Food security in Aotearoa New Zealand: Barriers, strategies, and aspirational conditions for success

INTRODUCTION: This article reports a practice–research partnership that was aimed at co-creating recommendations for sustainable food practices. We explored the barriers, existing strategies, and aspirational conditions for success in food security. METHODS: A co-created practice–research design included six virtual workshops via zoom with 25 local service providers, food growers, and community organisations across five local board areas in Auckland’s North in 2021. A hybrid thematic analysis was used to identify existing barriers and strategies and to explore aspirational community-identified conditions for food security. FINDINGS: Income instability, isolation, and disconnection from soil were highlighted as the main barriers to food security. Participants detailed three existing strategies used to address food insecurity: food security education, social media, and collaborations between food providers. Participants explicated four aspirational conditions for success in food security: access to healthy food, relationships with and through food, closed-loop food systems, and sufficient resources. CONCLUSIONS: A systems change perspective was applied, highlighting the need for relational and structural changes to support community-led ideas that work toward food security, which demand coordinated, collective, and multi-level responses to create conditions for success. We argue that the changes suggested by this partnership will hold value across regions and are crucial to building food-secure communities across Aotearoa New Zealand.