Almost there: On the importance of a comprehensive entrepreneurial ecosystem for developing sustainable urban food forest enterprises

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

Sustainable food forests offer multiple benefits to urban sustainability challenges. Research to date mostly describes structure and services of individual food forests but provides little evidence and guidance for implementation. This study analyzes and evaluates an ongoing, multiyear, transdisciplinary project developing a sustainable urban food forest enterprise in Phoenix, AZ, through a collaboration between researchers and a coalition of nonprofit organizations. Unlike other food forest projects run by nonprofit organizations, this food forest originated as a sustainable enterprise that would provide jobs and livelihood opportunities in an economically marginalized urban area while pursuing social and environmental goals such as providing healthy food and a cooler microclimate. Efforts to date have built a coalition of supporters, secured a suitable site, codeveloped a vision and an action plan, and fundraised a major start-up donation. We evaluate these outcomes against a suite of success factors derived from implementation of other food forests and explain challenges in realizing these factors through the lens of a comprehensive sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem. Data for the accompanying research was collected through direct and participant observations, review of project documents, informal conversations, a stakeholder survey, and research diary reflections. Research findings indicate that despite achieving all the success factors, at least to some extent, the underdeveloped sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem jeopardizes long-term success and multiplication efforts. These findings confirm the importance of a sufficiently developed entrepreneurial ecosystem for successful development of sustainable food enterprises. They offer guidance to food entrepreneurs, urban developers, and city officials on how to develop and support sustainable food forest enterprises.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere20025
JournalUrban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems
Volume7
Issue number1
Number of pages14
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23.02.2022

Bibliographical note

This research was made possible within the graduate school “Processes of Sustainability Transformation,” which is a cooperation between Leuphana University of Lüneburg and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. Stefanie Albrecht gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Robert Bosch Stiftung (12.5.F082.0021.0). Arnim Wiek acknowledges financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (TRANSFORM: Accelerating Sustainability Entrepreneurship Experiments at the Local Scale, 50658‐10029), as well as from the Belmont Forum and the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe (Globally and Locally‐Sustainable Food‐Water‐Energy Innovation in Urban Living Labs (GLOCULL), 730254). We would like to thank our project partners from Spaces of Opportunity, especially John Wann‐Ángeles, Amy Simpson, Darren Chapman, Bruce Babcock, and Sowan Thai for the fruitful collaboration over the past several years. We would like to thank the Sustainable Food Economy (former) lab members Dr. Nigel Forrest, Nicholas Shivka, and Hanna Layton for support in facilitating events and assisting with grant applications; Prof. Daoqin Tong, Jordan Smith, Kevin Carranza, Yueling Li, and Kelly Bitler for GIS support; Sadhbh Jouarez Bourke for facilitation support; Maud Dieminger and Kelly Baur for visual documentation of the project and the research; Jacq Davis and Pamela Mace for the field visit of their forest gardens; and V.H. Lassen Elementary School for hosting project events.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Agronomy and Crop Science Society of America.

DOI

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Explaining the Heterogeneity of the Leadership-Innovation Relationship
  2. Monodominance in tropical forests: modelling reveals emerging clusters and phase transitions
  3. Predictive performance of plant species distribution models depends on species traits
  4. Digital Gazelles: Challenges of Digital Startups during Phases of High Growth
  5. Sensory Engineering
  6. Success Factors for Studying Parallel to Work
  7. Substituting
  8. Multiple
  9. Erprobung und Evaluierung des ine-Portals TELL ME MORE CAMPUS
  10. Zu einer Theorie Allgemeiner Handlungssysteme
  11. Schöpferische Impulse
  12. Bunker-face
  13. Assessing Printability Maps in Additive Manufacturing of Metal Alloys
  14. Lagrangian coherent sets in turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection
  15. Foundations of Management & Entrepreneurship
  16. Sustainability economics – general versus specific, and conceptual versus practical
  17. Digitaler Realismus, zwischen Computeranimation und Live-Action, die neue Bildästhetik in Spielfilmen
  18. Woanders Zuhause
  19. Measuring mathematics teachers’ professional competence by using video clips (COACTIV video)
  20. Evidence-Based Management and Organisational Reality
  21. Institutional Logics as orchestras' strategic dilemma
  22. Agriculture and everyday realities on small farms – An entrepreneurial challenge to farmers between the desire for autonomy and a secure existence. Two examples from east and south-east Poland
  23. Sustainability process assessment on transformative potentials
  24. Kerstin Hensel
  25. Fremdsprachliche Textkompetenz entwickeln
  26. Completion of the OBD- with the OBM-(On-Board-Measurement)-Technology
  27. Public Value
  28. Microstructural investigations of interfaces in short fiber reinforced AlSi12CuMgNi composites
  29. Education on the path to sustainability
  30. Publicly Mediated Inter-Organizational Networks