I, alongside colleagues from the Living Good Food Nation Lab, are currently in the middle of developing a planning toolkit to provide guidance and resources for those developing Local Good Food Nation Plans.
The Good Food Nation Act (Scotland) requires that by April 2028 all Relevant Authorities (RAs) – Scotland’s 34 Local Authorities and 12 territorial Health Boards – will have developed a plan which demonstrates their vision of how to improve food in their local area (Outcomes) and provide ways of measuring that improvement (Indicators). Although many places in Scotland already have Local Food Plans –some developed as part of their participation in the Sustainable Food Places network – the Good Food Nation plans are a new statutory requirement.
Developing this toolkit is a key part of the Lab’s work as a Wellcome-funded research project designed to support RAs and build a community of practice around their Good Food Nation work. We do not advise on the content of Local Plans - those are political decisions to be made by national and local government in consultation with their electorate and the public. Instead, we aim to provide guidance on process: explaining the requirements of the Good Food Nation Act; describing how to convene a group to carry out this work and who should be involved; and providing resources to help with the mapping and auditing process (including our newly released Local Good Food Nation Data Dashboard).
As part of this work, we have developed a three-stage model for the process of developing a Local Good Food Nation Plan that aims to capture all the steps involved. Each stage incorporates important statutory requirements such as the need for RAs to get initial authorisation for this work and to run public consultations on their draft Local Plans.
This is the second time I have been involved in developing a toolkit. For the Shaping Interdisciplinary Practices in Europe (SHAPE-ID) project, I was part of the team that developed a toolkit of resources for those conducting research spanning the arts humanities and social sciences and science, technology, engineering and medicine and their societal partners. In that case, we also aimed to help users to save time and avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ by providing a way of easily accessing a set of carefully chosen existing resources.
For the SHAPE-ID toolkit we also (unexpectedly for me at least) ended up developing a set of short practical resources, including case studies of successful research projects, reflective guides on specific topic and top ten tips for many of the goals. Now as the development of the GFN Planning Toolkit is well underway, I find we are also drawing on our own expertise and that of project partners to create similar resources - briefings to explain the GFN Act and its requirements, checklists of who to invite to be part of a working group and reflective questions to help develop a collaborative process for those groups. This reminds me that this synthesis process is an important part of developing a toolkit which is often overlooked as a form of knowledge creation (Laursen et al, 2024).
Echoing the timeline of the development of Local Good Food Nation Plans, we aim to launch the first part of our toolkit by the early autumn – please look out for our announcement. This first iteration will cover Stage 1 and include the first four steps of the process– 1) Understand, 2) Convene and Collaborate, 3) Map and Audit and 4) Review – which lead up to the launch of a draft Local Plan. Stages 2 and 3, covering the processes up to the publication of the final Local Plan and then its implementation and review in 5 years will be launched in the latter part of 2026. We will also be actively seeking feedback on the toolkit and its resources, and are planning to use this feedback to improve and extend the toolkit during and beyond the development period.