Sustainable Empowerment and Food Governance in Indonesia and Malaysia: Exploring Transformative Pathways in the Global South

Countries across the Global South face acute and intersecting challenges in governing food and nutrition systems, including climate vulnerability, geo-economic instability, land degradation, and entrenched social inequalities. While national governments have introduced policies aimed at strengthening food security and supporting rural livelihoods, many of these interventions struggle to address underlying power asymmetries or to meaningfully incorporate the voices of smallholders, indigenous groups, and low-income urban communities. This paper employs sustainable empowerment as its conceptual lens, a dynamic and context-sensitive process through which peoples gain the collective capacity to shape, govern, and transform their food systems in ways that are ecologically resilient, socially just, and politically inclusive. Sustainable empowerment understands transformation as rooted in four interdependent pillars: power, governance, justice, and sustainability. Crucially, the paper adopts an iterative theory-building approach, treating empirical research not as the application of a fixed model but as a dialogical process through which sustainable empowerment is tested, refined, and potentially expanded. Fieldwork thus serves as a site where theoretical propositions meet grounded governance practices, enabling the framework to evolve through engagement with diverse socio-political contexts. Indonesia and Malaysia are selected as comparative cases because they represent two distinct yet interconnected trajectories of food governance in Southeast Asia. Indonesia hosts some of the region’s most influential peasant and agroecological movements, such as the Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI), with long-standing struggles around land rights, sovereignty, and territorial governance. Malaysia, by contrast, offers a markedly different landscape: a more state-driven food security regime, combined with recently emerging community and civil society-led initiatives addressing urban and peri-urban food insecurity. This contrast provides an analytically productive setting for examining how sustainable empowerment unfolds across different governance cultures, political economies, and movement ecologies within the Global South. The study draws on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations, and policy and organisational analysis, conducted alongside peasant organisations, community networks, and local authorities in both countries. Preliminary findings identify three conditions under which sustainable empowerment materialises. First, empowerment is anchored in organised and territorially rooted social movements capable of articulating collective claims and sustaining mobilisation. Second, institutional openings, formal or informal, provide pathways through which community initiatives can influence, reinterpret, or challenge policy frameworks. Third, the integration of agroecological and climate-adaptive practices strengthens autonomy and ecological resilience, grounding governance transformations in cultural and territorial continuity. Where these conditions converge, participatory food governance gains the capacity to redistribute authority, deepen justice, and cultivate long-term transformative potential. The paper seeks to demonstrate how sustainable empowerment sheds light on the interplay between democratic agency, structural inequalities, and ecological vulnerability. At the same time, empirical engagement with Southeast Asian contexts feeds back into the framework’s conceptual development, revealing additional dimensions, such as relationality, care, territorial belonging, and epistemic justice, that may be foundational in particular settings. In this way, the paper contributes both to understanding transformative food governance in Indonesia and Malaysia and to refining sustainable empowerment as an open, evolving, and context-sensitive theoretical framework