Brief: A system rarely holds itself together — someone has to carry the unglamorous work of turning shared goals into working operations, absorbing failure, and staying accountable long after the funding stops. This essay names that role, place-based intermediary, and lays out the six forms of work it actually requires. It argues this work is the missing infrastructure that turns separate, well-meaning actions into a system people can actually depend on. Hội An’s own experience — years of grassroots practice earning a formal role inside the city’s public waste system — is offered as evidence that this capacity can be built, not just theorised. It closes with a question meant for every funder, government and business reading it: are you paying for an activity, or for the capacity that keeps producing results?
A few weeks ago, a food and beverage business in Hội An asked us a simple question: should they ask a nearby farmer to collect their kitchen scraps for livestock feed, or should they contract Hoi An Eco-Hub to manage the material instead?
Both options keep food scraps out of the mixed waste stream. What differs is much harder to see from a spreadsheet.
A direct arrangement with a farmer can work well — when the material is safe, the farmer’s needs are clear, and collection is reliable. But it leaves real questions unanswered. Who checks for contamination? What happens on the day the farmer can’t collect? Where does material go when it isn’t suitable for feed? And a year from now, who can actually say how much was recovered?
A contract with Hoi An Eco-Hub answers those questions by design. Separation standards are agreed in advance. Material is checked and recorded. Every stream has a destination, and every disruption has a response. The business gets something it can genuinely report on — and its payment keeps trained local staff working, equipment running, and the system improving.
So the business isn’t really choosing a collection method. It’s choosing what kind of outcome to pay for, and what kind of local capacity its money will help keep alive.
That distinction — outcome versus activity — turns out to matter far beyond food scraps. It applies just as much to restoration, climate adaptation, community learning, and regenerative tourism. An idea becomes dependable only when someone holds its relationships, its resources, and its responsibilities together, in one place, over time.
That is the work of a place-based intermediary.
The missing work between intention and outcome
Local change is never the work of one actor. A business can separate its waste. A farmer can improve a plot of land. A public agency can set a target. Each of these is necessary. None of them, alone, produces the result everyone actually wants — because that result only appears when the separate actions connect: through clear roles, reliable services, and someone who responds when conditions change.
A place-based intermediary carries that connecting work. It brings the right people into the room, turns broad ambitions into arrangements that actually function, and stays involved as the system develops — not just for the length of a workshop or a pilot. Researchers who study innovation describe this role as connecting needs, knowledge, partners and implementation, and argue that sustainability transitions depend on it operating across markets, regulation, institutions and everyday behaviour (Howells, 2006; Kivimaa et al., 2019a). The OECD reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: effective place-based action needs coordination, local capability, finance and feedback working together, not any one of them alone (OECD, 2025).
Three things define the role:
- Rooted knowledge of the place — its people, institutions, seasons, and constraints.
- The trust and technical range to work across government, business, community, research and practice.
- And responsibility that outlasts a workshop, a pilot, or a single contract.
The legal form this takes can vary widely. What matters is whether the formal organisation or the informal collective can turn separate efforts into a system other people can actually depend on.
What being place-based changes
Being place-based means staying close to the work and living with its consequences. A short assignment rarely uncovers who actually controls a purchasing decision, why collection keeps failing in one particular neighbourhood, how a monsoon interrupts operations that looked fine on paper, or which relationship needs repairing before anything else can move forward. Repeated practice does uncover these things — slowly, and often the hard way.
That produces a particular kind of knowledge: part data, part technical expertise, part memory, part trust, part hard-won thinking process. And it comes with a cost. Problems return directly to the organisation that holds them. Weak instructions show up as contaminated material. Poor planning shows up as idle equipment. A restoration design that looked sound on paper gets tested — and sometimes exposed — by the human disturbance. Research on locally led adaptation makes the same point: combining scientific knowledge with the lived experience and decision-making power of local actors produces better outcomes than either alone (Loeber and Kok, 2024; Coger et al., 2022).
Six forms of work that make a system dependable
1. Seeing the whole chain
The intermediary holds the views of businesses, service providers, communities and public agencies in one operating picture — and that picture is usually the first place a system’s missing links become visible. Separation only works if there’s a reliable outlet on the other end. Treatment equipment is useless without suitable inputs, trained operators, and finance to keep it running. Riverbank planting fails without follow-up care and a clear agreement over who has rights to the land afterward. The question that actually matters isn’t whether an activity happened. It’s what conditions would let the result keep happening.
2. Turning goals into working operations
Ideas like zero waste, climate resilience, and community participation sound clear until someone has to act on them. The intermediary’s job is to answer the unglamorous questions underneath: who does what, to what standard, by when, at whose cost, and what happens when something fails. Written down, these answers become protocols, contracts, schedules, quality standards, and the escalation procedures nobody thinks about until they’re needed.
3. Building relationships that can carry pressure
Local systems run on trust, shared expectations, and communication people can rely on — none of which appear on their own. They’re built through the consistent repetition of sharing results honestly, explaining failures instead of hiding them, paying practitioners fairly, following up when something was promised, and keeping institutional memory when staff change.
These relationships enable partners adjust together — when floods disrupt access, when separation quality drops, when a market disappears overnight. Loeber and Kok (2024) call this relational capital rooted in place, which is a precise way of saying something simple: it can’t be imported, and it can’t be rushed.
4. Operating, maintaining and repairing
Continuity is unglamorous by nature. It’s caring for equipment, refreshing staff skills, checking records, and correcting problems before they compound. Repeated failure is actually useful here — it shows exactly where a good design meets real behaviour and real conditions, and the response might mean new guidance, new equipment, a new partner, or a different public arrangement altogether. As a system matures, part of the intermediary’s job becomes handing off responsibilities and capabilities to other actors, rather than holding onto all of them indefinitely (Kivimaa et al., 2019b).
5. Making results visible and useful
Accountability needs agreed standards, recorded quantities, known pathways, and a clear response when something goes wrong. These records let partners verify results, improve their own operations, and report honestly on environmental performance. They also turn failure into evidence: contamination can expose a weak kitchen workflow; tree mortality can reveal poor timing, hydrology, or stewardship. Monitoring is only useful when it actually changes what happens next (Global Center on Adaptation, 2021).
6. Connecting the place to wider resources
The intermediary works as a two-way bridge. Research, finance, policy knowledge, markets, and peer experience flow into the place; local priorities, evidence, and practical knowledge flow back out. Done well, it can bundle small or fragmented needs into something a funder or partner can actually work with, support compliance, and build partnerships — all while keeping local actors involved in the decisions and accountable for the results (OECD, 2026).
From collecting material to procuring an accountable outcome
Put the six functions together and the F&B example becomes a useful lens for the whole argument.
The farmer may still be part of the answer. Where food scraps are genuinely suitable for feed, direct use creates local value with very little processing — there’s no reason to route it elsewhere just because a system exists. A well-designed arrangement can include that pathway while still defining quality, traceability, continuity, and who’s responsible if something goes wrong. Other kitchen materials will need different treatment, or a different destination altogether.
What the intermediary adds is coherence. It helps the business separate correctly, assesses what comes in, records what’s recovered, routes each stream to where it actually belongs, and can show evidence of the result. It also learns from what doesn’t work, and adjusts.
That changes what the contract is actually for. The business isn’t just paying to have material collected. It’s paying for four things at once: environmental accountability — a known, responsible route for the material; operational reliability — clear standards and a response when conditions change; evidence — records that support real decisions and credible reporting; and local system capacity — skilled work, infrastructure, and relationships that stay available to everyone else in the place, not just to this one contract.
How this capacity has developed in Hội An
The capacity described above isn’t something the GYC ecosystem arrived with. It’s something learned from inside the systems it was trying to improve — which is a different starting point than most intermediaries have.
Green Youth Collective began with practical environmental action in Hội An and the surrounding villages, not with a mandate to coordinate anything. Years of hands-on work slowly revealed the connections that action alone couldn’t see: waste tied to purchasing decisions, tourism operations, and public services; organic material tied to soil health, farming, and local livelihoods; environmental learning tied to whether residents and practitioners actually had agency to act; tourism tied to the stewardship of the very landscapes and communities the destination depends on.
Different organisations grew out of these connections, each carrying a different piece of the work. GYC holds the long-term community and systems orientation — the role described throughout this essay. REED develops the technical and operational services. Hoi An Eco-Hub is where households, tourism businesses, public services, farms, and material flows meet. Refillables Đong Đầy, an independent partner, builds reuse and refill pathways further upstream. REwild connects land restoration, learning for change, and hospitality on the land itself.
Hoi An Eco-Hub shows what it looks like when this kind of capacity gradually becomes part of local institutional capacity, rather than staying a private service. Since 2021, REED has advised Hội An’s tourism authorities and 100+ businesses on waste prevention, source separation, and recovery — through waste assessments, staff engagement, pilots, and the kind of working relationships that only build up over years, not during a single project cycle.
In 2026, Hội A government assigned REED to operate an underused public facility as Hoi An Eco-Hub, and formally connected the Hub to Cẩm Kim’s municipal source-separation and collection system. The arrangement now covers 1,222 households, with responsibilities shared across the local authority, REED, public-service providers, neighbourhood groups, and community organisations. Hospitality and tourism-generated organic and plastic material that used to have nowhere defined to go now has a clear route to local treatment.
That is not a small step. It means a public authority, a public asset, community participation, zero waste service suppliers, and the operating capacity of a local social enterprise are now working inside one arrangement, rather than separate efforts. The F&B contract this essay opened with sits inside that wider structure — a business paying for an accountable recovery service is, whether it intends to or not, helping sustain infrastructure and capability that also serve public and community goals.
The system is still young, and it should be judged as one still in development — on service quality, material recovered, participation, financial viability, working conditions, and whether it keeps improving. What the progress so far demonstrates is something more specific than success: that sustained, unglamorous local practice is what actually builds the credibility to be trusted with a formal role in public delivery. From years of showing up.
Who pays for continuity?
All of this work has a real cost, and it’s the kind of cost that’s easy to leave out of a budget: coordination, R&D, quality control, data, maintenance, staff development and skill training, relationship management, safeguarding, and the constant, quiet problem-solving that keeps a system from falling apart. The work usually happens beyond grant cycles. It happens every week, including the weeks nobody’s watching.
When financial design leaves this work out, someone still does it — through unpaid effort, underpaid staff, income diverted from somewhere else, or the sheer personal commitment of a handful of people who haven’t yet burned out. What’s really happening is that its continuity is running on hidden subsidy and someone’s exhaustion.
This isn’t a uniquely local problem. The OECD has found that rigid, short-term funding actively weakens local staffing, core systems, collaboration, and the ability to plan and adapt — while longer, more flexible support lets local organisations retain capability, recover their legitimate core costs, and respond as conditions change (OECD, 2026). The Global Center on Adaptation makes a parallel case for patient, predictable finance and investment that leaves lasting capability behind in the place, not just a completed report (Global Center on Adaptation, 2021).
A viable place-based intermediary usually runs on a portfolio, not a single source. Public contracts can pay for defined service functions. Business contracts can pay for collection, recovery, advice, or hospitality. Grants can fund the experimentation and public goods that markets never will. Visitor revenue can support learning, livelihoods, and stewardship (Travel with Purpose). Research partnerships can fund monitoring and knowledge production. And core support — the hardest kind to raise — sustains the connective capacity that every other activity actually depends on.
Mixing these sources takes real care. Every funding source arrives with its own incentives and its own reporting demands attached. A resilient model is one that makes the full cost visible, protects its public purpose from being quietly reshaped by whoever’s paying that quarter, and shares the cost of collective benefit fairly. Financial design, in the end, is systems design — it just doesn’t always get treated that way.
Rootedness, power and accountability
Being rooted in a place gives an organisation real influence — over whose knowledge gets heard, which opportunities get attention, how resources move, and who ends up speaking for a place in front of funders and government. That influence brings insight and access. It doesn’t come with automatic legitimacy. Representation has to be earned, and re-earned.
A credible place-based intermediary needs several kinds of accountability running at once, not just the one that’s easiest to report on. Accountability to the people affected — residents, workers, and practitioners need a real way to influence priorities and raise concerns, not a suggestion box. Public accountability — shared assets, public funds, service duties, and environmental claims all need transparent standards and evidence, not just good intentions. Accountability to partners — clear roles, costs, risks and results, including the uncomfortable conversations when something fails. Accountability to learning — records and reflection have to actually change practice when the evidence contradicts the plan. And accountability through distributed capability — knowledge, relationships, and authority need to extend beyond a founder, one project team, or the intermediary itself, or the whole system is one departure away from collapse.
They’re what keeps agency distributed across the wider place instead of concentrated in one organisation — so community actors can strengthen their own role, public institutions can fulfil their mandate, businesses can genuinely improve their operations, and practitioners can build recognised expertise and income of their own. An intermediary succeeds, in the end, when the whole system gets more capable — not when it becomes indispensable.
What serious partnership requires
Recognising intermediary work properly changes how a partnership gets designed, for everyone involved.
Governments can connect proven local capacity to public mandates, assets, data, and service arrangements — with clear performance standards and public oversight to protect legitimacy on both sides.
Funders can finance coordination, learning, maintenance and core capability, not just the visible activities that photograph well. Multi-year horizons, realistic cost recovery, and fair risk-sharing give local organisations room to adapt responsibly instead of chasing the next grant cycle.
Businesses can procure accountable environmental outcomes, not just compliance. Service contracts, changed purchasing habits, staff responsibility, shared data, and fair payment let a corporate sustainability commitment actually strengthen a local system, instead of sitting next to it.
Researchers can treat working places and practitioners as knowledge partners, not just data sources. Research questions, methods, compensation, authorship, data ownership, and how findings get returned all determine whether research leaves anything useful behind.
And intermediaries themselves carry a responsibility too: making their own work legible. Governance, technical standards, evidence, financial discipline, succession planning, and clear boundaries protect both the organisation and the place it serves — because an intermediary that can’t explain itself is asking to be trusted on faith alone.
The better question
Place-based intermediaries tend to become visible through small, ordinary signs: a collection route that keeps running, a public facility put into better use, a business procedure that survives staff turnover, a farmer recognised as a practitioner and trainer in his own right, a failed trial that quietly improves the next design, a partnership that hits real conflict and keeps working anyway.
None of these make a good headline. All of them are evidence that a place is getting better at organising people, knowledge, infrastructure, and finance around needs that don’t resolve in a single funding cycle.
Which brings the F&B conversation this essay opened with back around to a question with relevance well beyond food scraps: are we paying for an activity to happen, or for an accountable outcome — and the local capacity required to keep producing it?
That question changes how procurement gets written, how projects get designed, and how impact gets assessed. It asks who stays responsible when conditions change, how the result actually gets verified, and what capability is still standing after the contract ends or the grant runs out.
Regeneration depends on this kind of institution — the one that holds the connections long enough for separate, well-meaning actions to become a system other people can actually depend on, and that helps that system learn, adapt, and share responsibility as it goes.
References
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Global Center on Adaptation (2021) Principles for Locally Led Adaptation. Available at: https://gca.org/programs/locally-led-adaptation/ (Accessed: 8 August 2026).
Howells, J. (2006) ‘Intermediation and the role of intermediaries in innovation’, Research Policy, 35(5), pp. 715–728. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2006.03.005.
Kivimaa, P., Boon, W., Hyysalo, S. and Klerkx, L. (2019a) ‘Towards a typology of intermediaries in sustainability transitions: A systematic review and a research agenda’, Research Policy, 48(4), pp. 1062–1075. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.006.
Kivimaa, P., Hyysalo, S., Boon, W., Klerkx, L., Martiskainen, M. and Schot, J. (2019b) ‘Passing the baton: How intermediaries advance sustainability transitions in different phases’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 31, pp. 110–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.01.001.
Loeber, A.M.C. and Kok, K.P.W. (2024) ‘Exploring the functions of place-based intermediation in the governance of sustainability transitions’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 52, article 100869. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2024.100869.
OECD (2025) Place-Based Policies for the Future. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/e5ff6716-en.
OECD (2026) Practical Guidelines for Supporting Locally Led Development: Menu of Options for Shifting Agency and Resources to Local Actors. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/eaecf72b-en.