Increasing the Effectiveness of Rural, Regional and Remote Food Security Initiatives Through Place‐Based Partnerships—A Qualitative Study

ABSTRACT

Issue Addressed

This work aimed to understand the ways in which local organisations were working in partnership to support food security action in rural, regional, and remote areas.

Methods

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 101 food security initiative leaders, representing 148 food initiatives within Australia's largest state, Western Australia (WA). A thematic analysis was undertaken using NVivo that indicated a total of 378 partnering organisations worked on the food security initiatives.

Results

Organisations partnered to address food security in their regions through coordinated action; community consultation; food/financial donations; funding and grants; on‐ground programme and service delivery and physical and human resources. Initiatives need to be documented, where appropriate, in formal partnership agreements to increase the sustainability of initiatives yet allow for some adaptability to respond to the changing nature of wicked issues such as food security.

Conclusion

This study's findings increase understanding about how rural, regional, and remote Australian organisations are collaborating to drive food security action and identify areas where partnerships could be enhanced to maximise impact on food security. Although this study was undertaken in WA, the recommendations are relevant to all rural, regional, and remote food security initiatives and include helping organisations to identify clear partnership purposes, partner roles, and actions.

So What?

Providing a qualitative analysis of food security partnerships offers insight into the nature, purpose, and experiential phenomena of these partnerships, to determine what, how and why organisations work together.

1. Introduction

Partnerships are an agreement to work together [1], combining strengths and capabilities to achieve a shared goal [2]. The resulting impact is greater than each individual endeavour and includes shared responsibilities, risks and successes, and a longer‐term purpose. Partnerships are essential for the combination of expertise and insights, the testing of early ideas, development of appropriate responses to complex issues, understanding and addressing of barriers to equitable opportunities and valuing of lived experience in decision‐making [2]. The word ‘community’ used here in this paper, alludes to both ‘community organisation’ and ‘place’. While government‐community partnerships have the potential to increase community engagement, increase the likelihood of meeting policy objectives [3], and foster social cohesion [4], ‘vertical’ or ‘top‐down’ structures can result in power imbalances [5], and lack consideration of contextual opportunities and issues [6]. Multi‐agency partnerships target funding and specific criteria on overarching themes (e.g., ‘healthy communities’) within a geographic location. ‘Horizontal’ partnerships between service providers commonly focus on meeting community need and sharing resources [5], thereby placing less of a burden on any one organisation [7]. They also have broad welfare goals, such as ‘increasing wellbeing’ or ‘reducing health inequalities’ [8]. Successful partnerships harness respective strengths across sectors and ‘organisational boundaries’ [6], account for constraints and include a mutual respect for each partner's organisational culture. Involving community from the outset, adopting a knowledge‐based approach guided by evidence, adequately funding the work, including participatory decision‐making, flexibility to meet community needs, outlining clear roles and accountabilities and ensuring the partnership is mutually beneficial [4] are essential elements. Government‐community partnerships are, particularly beneficial in circumstances where complex, ‘wicked’ issues, exist. Such partnerships can increase understanding of a multifaceted issue that cannot be addressed by one sector alone, lack clear solutions and ‘require a whole of government or whole of community response’ [6]. Further, collaboration is vital where behavioural change is needed to solve wicked issues [7].

An example of a complex, wicked issue is food security, which is defined as regular and reliable access to safe, nutritious and culturally‐appropriate food at all times [9]. It has many interconnected and interdependent causal factors, including food availability, food affordability, distance and transport to food outlets, nutrition knowledge, climatic events, agency over food and sustainable food production [10]. Food security is also constantly adapting, is unpredictable, and is the subject of social policy [11]. An ideal approach that utilises partnerships to address complex issues like food security includes place‐based approaches. They involve cross‐sectoral partnerships to develop and implement actions to address an issue [5, 6]. Place‐based approaches can provide communities with shared decision‐making opportunities and increase understanding about how systems can bring together different stakeholders and enact change [6]. Activities may involve the creation of networks, recognising service provision gaps, advocacy for social policy changes [5] or new governance. While a large body of evidence outlines partnership definitions, attributes of successful partnerships and potential pitfalls, the current evidence gaps relate to the connectivity between place‐based organisations delivering food security initiatives.

Western Australia (WA) experiences diverse food security issues, particularly, in rural, regional, and remote areas (Figure 1). Accounting for one‐third of Australia's landmass [12], WA has a plethora of food security challenges including a lack of food affordability and high food prices [13, 14, 15], suboptimal food quality [13], low food variety [10] and food transportation disruptions [10] that impact communities. Food security is increasingly challenging to maintain for people living in rural, regional, and remote areas [14], migrants [16], young adults [14], low‐income earners [17], people who are divorced or separated [17] and people with a disability [14]. Food security has come under the spotlight in recent years, with the COVID‐19 pandemic illuminating the fragility of Australian supply chains [14, 15]. While a good understanding of the food security issues facing many Australian communities has been established, there is a lack of understanding of the role that partnerships play in supporting food security action in rural, regional, and/or remote areas. In particular, the specific details of processes used among Australian food security collaborators are largely unknown [18]. Given previous research has identified that many regional service providers identify they are working under difficult conditions and are unable to obtain adequate support or recognition from within their organisation or from external partners [19, 20], expanding the knowledge base in this area would assist in identifying needs for targeted funding and collaborations. In regions or parts of regions, it would be beneficial to identify how food security initiatives could be strengthened through increased or improved collaboration, in addition to identifying challenges and solutions.

FIGURE 1.

Map of the WA regions, (Adapted from REMPLAN MapBuilder).

A Systemic Innovation Lab approach [21] identifies all initiatives addressing any of the causal factors of a wicked issue, and the partnering organisations delivering these initiatives [11]. The approach includes nine evidence‐based Focus Areas (FAs) [21] which assist researchers and practitioners in identifying aspects of initiatives that need strengthening. The first five FAs relate to the adaptive capacity of communities, and the remaining four relate to government–community organisation connection. This increases understanding of how organisations delivering food security initiatives, in partnership with others within their network, are contributing to systems change. It also includes the identification of a partnership network to understand which partners are working on the issue, and how they are collaborating to do so. This approach is beneficial, as it identifies diverse stakeholders involved in addressing the determinants of a wicked issue [22], supports networked governance and self‐organisation principles [23]. Partnership network typologies, and the understanding of how initiatives possess systems change characteristics relating to the FAs, are addressed by separate papers. As such, this study aimed to understand and describe the ways in which rural, regional, and remote organisations were working in partnership to support food security action across the WA regions. This study used a mixed‐method approach. This article reports on the qualitative results, with the quantitative data reported elsewhere. Providing analysis around this qualitative work offers insight into the nature, purpose, and experiential phenomena in food security to determine what, how, and why.

2. Methods

2.1. Recruitment

Potential participants were identified as those people facilitating a food‐based initiative in rural, regional, and remote WA that was addressing any of the determinants of food security outlined in a framework that provided a visual representation of individual food security determinants (e.g., nutrition knowledge and cooking skills), based on existing evidence [24, 25]. Potential participants' details were recorded in databases for each region and included the food initiative name, description, contact details, facilitating organisation, an organisation description, sector (e.g., not‐for‐profit) and a web address for the organisation. Three hundred and twenty‐one initiatives were identified across the Kimberley, Pilbara, Goldfields, Midwest, Wheatbelt and Great Southern regions. Participants were invited by direct email which included a study overview, Participant Information Letter and Consent Form. All participants provided written consent to participate in this work.

2.2. Interview Guide

A qualitative, semi‐structured interview guide containing 40 questions was developed by the project team (see Data S1). Questions included initiative information (e.g., start date), a question about partner organisations working on the initiative and their role and systems change components which are the focus of other publications. Interview questions relating to systems change aspects have been reported elsewhere. The interview question presented below related to how organisations were partnering with others in their region. Interviews were conducted over Microsoft Teams or by telephone.

2.3. Data Collection

During interviews, participants provided a brief description of the food security initiative, the period in operation (if ceased) and ‘who else is involved?.’ This enabled an understanding of which partner organisations supported the facilitation of the initiatives and discussion allowed for information about the nature of partner organisation involvement. The remaining questions probed interviewees about whether their initiative possessed systems change characteristics [21, 26]. Interviews were conducted between December 2022 and November 2023, and interviews were on average, 60 min long but ranged from 24 to 105 minut.

2.4. Data Analysis

The interview transcripts were initially generated from Microsoft Teams ‘record and transcribe’ function. To ensure qualitative reliability of these data, each transcript was checked and ‘cleaned’ by team members, using a 10‐step protocol that included comparing recordings and transcripts to update incorrectly transcribed words. Date stamps and any identifying information were removed. Interviews were analysed thematically using NVivo 13 [27], following a data analysis protocol based on Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis process [28] to ensure consistent coding. A coding frame was developed and added to throughout the coding process to ensure systematic data analysis [29, 30]. Team members read each transcript, and created memos that noted key points. Strategies to support qualitative validity of these data included coding being undertaken by three team members, who had completed Lumivero (producers of NVivo software) training using the current version of NVivo (also a reliability strategy). This increased trustworthiness in the coding and provided data triangulation [30]. Numerous child nodes were initially created, with prominent categories subsequently identified when child nodes were consolidated. Across the dataset, nodes were cross‐checked by team members, coding stripes turned on to examine coding similarities and differences, which supported a thorough, systematic analysis of the data. Peer debriefing was conducted through team meetings to refine codes (also a reliability strategy) [29, 30]. Saturation was determined when no new ideas were identified across transcripts.

3. Results

3.1. Organisations

Ninety‐four interviews were undertaken with 101 participants, across the Kimberley, Pilbara, Goldfields, Midwest, Wheatbelt and Great Southern regions. Fifty per cent (n = 51) of interviewees were in coordinator/programme coordinator/project manager roles, while almost one‐quarter (24%, n = 24) were in CEO or President roles and 21% (n = 21) were in health professional roles. There were also three business owners (3%), one volunteer and one tertiary education professional interviewed.

A total of 378 partnering organisations were working on 148 rural, regional, or remote food security initiatives in this study. These initiatives included 17 community gardens/food swapping groups (11%); 44 emergency food relief and community programmes (30%); 57 food literacy and health promotion initiatives (39%); 5 policies or strategic plans (3%); 18 businesses, networks and alliances (12%) and 7 farmers' markets and food events (5%).

Table 1 provides an overview of the participant organisations in this study: The Kimberley region, which covers one‐sixth of WA's landmass and is twice the size of Victoria [31], had the highest number of food security initiatives led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander‐led organisations, educational institutions, state government and not‐for‐profit organisations. The Great Southern region, which is much smaller than the Kimberley but has almost five times the population [32], had the largest number of partnering organisations (n = 77).

TABLE 1.

Stakeholders partnering on place‐based approaches in rural, regional, and remote WA.

WA regions	Wheatbelt, n (%)	Midwest, n (%)	Goldfields, n (%)	Pilbara, n (%)	Kimberley, n (%)	Great southern, n (%)	Total, n (%)
Stakeholder types
Aboriginal controlled health organisation, corporation or traditional owner‐led organisation	0 (0)	3 (14)	2 (9)	2 (9)	15 (68)	0 (0)	22 (100)
Business	11 (22)	7 (14)	3 (6)	10 (20)	3 (6)	17 (33)	51 (100)
Education	1 (6)	4 (25)	3 (19)	1 (6)	5 (31)	2 (13)	16 (100)
Federal government	1 (7)	5 (36)	0 (0)	1 (7)	3 (21)	4 (29)	14 (100)
State government	6 (13)	9 (19)	8 (17)	6 (13)	10 (21)	8 (17)	47 (100)
Local government	5 (31)	1 (6)	2 (13)	2 (13)	2 (13)	4 (25)	16 (100)
Community group	6 (35)	3 (18)	1 (6)	2 (12)	0 (0)	5 (29)	17 (100)
Non‐government or not‐for‐profit organisations	32 (17)	26 (14)	26 (14)	31 (16)	37 (20)	36 (19)	188 (100)
Social enterprise	1 (14)	2 (29)	1 (14)	1 (14)	1 (14)	1 (14)	7 (100)
Total partnering organisations	63 (17)	60 (16)	46 (12)	56 (15)	76 (20)	77 (20)	378 (100)

3.2. The Nature of Regional Food Security Partnerships

Participants articulated the nature of their partnerships to facilitate their regional food security initiatives, with responses visually depicted in Figure 2.

FIGURE 2.

The ways in which rural, regional, and remote initiatives partnered to support food security.

Common themes across the 148 food security initiatives are now examined under themes. These findings are further explored below.

3.2.1. Collaboration, Coordinated Action and Capacity Building (22 Coded Statements)

Most partnerships were able to build capacity and strengthen coordinated action towards shared food security outcomes. They were largely horizontal, focusing on local community issues. Several initiative leaders collaborated with other organisations working in the same field or geographic location to coordinate service delivery and initiative implementation. Only one food security initiative described a formal multi‐agency collaboration between not‐for‐profit, state government, and federal government organisations, which met quarterly to coordinate activities outlined in their joint action plan. In some regions, not‐for‐profit organisations and businesses coordinated food relief delivery to reduce service duplication, for example:

We certainly collaborate with other service providers who we know are providing food as well and making sure that we're not … doubling up on delivery and we're complementing existing services … they [a local organisation] provide a calendar of different activities each week and that shows who's providing food. (Pilbara interviewee, non‐government organisation)

Larger urban based not‐for‐profit organisations often collaborated with rural, regional and remote initiatives to build local capacity. For example, a Perth‐based organisation partnered with a rural initiative to increase food relief reach and cross‐promotion through social media avenues reinforced shared messaging. Some regional agencies partnered with others to boost their own credibility, while others shared referral forms across several other region‐based agencies, to better fulfil client needs.

3.2.2. Funding and Grants for Program Delivery (18 Coded Statements)

Rural, regional, and remote initiative leaders described the importance of receiving funding and grants to support local programme delivery. Many received funding from multiple organisations at the same time, including local, state and federal government organisations and businesses. To increase grant success, initiatives' work was aligned with the prospective funding organisation's key messages and strategic plans to strengthen the link between the funding bodies' vision for the future and the policy decisions and resource allocations that guided the food security initiative. Some initiative leaders described their funding partnerships occurring seasonally or within specific time frames to meet local needs. For example, an initiative leader in the Great Southern collaborated with surrounding organisations during the Christmas season to support the increased demand for food relief:

They can't afford to do much at Christmas so they give us $500.00 and we spend it for them … on our hampers. (Great Southern interviewee, non‐government organisation)

In some regions, funding for programmes such as cooking workshops and food events was used to enable community members to engage, learn and participate for free:

… we source the funding to pay for the ingredients so that community members who are participating … are not out of pocket themselves, but also, we make the event free for other people to attend so it's about accessibility and ensuring that people on low incomes can participate in the events. (Goldfields interviewee, non‐government organisation)

3.2.3. Physical and Human Resources (18 Coded Statements)

Initiative leaders regularly shared physical and human resources, which are necessary in rural, regional, and remote areas due to high staff turnover, fewer resources and competing demands. For example, in one region, local organisations were brought together to partner on disaster responses, while others coordinated efforts and jointly identified community needs. Due to scarce resources, food security initiatives often had to rely on volunteers such as is explained below:

People from corporate resources companies … bring in volunteers where the workers actually get paid … they turn up at the garden and do lots of the heavy lifting kind of work … this year we had them dig up the garden at the beginning of the season, put some new soil in and planted a whole lot of new plants in one day. (Pilbara interviewee, non‐government organisation)

Building facilities and cooking equipment were frequently shared across the regions to implement food security initiatives to ensure equitable provision of services to rural communities and reduce the costs associated with providing food security initiatives in areas of dispersed population:

It will usually be in schools or … public spaces, if there's, you know, barbecues and things like that. (Kimberley interviewee, non‐government organisation)

Some partnerships included the sharing of human resources such as specialist staff including nutritionists and chefs between initiatives as attracting and retaining skilled and professional staff in regional locations in Australia is challenging [33, 34]. One example showed several organisations partnering with their local TAFE to bring students and chefs together at food festivals, supporting hands‐on learning opportunities and cross‐fertilisation of ideas. Others utilised staff across initiatives:

It's facilitated by a child health nurse … on occasion [it] will be co‐facilitated with one of our dietitians as well … (Goldfields interviewee, State Government)

3.2.4. On‐Ground Program and Service Delivery (17 Coded Statements)

Food security initiatives were often joined‐up to support on‐ground programme delivery, particularly, for nutrition education programmes, cooking sessions and food‐growing workshops. Strategies included advocacy, shared messaging and shared programme delivery, as demonstrated below:

Often I'll link in the public health nutritionist to run some workshops or … events. (Kimberley interviewee, non‐government organisation)

Other initiative leaders reported collaborating with local organisations to ensure programmes were culturally appropriate, whereas others partnered with local services such as prisons to deliver educational programmes such as food growing training to ‘improve self‐sufficiency’.

3.2.5. Food and Financial Donations (13 Coded Statements)

Various food relief initiatives received food donations from larger not‐for‐profits and supermarkets. In one region, a local government partnered with a not‐for‐profit organisation to redistribute excess produce to community members. Another reported receiving funds from their overarching organisation to meet client and community needs in relation to food security. In many cases, organisations received financial support or ‘donations’ from local businesses, sponsors, community members and larger organisations with shared values and goals, building local partnerships:

We have a corporate partnership … they give us our financial donation every year to help our running costs of the organisation. Lots of grower partners and obviously just larger donators … just gave us a heap of money to update one of our freezers. (Great Southern interviewee, non‐government organisation)

Many not‐for‐profit organisations described their reliance on donations or internal group ‘fundraising’ in collaboration with national bodies to support service delivery, for example, in delivering food relief programmes:

We are not‐for‐profit association, incorporated association … we rely on memberships, we rely on donations and sponsors and there's a big, long list of all of those people … (Kimberley interviewee, non‐government organisation)

3.2.6. Community Consultation and Involvement (6 Coded Statements)

Community members often played integral roles as volunteers in the design and/or delivery of services. One regional initiative leader described the structure of their organisation as being ‘governed by a committee’ and reliant on ‘about 40 volunteers’ due to the lack of other partnerships or funding opportunities. Initiative leaders consulted community members to inform activities and/or sought their representation on committees. The following two quotes exemplify how partnerships with local communities were fundamental to some initiatives, for example:

Very community‐driven … we have very strong and regular interface with our members and the community … we talk with our Elders and members every day … (Pilbara interviewee, non‐government organisation).

We design our program based on what community want … it's a codesign model as we approach new communities but … we're very responsive as to how we develop that partnership. (Midwest interviewee, non‐government organisation)

4. Discussion

This paper aimed to understand how organisations were working in partnership to support food security in rural, regional, and remote areas. It is one of the first regional food security studies to undertake a comprehensive investigation into partnership activities. The place‐based approach adopted in this study, which acknowledges geographical differences by focusing on regions of WA, is comparable with a ‘territorial’ perspective that has been applied to food systems in South Africa. It is proposed that a territorial perspective addressing place‐based issues and their solutions can better capture the realities and dynamics of specific spaces. This approach holds potential to build capacity, enhance connections among stakeholders, and strengthen the flow of information across a system [35]. A total of 378 partnering organisations were working on 148 food security initiatives across the regions included in this study. Key findings resonate with previous research that has identified that many joint efforts in this research were built on the premise that no one individual organisation or sector has the sole responsibility or capacity for improving food security [36]. Through collaborative partnerships, many of the challenges observed in regional areas, such as making best use of available resources, skills, funding and aligned objectives, were overcome and resulted in more sustainable advancements in local food security initiatives.

More specifically, this study indicated that most partner organisations demonstrated similarities and differences in a range of dimensions: the sectors they represent, the nature of the collaboration, and the resources they bring and seek, engaging with community. Regarding sector representation, most partners were non‐government or not‐for‐profit organisations. Partnerships were either horizontal, multi‐agency partnerships between service delivery organisations or vertical partnerships between government and community agencies, most often associated with funding for service delivery. Interviewees described partners from social services, Aboriginal service sectors, health disciplines, government, and education. Estacio et al. underscored the value of including diverse partners to achieve health promotion goals; researchers advised on evaluation best practice, and practitioners integrated strategies to increase participation rates [8]. As with initiatives captured in this study, the diverse mix of stakeholders contributes to a rich ‘knowledge bank’ from which to inform initiatives. Further, using existing organisation staff was reported to expedite the response to food security issues, as they can build on existing capacity [37].

Results show that rural, regional, and remote initiative leaders collaborated in similar ways to those described in previous studies, with a key finding being fewer formal partnership agreements and relational and informal ways of working between organisation staff. The main activities organisations were partnering on to deliver food security initiatives included coordinated action; funding and grants; physical and human resources; on‐ground programme and service delivery; food/financial donations and community consultation. Many researchers have reinforced these informal methods of partnering, including word‐of‐mouth information sharing, data sharing, collaborative funding, and joint referral systems for food relief in the United States [38, 39] and Australia [40]. The findings of this study found that several regional food security initiatives used a referral system that linked to other local service providers to better meet the range of community needs, based on the information their records contained. This process is also likely to provide more efficient and effective service delivery for communities [38]. While findings in this study described the importance of informal partnerships, it was apparent that organisations still had clear roles, boundaries, and rules within their scope of work. Several studies over the past 15 years corroborate these as key partnership success factors [41]. Partnerships described in this study largely appeared to be agile and were adapted to reflect emergent community needs. Such attributes, like ‘fluidity’, have been considered key to success in the international literature [41].

Few initiative leaders in the present study reported formal agreements with other service delivery agencies, beyond funding contracts. These contracts were largely ‘transactional’ in nature, with government purchasing services from the recipient organisations [42]. Many partners aligned their work with local government policies, to increase the chance of funding success, often obtained from multiple funding sources. This is often a necessity in rural, regional, and remote areas but highlights the potential for organisations to provide a tangible ‘joined up’ delivery route for local strategic partnerships, thereby maximising their contribution to local food security initiatives. These findings also echo those of Pollard et al. who reported ‘ad hoc’ funding from ‘corporate and private donations, sponsorships and government grants’ [43] among charitable food organisations. An approach to address this ad hoc funding is required to reduce the substantial burden on organisations to source and acquit such funding, such as more government investment. Broader Australian evidence suggested that rural organisations share resources and services out of necessity, due to their own scant resources and capacity [40]. Overall, initiative leaders in this study largely collaborated through informal partnerships with other organisations, except for financially driven interactions.

Although not a new finding, it is important to note that meeting community need and sharing resources were key success criteria for partnerships in this study. These findings reinforce that joint efforts are built on the premise that no individual organisation or sector has the sole responsibility or capacity for improving food security. They also reflect much of the literature that shows partnerships create leverage through the sharing of resources, skills, reputation, credibility, funds, programme reach to support social innovation, social return on investment in food security initiatives [36, 44].

While existing international evidence provides a rich understanding of partnership activities and motivations in the health and social services sectors, Australian evidence is scant. As such, this study provided novel insights into the ways in which rural, regional, and remote WA organisations partner to apply ‘fit for purpose’ [41] responses to food security issues in their region. Overall, the participants described largely informal ways of collaborating to support food security action in their regions. Personal relationships have been suggested to initiate partnerships [40], and require substantial dedication and commitment to maintain [41]. However, underpinning food security initiatives with highly relational partnerships is a substantial risk due to issues with staff retention in regional and remote Australia [33]. This approach could potentially undermine initiatives' sustainability and effectiveness, and impede progress on food security action, as staff retention is a common issue. Previous Australian evidence asserted that in order to be effective, collaboration must be adequately resourced, over a long period of time [41]. Of concern is whether participating organisations have adequate resourcing for partnerships, beyond their immediate service delivery remit. A recommendation from this work includes organisations identifying clear partnership purposes, partner roles, and actions and document them, where appropriate, in formal partnership agreements to increase the sustainability of initiatives. However, formal documents should allow for some adaptability [41] to respond to the changing nature of wicked issues. This formality is necessary as food security is recognised as exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity in that it involves a wide diversity of interdependent actors and institutions whose actions contribute to a larger, dynamic system and can create challenges in pinpointing causality [45], making partnerships critical. A resource that organisations could use to examine, inform and formalise their partnerships is the Partnerships Analysis Tool [46]. This resource facilitates an exploration of the need and nature of partnerships and identifies whether key features of successful partnerships are already embedded in a partnership. It also prompts reflection of additional attributes that may be required for successful and sustainable partnerships.

A strength of this study was the inclusion of 94 interviews with regional organisation representatives spanning government, not‐for‐profit organisations, businesses, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander‐led organisations, social enterprises and community groups. This provided a diverse range of perspectives relating to partnerships. The in‐depth interviews provided the ‘why’ and ‘how’ about organisations collaborating to support food security in their region and were able to delve deeper into the nature of partnerships beyond the visualisation of the networks. Limitations included explicit questions about barriers to partnering in each region. This insight would have uncovered more potential opportunities for intervention to better support organisations to link up and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the partnership work. Additional limitations included that an examination of how the partnerships were influencing food insecurity and its determinants, and whether specific partnerships were more effective than others, was beyond the scope of this study.

5. Conclusion

Partnerships are essential to bring together strengths and capabilities to achieve a shared goal. The current study has provided an in‐depth understanding of how rural, regional, and remote organisations are enacting partnerships to support food security in a state jurisdiction. The main activities organisations were partnering on to deliver food security initiatives included coordinated action; funding and grants; physical and human resources; on‐ground programme and service delivery; food/financial donations and community consultation. Few formal partnership agreements were in place; there were mostly relational and informal ways of working between organisation staff. However, organisations still had clear roles, boundaries and rules within their scope of work. Increasingly, the health sector at all levels will be called upon to play a motivational and brokerage role for new types of partnerships to promote food security in regional areas, including providing support with the management of regional partnerships and providing sufficient resources. Only then will improvement in the management of partnerships be able to create resilient and sustainable partnerships between organisations in rural, regional, and remote areas, leading to enhanced food security action.

Ethics Statement

This project was approved by the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee (2022‐03358‐GODRICH) and the WA Country Health Service, Human Research Ethics Committee. The study conforms to the Declaration of Helsinki.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Supporting information

Data S1.Supporting Information.

Data Availability Statement

Research data are not shared.