what a desirable future food system might look and feel like in their city.

These visual collages became prompts for discussion, storytelling, and debate. The different groups presented their visions, with a sense of friendly competition emerging between them. At the same time, the diversity of perspectives within each group meant that no single narrative dominated the process.

From these group visions, common themes and priorities were identified and distilled into one or two broader vision statements. Across the cities, a consistent reflection emerged: while the final vision statement is important, the process of co-defining it was even more valuable. The second and third workshops continued this iterative approach, returning again to questions of representation and inclusion. What inclusive governance looked like in practice varied across contexts. Each city brought its own institutional arrangements, relationships, and histories into the process. These differences were not a weakness of the methodology; they were a reminder that inclusive governance should be shaped by local realities. Several lessons stood out:

• Inclusion needs to be actively designed, revisited, and resourced.

• The value of the process lies in the relationships and shared understanding built along the way.

• Making cities’ role in shaping food systems visible is a crucial step towards more coherent governance.

• Frameworks are most useful when they leave room for adaptation.

As the African Broadening city-regions move towards finalising their food strategies, the importance of inclusive, participatory governance becomes increasingly clear. These processes do not remove complexity, but they help cities work with it more consciously and collaboratively.

This article was written by Tashi Piprek from FoodCLIC partner ICLEI Africa

Publishing date: 2 March 2026