Funding the connective tissue: Making systems change work in agriculture
08/10/2026
By Randall Krantz, Head of Strategy & Partnerships, Accountability Accelerator
As the dust settles on Climate Week NYC, the curtain is already raised on Climate Week in Bangkok, while colleagues prepare for CBD COP17 in Yerevan and COP31 in Istanbul. The value of these meetings is not just the events themselves, but the connections they create, allowing people and projects to form an ecosystem of action.
In New York we launched our Systems of Consequence report that examines the accountability infrastructure surrounding the U.S. food system, with a focus on the Midwest. We launched the report in the way that we work: through a working session with participants from civil society, finance, business, science and philanthropy. Together with our peers we explored what “accountability infrastructure”—the systems that make externalities visible, commitments verifiable, rules and laws enforceable, and risks reflected in financial decisions—means for U.S. food systems.
The discussion reinforced something I had been noticing throughout the week, namely that good interventions are often organised and funded as though they exist in isolation and can solve systems challenges in silos. Indeed, in the research conducted for the Systems of Consequence report, we heard about plenty of solutions to help make food systems more accountable, but they collectively suffer from weaknesses in the infrastructure that enables them to reinforce one another and influence wider systems.
Asking the experts, mapping the system
Rather than relying on our own expertise in agriculture, we stood on the shoulders of giants and asked the experts, creating a map of gaps in the accountability ecosystem. We mapped more than 200 organizations, interviewed 30 stakeholders and identified 75 accountability gaps with more than 40 possible interventions.
By clustering the gaps, we were able to reduce the solution set to six “accountability levers”:
- Policy and legal incentives
- Civil society oversight
- Finance and risk
- Measurement, reporting and verification
- Market transformation
- Narrative change
Intervention stacking for systems change
While different organisations we spoke with have deep expertise in each of these levers, they were aware that their work alone could not trigger systems change. Rather it would be necessary to stack the levers in different ways to address different challenges at a systemic level. A narrative campaign, for example, may struggle to translate public awareness into change without corresponding regulatory or market incentives, while a new data platform will have limited accountability value if the information it generates is not connected to enforcement, financial decision-making, or other mechanisms for consequence.
Putting the stacks to work
In New York, we asked participants to examine what would be required to move this thinking from a report into practice by working through three illustrative stacks: Institutional market pull, Liability and enforcement, and Investment stewardship. Participants in the room with us agreed that by thinking of their daily interventions as part of a stack, they could be more aware of what the complementary pieces of that stack might be and seek to make the right connections to embrace these.
We heard three learnings at high level:
- Fund the connective tissue
Participants agreed that many of the necessary organisations, tools and initiatives already exist, but what is missing is someone resourced to connect them. Participants repeatedly identified a need for trusted convening, translation, coordination, and relationship-building, none of which tends to fall within their usual grants or project scopes. Examples included linking community-generated evidence with legal and regulatory expertise, or connecting physical-risk data with investor and corporate decision-making.
These connecting functions are regularly treated as overhead or expected to happen informally, even though this orchestration is a necessary part of the accountability infrastructure; without funding the relationships between organisations, the wider system can remain fragmented.
- Follow the power
One of the fundamental issues that was raised in all discussions was the inherent imbalance of power between stakeholders across food systems. Participants asked questions such as, Who defines the metrics? Who controls and interprets the data? Who captures the value? Who bears transition costs? Their conclusion was that costs are pushed downward while the value is pushed upwards. In the market-pull discussion, the question “Who is the value for?” brought the conversation back to farmer margins, agency and incentives. Farmers and communities cannot be treated merely as recipients of training, data or externally designed interventions; they need to help define problems, shape evidence and influence decisions. Accountability work must consider how power is distributed, not only whether a technically sound intervention exists.
- Connect evidence to consequence
Participants questioned the need for more data: while existing data is imperfect, there is already enough to act, and lack of data is no longer an excuse for inaction. They questioned who the data serves and how it becomes usable, and noted that different users may require different but interoperable forms of measurement. Critically, it was pointed out that evidence only becomes accountability infrastructure when it affects a decision, as disclosure is not the same as implementation, and information is not the same as accountability.
The workshop concluded with the observation that “Systems change happens at the speed of trust”—a reminder that understanding incentives and constraints across actors takes time and continuity, something difficult to sustain through short, narrowly restricted grants.
Where to from here?
The next step is not to turn all five stacks into fully fledged programmes at once. We first need to bring together what we heard in New York, follow up with voices that were missing, particularly farmers and affected communities, and understand where good work is already underway. In many cases, the opportunity may be to connect existing initiatives rather than create something new.
From there, we can identify a small number of practical collaborations worth testing, beginning where there is credible leadership, genuine partner demand, and enough readiness to move. This is not a competition to identify the “best” stack, as different combinations will make sense in different contexts. Some of the deeper changes will take years, but there may be prerequisites for these levers that can be acted on now. One workshop group challenged the three-to-five-year horizon and asked what could be tested in the next six months. A few well-chosen collaborations could begin generating evidence, relationships, and trust now, while laying the groundwork for more ambitious change.
This also points to a clear role for the Accountability Accelerator: keeping the ecosystem map alive, identifying under-resourced capabilities, and connecting actors working on different parts of the same problem. We do not need to own or implement every intervention. Our distinctive contribution may be helping the wider ecosystem see itself more clearly and organise around where working together could achieve more than isolated projects.
An invitation
The opportunity is to start funding beyond individual projects and rather through trusted convenings and orchestration of ecosystems. The project money is important, but it will go a lot further with more funding of the connective tissue that allows accountability levers and individual projects to be stacked to address systems change. Within funded projects, this means increasing the budget for convenings and trust building, and acknowledging that these may not fit into the first six months of a project, but can take years to build and require commensurate multi-year funding.
The opportunity for philanthropy is more than funding the next promising intervention. It is to help create the relationships, shared infrastructure and pathways to consequence that allow many interventions to become more effective together. If that is a challenge you are working on, we would like to hear from you.
