Community empowerment in changing environments: creating value through food security

Methodologies that are locally relevant, empowering and replicable offer a way forward for improved policymaking and efficient resource governance in a globalised landscape of rapid change and scarce resources. Using the principles of equal participation and distribution, this article shows how the use of participatory methods can lead to greater community ownership and cohesion around shared concerns over access to healthy food and sustainable resource use in challenging urban environments. Drawing on contextualised examples from small-scale projects carried out by Charushila, an international environmental design charity, in Venezuela and Palestine, the article presents a co-design approach that puts people in touch with food growing and the reuse of resources to transform open spaces. An analysis of community-led co-production projects in these two contrasting urban environments shows how such processes can contribute to policymaking for longer-term sustainable development in the field of disaster relief and amid political upheaval in low- and middle-income countries.