Marcelo S. Tedesco

Peru’s gastronomic boom has been promoted as a national project linking chefs, producers, educational organizations, civil society, and public institutions. Yet the relational architecture underlying this transformation, and its implications for collaboration and governance, remain insufficiently understood. This article reconstructs the evolution of a collaboration network within Lima’s gastronomy-driven agri-food system between 1994 and 2025. Using an expanded egocentric design with partial snowball sampling, we combine complex network analysis with quantitative and qualitative evidence from 41 organizations. The results show a transition from a fragmented structure to a denser and more integrated network in which relational prominence became progressively distributed across several hubs. Collaboration relied mainly on knowledge, networking, human capital, and visibility rather than on monetary or material transfers. Non-formal producer communities were perceived as important sources of products, knowledge, innovation, and territorial legitimacy, although they were not among the most prominent organizational nodes captured by the study. Public institutions were also perceived as insufficiently connected to the collaborative infrastructure. The longitudinal patterns and qualitative evidence characterize this subsystem as a complex adaptive system and show how institutional entrepreneurship can generate durable relational infrastructure that persists and reorganizes over time.