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This article provides a brief history of the use of maps and fences in wildlife conservation. Analysis of the promotional materials of one of the main promoters of Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa, the Peace Parks Foundation, reveals the importance of mapping as a planning and promotion tool. These maps, however, appear to be quite silent about the communities that are supposed to benefit from the TFCAs. The fences around wildlife areas are resented by local communities because they prevent them from harvesting natural resources "on the other side." Local communities also object to the fences because of their symbolic meaning and instrumentality, shown in warfare and policies "to control and divide." Conservation organizations nowadays use the symbol of the fence to communicate their change in policy toward local communities: stressing the need to move "beyond the fences" by involving local communities in the management of protected areas and using these to promote economic development.

This is the first special issue of any organisation studies journal on food labour. Why is this a big deal? In this Introduction, we argue that the field should pay much more attention to the agri-food system and the work that goes into producing, distributing and consuming foodstuff. Food is such an all-important, basic ingredient to human existence, incorporating a vast web of organisational processes that are constantly changing, being contested at all scales. Whether subsistence peasants, new-age community foodies, massive food logistics companies, Deliveroo dark kitchens or Uber Eats cyclists – there is a huge amount of labour everywhere in the agri-food system. Food labour is so vast, this special issue can only begin lifting the lid. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of the current scholarly work on food labour. We identify some of the historical contexts and struggles that have led to the agri-food system in existence today. We identify food labour types, particularly focusing on those that are vanishing or emerging, crucially asking why these transitions are taking place. We also engage with the various resistances expressed by people against the ever globalising agri-food system, outlining logics for the emergence of alternative food movements. Finally, we introduce each of the seven papers collated in this Special Issue, all of which, we hope, will provide food for thought to all of us who tend to have three meals a day without thinking too much about the labour that goes into our grub.

Here, we discuss tensions inherent in multistakeholder approaches addressing conflicts over natural resources as well as the involvement of stakeholders in research. Our discussion is built on knowledge generated by extensive research on the impacts of private farm conversions to game farms in South Africa, where significant increases in farm conversions have been observed since the 1990s. The studies had a particular focus on the consequences for farm dwellers, one of the most marginalized groups in the South African countryside. The research findings challenge the dominant narrative that game farming offers a win-win situation for nature conservation and rural development. Based on data from the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, we extended the narrow technical and economic framing of the narrative to include the socio-political meanings of the conversions. We reflect on a series of multistakeholder workshops that we organized, partly as a requirement of the funding agency. The workshop aims were to disseminate our research findings among the stakeholder groups and explore ways to mitigate the negative impacts of conversions. We discuss how we organized the engagement process in ways that sought to address the power differences between game farmers, the State, and farm dwellers. The main challenge appeared to be that farm dwellers were not recognized as stakeholders. This "invisibility" has multiple reasons, in particular, the historical and current trajectories of land dispossession. It is also linked to specific institutional and personal relations in the two provinces, resulting in different uses of the workshop spaces. By considering the complexities of stakeholder relations in the farm conversion context, we gained a deeper understanding of the politics of land and belonging in the still unequal post-apartheid rural landscape. Based on experiences from the research as well as the workshops, we take a critical stance regarding mainstream notions of stakeholder engagement and resilience building. We argue that if we fail to consider power relations and politics explicitly in these processes, we risk neglecting important conflicts and reproducing the invisibility of marginalized stakeholders.