Understanding Boundary Judgment Dilemmas in Global Food Security Projects

Project Description

Not only are food systems highly complex in themselves (with massive interconnectedness and multiple stakeholder perspectives), but food security and resilience issues also interact with other economic, social and environmental concerns. Making boundary judgments on the remit of research in such circumstances is fraught with difficulties: the need for a pragmatic research focus that can deliver outputs and impacts needs to be balanced against the concerns of different potential stakeholders who might see the desirable boundaries of the project differently from the researchers and each other. Indeed, a stakeholder who believes they will be affected by the outcomes of a research project, but has their concerns marginalized or excluded, may create conflict over the research, and could even significantly undermine it. This makes the legitimacy of boundary judgments in the global food security (GFS) projects very important: all boundary judgments bring dilemmas to be addressed, but if the rationales for making those judgments are made transparent, and are widely perceived as fair, then cross-stakeholder collaboration can be enhanced, and conflicts with negative impacts can be minimized. The focus of this proposal is therefore a preliminary piece of research on the kinds of boundary dilemmas facing the 10 existing GFS projects: what stakeholders to include/exclude, both as end users and influencers of the research; what issues to include/exclude in the research remit; and what timeframe to consider in the context of the resilience of food systems. Once we know the nature of the boundary dilemmas, we will be in a good position to design a future project to support the teams to address them in a manner that enhances research impacts.