The study examined the SALIENT consortium, a UK research programme funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, with additional support from the government’s Evaluation Accelerator Fund, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency. SALIENT’s ambition was explicitly translational: rather than conducting research in isolation and hoping policymakers would eventually take notice, the consortium set out to co-design, implement and evaluate public-facing food system interventions with government partners and food system stakeholders, targeting improvements in both health and sustainability while maintaining affordability and commercial viability. In total, forty organisations engaged with the consortium, and eight of those progressed far enough to deliver and evaluate a combined ten interventions.

To understand how and why this engagement process worked for some organisations and faltered for others, the research team, led by Sarah Shaw of the University of Cambridge’s MRC Epidemiology Unit and the University of Southampton, together with colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Liverpool and the University of Oxford, conducted a qualitative evaluation grounded in theory-based evaluation principles. The methodological approach is worth unpacking. Rather than simply asking participants whether they enjoyed the collaboration, the evaluators first constructed a theory of change, a formal description of the causal pathway through which the SALIENT process was expected to produce its intended outcomes. This artefact then served as an analytical scaffold against which the interview data could be interpreted, allowing the team to identify precisely where the assumed mechanisms of change held up and where they broke down.

The evidence base for the evaluation consisted of thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with three categories of participants: government partners, academic researchers and food system representatives. Interview transcripts were subjected to thematic analysis, a systematic qualitative method in which researchers code the data, group codes into candidate themes, and refine those themes iteratively until they capture the patterns running through the corpus. By interpreting the resulting themes in relation to the theory of change, the evaluators could trace not just what participants experienced but why the engagement process unfolded as it did, a distinction that matters enormously for anyone planning to replicate this model of collaborative research.

The first major finding concerns fragmentation. Participants described a food system landscape in which existing health and sustainability actions were scattered, disconnected and often duplicative, shaped by the differing priorities, agendas and constraints of the stakeholders involved. A local authority might be focused on food poverty, a retailer on supply chain resilience, a regulator on safety standards, and a researcher on generating generalisable evidence. None of these agendas is wrong, but their misalignment means that even well-intentioned initiatives can pull in different directions, dissipating resources and momentum. The evaluation suggests that this fragmentation is not merely an administrative nuisance but a structural barrier that any cross-sectoral collaboration must confront from the outset, ideally through explicit governance arrangements that acknowledge and mediate competing interests rather than pretending they do not exist.

Power dynamics emerged as a second, closely related theme. The researchers found that stakeholder participation was strongest when the research aligned with the stakeholder’s core goals and offered tangible benefits, and weakest when it did not. This may sound obvious, but it carries a profound implication for how collaborative research is designed. Organisations do not donate their time, staff and data to academic projects out of altruism; they engage because the collaboration serves their institutional interests, whether that is access to evidence, reputational advantage, regulatory preparedness or practical problem-solving. Where the perceived benefit was diffuse or distant, engagement thinned out. The lesson for future consortia is that the value proposition for each partner must be articulated early and honestly, and that researchers who assume stakeholders will simply rally around the scientific mission are likely to be disappointed.

The third finding is perhaps the most methodologically provocative. Pragmatic co-design processes, in which interventions were shaped jointly with stakeholders to build trust and ensure feasibility, did indeed strengthen relationships and make implementation more realistic. But the evaluation found a hidden cost: interventions designed primarily for practical acceptability sometimes had limited potential to address the critical uncertainties in the evidence base. In other words, the very compromises that made an intervention deliverable in the real world could also blunt its scientific value, leaving fundamental questions about what works and why unanswered. This tension between rigour and relevance is a perennial problem in implementation science, but the SALIENT evaluation documents it with unusual clarity, showing that co-design is not a cost-free good but a balancing act in which the research questions themselves can be diluted.

Compounding this tension, the study found that academic processes were often perceived as misaligned with stakeholders’ practical needs. Timelines built around grant cycles, ethics approvals and publication schedules rarely map neatly onto the operational rhythms of businesses and local authorities, which must respond to market pressures and political timetables. Reporting requirements, evaluation protocols and the language of research governance can feel alien to partners whose expertise lies in logistics, catering or retail. The evaluation suggests that these frictions are not trivial irritations; they shape whether stakeholders remain engaged at all, and they can determine whether the evidence produced is actually usable by the people it is meant to serve.

So what should be done differently? The authors conclude that long-term government direction, stronger accountability and appropriate incentives are needed to foster meaningful collaboration between researchers and food system stakeholders. Short, project-based funding windows, they imply, are poorly suited to the slow work of building trust across sectors. Future partnerships, the study argues, should balance flexibility with rigour, invest in sustained relationships rather than one-off consultations, and establish strong governance, communication and evaluation processes early, before disagreements about priorities and power have a chance to fester. The goal is to generate robust, scalable evidence for meaningful food system change, and the evaluation makes clear that the machinery of collaboration is not a preliminary to that evidence but a determinant of it.

The significance of this work extends well beyond the UK food sector. Governments worldwide are grappling with diet-related disease, food insecurity and the environmental footprint of agriculture, and the prevailing policy fashion favours multi-stakeholder partnerships and co-produced solutions. SALIENT’s evaluation is a reminder that these fashionable formats are neither self-executing nor universally benign. They can build trust and deliver interventions, but they can also reproduce existing inequalities of power, fragment effort and soften scientific ambition. For researchers, the message is to design engagement around stakeholders’ real incentives and to protect the evidential core of their studies. For funders and governments, the message is that meaningful food system transformation requires patient investment in the unglamorous infrastructure of collaboration: governance, accountability and time. The study, which received ethics approval from the University of Cambridge Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committees and was published open access, offers a rare, honest blueprint for the difficult work ahead.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectoral collaborative research for food system transformation

Article Title: Conducting cross-sectoral collaborative research for food system transformation: learnings from a qualitative evaluation study

Article References: Shaw, S., Huse, O., Savory, B., Cooke, N., Thompson, C., Loopstra, R., Scarborough, P., Ogilvie, D., Cummins, S., White, M., & Adams, J. (2026). Conducting cross-sectoral collaborative research for food system transformation: learnings from a qualitative evaluation study. Health Research Policy and Systems. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01540-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01540-y

Keywords: food systems, cross-sectoral collaboration, co-design, qualitative evaluation, theory of change, stakeholder engagement, public health, sustainability, research policy, SALIENT consortium, power dynamics, evidence-based policy