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Exploring the governance of wicked problems: insights from South Africa's Breede Valley urban food system
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DOI：10.1080/1523908X.2025.2577214.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Urban food insecurity is increasingly framed as a wicked problem, yet governance responses often rely on normative ideals of coordination and participation, overlooking how historical dispossession, market dependence, and informal authority constrain adaptive action. This article examines food system governance in Breede Valley Municipality, a South African secondary city marked by decentralization without devolution and structural fragmentation. Using the governance capabilities framework – reflexivity, responsiveness, resilience, revitalization, and rescaling – and drawing on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the study explores how governance capabilities are shaped by unequal access to land and water, entrenched agribusiness interests, and contested decision-making spaces. The findings extend the governance capabilities approach by emphasizing its political, relational, and context-dependent nature. The study contributes to wicked problem governance debates by reframing capabilities as relational and political practices shaped by historical dispossession, coalition dynamics, and institutional legacies, and showing that capabilities emerge not from institutional design alone.
Keywords:
Wicked problems
urban food systems
climate change
governance capabilities
South Africa
Journal
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677
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