Holding the in-between: lessons on partnering, trust and adaptive governance from 2025

Stakeholders engaged with potential climate change scenarios and their economic impacts at the PCC’s economic pathways stakeholder engagement workshop held in September 2025. Credit: Lewis Malapane.

Not consensus at all costs: collaboration as an ongoing practice

In many of our stories, we see that our greatest breakthroughs happen in the cracks. These are the moments of tension, uncertainty and imperfect alignment.

The EDP deliberately does not run from discord. As reflected by Anna du Plessis in “Holding the Rift,” about the RISE Africa 2025 festival, as an intermediary we’re encouraged to hold the tension of difference rather than smooth it over by striving for consensus at all costs. Participants reminded us that “simple agreement is not the point … it’s a willingness to stay in the conversation” that makes collaboration effective. This is not just a metaphor — it’s the practice that underpins impactful partnership.

Similarly, when we convened the multi-stakeholder economic scenarios workshop with the Presidential Climate Commission, participants flagged governance, informal sector economies and cross-cutting systems like water as deeply interconnected. These are not neat, linear problems; they demand humility, systems thinking and the capability for navigating disagreement.

The capability to stay in difficult spaces, to reflect and adapt rather than force agreement, is part of what makes the EDP’s practice – and impact – durable long after we step away. 

Grounding collaboration in place and people

A second pattern that threads through our work is how our team roots collaboration in real, place-based relationships rather than top-down policies.

Take the Langa Learning Exchange, where diverse grassroots actors came together to share strategies, voice challenges and imagine joint action to address food insecurity. In that space, trust was built over shared meals, stories and honest reflection; it was not mandated by anyone. That relational centre is now giving rise to the proposed Langa Food Council, a locally rooted, participant-driven platform.

Or look at our work on inclusive recycling in Cape Town, where we partnered with the Recyclers’ Association, Angels Resource Centres and the City of Cape Town to run a waste-sector bootcamp. The outcome wasn’t just business development. It was the strengthening of informal actors, equipping them with business tools, networks and the legitimacy to be true partners in shaping Cape Town’s waste economy.

These are not transactional partnerships — they are rooted in real local economies, and they build ownership among the very people who may be excluded.

The group at the conclusion of the Learning Exchange. Credit: Madeline Bazil

Building governance capability, one platform at a time

The EDP delivers projects that builds partners’ capabilities for adaptive and collaborative governance.

The Zeekoe Catchment Management Forum (Z-CMF) is a standout example. In supporting its formation, we invested deeply in stakeholder mapping, transparent processes, neutral facilitation and continuous reflection. From this, emerged a trusted space in which community members, city government and civil society define shared priorities and hold each other accountable to designing collective action for managing a shared water resource.

Similarly, in the Western Cape Water Supply System water-user platform, the team adopted a relational model: regular quarterly meetings, shared accountability and co-created guiding principles. This platform is a scaffold for governance that delivers real maintenance actions (like clearing canals), long-term planning and trust-based partnership across institutions.

Networks as engines of shared learning and mutual adaptation

Beyond place-based projects, our work this year also underscores the power of learning and support networks to scale and sustain partnerships.

The Social Employment Network (SEN), convened by the EDP, was a finalist for the Institute for Collaborative Working Awards. The SEN is not just a platform for sharing, but a mechanism for embedding adaptive governance. It is designed to weave together government and civil society implementing partners to ensure the Social Employment Fund (SEF) remains a learning, responsive system capable of deep impact in job creation.

Such networks are fundamental to nurturing adaptive ecosystems where learning, trust and governance capabilities can live at the network level, not just within single interventions.

Bridging the macro and the micro

Another thread that binds our work is the way we bridge big-picture futures thinking with grounded action.

The scenarios workshop with the Presidential Climate Commission is a prime example: we brought together diverse stakeholders to imagine multiple possible futures. We explicitly linked these discussion to “no regret” actions, the concrete, feasible steps that governments and institutions can take now that are informed by long-term vision but responsive to current realities. In the same vein, our energy hub project designs resilient facilities and is a test case for how to embed equity in municipal energy strategies.

This capacity to link strategic foresight with real-world implementation makes the work we’re involved with stronger. It means that our partnerships are not reactive but intentionally and proactively designed for resilience.

Participants at the Mpumalanga dialogues shifted from asking what the Just Transition meant for their jobs to exploring the unqiue ways the province could lead a Just Transition at a local level in the country.

Power, legitimacy, and a More Just Transition

As I read through these stories, I’m struck by how much partnering is about legitimacy: enabling the people most affected — whether informal recyclers, community gardeners, residents in underserved wards — to shape the systems that affect them.

This matters deeply in a South African context marked by inequality and mistrust. By centring partnership on outcomes and on processes of power-sharing, the EDP helps unlock more just transitions. These can be in energy or climate change adaptation, water resilience, the local economy, the built environment or safety and wellbeing. Legitimacy must be earned through consistent, transparent and participatory processes. And that is exactly what the EDP’s work in 2025 reflects.

With local government elections on the horizon, four lessons take on new urgency.

1. Adaptive governance matters: Municipalities that can convene, reflect and learn across sectors will be better equipped to respond to climate shocks, inequality and infrastructure crises.
2. Trust is foundational: As voters, residents are legitimising their leaders when they trust that decisions are inclusive, that government is listening and that their voices shape action.
3. Partnership is not charity: Effective development isn’t about government handing down programmes. We need to co-create the solutions we need to see in our municipalities.
4. Institutionalisation is worth aspiring to: As we support long-term structures built on relationships and mutual accountability, we build institutions that outlast electoral cycles rather than isolated projects that fade when leaders change.

A call to deepen the skills needed for the spaces in-between

This year, more than ever, the EDP has learned that its greatest value lies in the in-between. It is in the bridges we build between community and municipal government, between informal workers and formal systems, between today’s urgency and tomorrow’s vision. The work in-between sectors, spaces and stakeholders is where lasting change takes root.

I’m deeply proud of what the EDP has achieved this year and I’m equally aware that the work is far from complete. If South Africa’s democracy and economic development are to thrive beyond the ballot box, we each must commit not only to the strategic partnerships, but also to the often messy, slow, patient work of holding space. Holding truth. Holding tension. Holding each other accountable.

As 2025 draws to a close, I invite our partners in civil society, business and government to lean even more into that work. Let us grow our shared capability for adaptive governance, deepen trust between different sectors and nurture resilient systems that can weather any change.

Because when we tend the spaces in-between, we don’t just build projects. We build possibility.