The MKBA sets out five steps to anchor food initiatives as social infrastructure: recognise, stabilise, coordinate, scale and monitor. Recognition deliberately comes first: as long as informal food initiatives are not seen as a fully-fledged provision, their funding, housing and partnerships remain dependent on goodwill and coincidence.
The order of the steps is itself policy advice. Stabilising and scaling only make sense once the base is recognised and secured; monitoring then shows whether the social value develops as intended. For municipalities, this means the first intervention does not have to cost money, but it does give direction to every subsequent investment in the food network.