Agriculture in urban areas is embedded in a dense policy and regulatory arena. Urban space, being more subject to multiple stakeholder interest, is both more intensively legislated and more contested than rural space. Urban planning often seeks sectoral separation between rural agriculture and urban manufacturing and services, thus outlawing or restricting urban agriculture and adding to the insecurity among households practising it.

Multiple markets with varied "rules of the game" heavily penetrate urban areas, offering opportunities, but also inequalities and risks. This is aggravated by frequently unstable residency among poor urban households, which weakens supportive ties among neighbors, leaving households to face such challenges alone.

Urban Harvest strategy has analyzed policy and institutional circumstances affecting urban crop and animal production and established platforms of dialogue and joint activities for building understanding among stakeholders. This has included partnerships along the production chain, including irrigation committees and women's community kitchens in Lima, schools in Kampala, NGO networks in Nairobi and flower trader groups in the Philippines. 

To build understanding and collaboration through dialogue at municipal and city levels, Urban Harvest has developed a stakeholder dialogue model involving a multi-agency committee on urban food security and agriculture with participation by municipal authorities to oversee research and development interventions and to facilitate policy change. The model, also implemented in Lima, Nairobi and Manila, has advanced most rapidly and successfully in Kampala. Through actions of the Kampala committee, the City Council undertook a participatory consultation with stakeholders on the massive number of city ordinances that effectively made crop and animal production illegal. A major revision of the ordinances has now been approved, legalizing agriculture for the first time.