We need to collaborate-but how? Configurations of managerial practices for operationalising global agri-food value-chain collaborations

The global agri-food system exceeds five of the nine planetary boundaries while failing to meet the basic needs of nearly half the world's population. These challenges constitute wicked problems: persistent, multi-causal, and context-dependent, and beyond the reach of any single actor or solution. Addressing them within global agri-food value chains is therefore widely held to require collaboration among heterogeneous actors (e.g., firms, producers, states, and NGOs).
Yet value-chain collaborations (VCCs) are themselves a challenge to enact, and previous
reviews have documented the stress points that strain them far more than what actors do about them. Drawing on an integrative review of 64 peer-reviewed articles across six disciplines, we examine the managerial practices through which actors operationalise VCCs. We first set out a repertoire of practices organised along five modes of action (sharing, connecting, influencing, structuring, and sustaining), spanning both the cooperation and coordination dimensions of collaboration. We then shift the unit of analysis from single practices to their combinations, identifying 39 recurrent combinations that we group into six configurations of practices. These are not mutually exclusive alternatives but combinable building blocks, articulated through a small set of keystone practices whose function changes with the practices they accompany; relational modes anchor almost every configuration, while none draws on all five.
Our findings qualify the recommendation to collaborate: the stress points internal to VCCs
mirror the very properties of the wicked problems collaboration is meant to address. We thereby move the injunction to collaborate from a general prescription to a specified one: six
configurations, each answering an identified cluster of stress points, and each assembled from practices that shift function with their combination. Specifying which configurations respond to which stress points makes collaboration actionable for actors working on the pressures that global agri-food value chains exert on planetary boundaries.