Diagnosing integrated food security strategies

Highlights

•	Many African governments have developed integrated food security strategies.
•	Little is known about the properties and outcomes of such integrated efforts.
•	The paper proposes three diagnostic steps for studying these.
•	The steps build on (i) policy integration, (ii) mechanisms and (iii) policy success.
•	The diagnostics are illustrated by applying them to South Africa’s Integrated Strategy.

Abstract

The global food price crises of 2007–8 and 2010 and subsequent policy debates have led to increased recognition that the drivers of food insecurity and associated policies transcend the boundaries of traditional governmental sectors and jurisdictions. Building on this insight, many governments of countries facing food insecurity have developed, or are in the progress of developing, integrated food security strategies. However, in spite of their recent popularity, to date little is known about the properties and outcomes of these strategies. This paper aims to help overcoming this gap by proposing a way of diagnosing the expected variety of integrated food security strategies and associated outcomes. Three diagnostic steps are put forward, each of which is linked to a specific theoretical perspective from the Public Policy literature. The first step concerns diagnosing the variety of IFSSs and is referred to as descriptive diagnostics. This type of diagnostics is suggested to be performed by using a policy integration perspective. The second step involves diagnosing what causes variety and change. This step is named explanatory diagnostics and revolves around what ‘mechanisms’ explain (dis)integration. The third diagnostic step focuses on diagnosing the outcomes of IFSSs and is referred to as evaluatory diagnostics. For this type of diagnostics a policy success and failure perspective is proposed. The applicability of these diagnostic steps and associated theories is illustrated through the case of South Africa’s Integrated Food Security Strategy. The paper ends with a discussion of promising methodological approaches and with raising some hypotheses and expectations about performing these types of diagnostics in a Sub-Saharan African context.

Keywords:

• Integrated food security strategy
• Food security
• Policy integration
• Governance
• Public policy

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this paper was presented at a workshop of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) on ‘Institutional diagnostics for African food security: approaches, methods and implications’, 29–30 September 2016. The author would like to thank Saskia Vossenberg, Sietze Vellema, Martijn Vink and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 In this paper, references to ‘food (in)security’ also include concerns about nutrition (security), which is considered a key dimension of food security.

2 This overview was composed in Autumn 2016 through an extensive Google search and by consulting the WHO web page: http://https://extranet.who.int/nutrition/gina/en/policies/summary. NB: I do not claim to be comprehensive; the table should be read as an exploratory overview. For every country, the most recent strategy/-ies that were found are presented.

3 Authors do not explicitly refer to mechanisms, but the (generic) interaction patterns they describe can be considered as such.

4 Authors did not study these mechanisms in the context of policy integration, but to explain impasses in the governance of an innovative climate change adaptation measure.

5 I here synthesize existing (accounts of) evaluations. The analyst could also directly adopt one or both of the evaluation rationales to analyze and appraise an IFSS’s outcomes (see Section 4).

6 A search of ‘integrated food security strategy’ on the newspaper database LexisNexis led to only two relevant articles, both of them criticizing the IFSS’s performance.