Designing exploratory partnerships in Southeast Asia: The challenge of building a sustainable ecosystem to address chronic malnutrition

Malnutrition linked to under nutrition is a cause of 3.1 million child deaths annually. Stakeholders from all over the word, gathered within various organizations, from public to private sector, tend to work together to fight against this disease that affects very vulnerable people. However, these stakeholders are generally highly dependent on numerous geopolitical issues and form together a highly fragmented ecosystem, which appears to be not efficient enough to provide nutrition solutions to all affected children. At the same time, researchers have identified for decades that other forms of malnutrition, such as chronic malnutrition, could also result from dietary habits that are linked to specific sociocultural contexts, which require a radically different approach: instead of treating an easily diagnosable patient, the aim is to prevent and change nutritional habits, and the mass of affected children is much larger. Thus, innovative partnerships beyond NGOs, local actors and public agencies need to be explored, for instance with private actors, to consider new ways to structure such a sustainable ecosystem. And the shift in the understanding of how to treat the disease entails necessarily deep changes in the structuration of an appropriate ecosystem to deal with it, which also highlights the need for a collective capability for innovation. In this paper, we tackle the organizational issue of building a sustainable ecosystem, both robust and innovative, to prevent chronic malnutrition in Southeast Asia. In particular, we study the building of innovative partnerships that contribute to long-term nutrition transition in this area where there international funds alone are not sufficient to support the stunting prevention, and thus private and public actors must work to develop hybrids models.