Institutional diagnostics for African food security: Approaches, methods and implications

Highlights

•	Diagnostics of institutional contexts enhances understanding food security in Africa.
•	Ex-ante institutional diagnostics is necessary before considering possible interventions.
•	Institutional diagnostics guides the design of locally appropriate interventions.
•	Institutional diagnostics is advanced by systematically triangulation theories.
•	Institutional diagnostics implies crossing (trans)disciplinary boundaries.

Abstract

Securing access to affordable and nutritious food is an urgent topic on the agenda for development strategies in Africa. Intervention strategies targeting food security triggered a long lasting debate whether science and technology driven interventions could be the panacea for hunger eradication. However, contextual factors are extremely important in determining food security, as it is a location specific outcome of how biophysical, geographical, societal and political factors combine. Recent studies emphasize the important role of institutions to understand the persistence of food insecurity or to explain how different actors address food security. This article introduces a special issue that investigates approaches and methods, anchored in different institutionalisms, diagnosing how institutions influence food security levels in diverse African contexts. We draw two main lessons from this special issue. Firstly, there is a clear need for localized ex-ante institutional diagnostics to understand developments in food security in Africa. This can inform and guide decision-makers in designing locally appropriate interventions. Secondly, developing institutional diagnostics in view of sustainable food security requires theoretical triangulation; food insecurity is typically a problem emerging from a configuration of distinct processes. To develop a contextual and precise understanding of how institutions work and to identify what an institutional context ‘is good at’, the special issue argues in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences that is strongly rooted in evolving practices (re)arranging institutions affecting food security.

Keywords:

• Institutional diagnostics
• Africa
• Food security

1 Introduction: the need for institutional diagnostics

Securing access to affordable and nutritious food remains a topic high on the agenda for development strategies in Africa. Growing and urbanizing populations, low average yields, limited market access and competing claims on natural resources might induce a looming scenario of a food insecure continent (Hilderink et al., 2012; FAO 2016; AUC et al., 2013; World Bank, 2008; Huisman et al., 2016). Similar looming scenarios were drawn by for example the Nobel prize winning author Myrdal in the 1960s, when Asia was scourged by famines (Myrdal, 1968). However, the results of the introduction of the Green Revolution technology packages in Asia contradicted these projections. The yield increases in specific areas, and for particular farmers that came with the Asian Green Revolution technology, has been interpreted as a sign that science and technology could be a panacea for hunger eradication. However, it was much more than a technological fix alone, since it required a specific economic and policy environment (Hazell, 2009). So far, the technical and social transformation that occurred in parts of Asia was not replicated in Africa, although the conditions of relative land abundancy and resource richness would suggest otherwise (Frankema, 2014; InterAcademy Council, 2004; World Bank, 2008). Nevertheless, in policy debates the example of the Green Revolution in Asia is often used as benchmark for projecting the future of food provision in Africa (Hazell, 2009).

One of the pitfalls of framing food insecurity by comparing Africa to Asia, and the resulting generalizations at the level of continents, is the neglect of context specific complexities behind food insecurity, both in biophysical terms (InterAcademy Council, 2004), but also in how societies are organized and evolve over time (Berendsen et al., 2013; Booth et al., 2015; Frankema, 2014). This pitfall is further illustrated by considering the consequences of the definition food security as agreed upon at the World Food Summit in 1996, which states that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy and active life” (FAO, 1996). Based on this definition, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defined four dimensions that must be fulfilled simultaneously to reach objectives of food security: 1. physical availability of food; 2. economic and physical access to food; 3. food utilization; and 4. stability of the other three dimensions over time. These dimensions immediately show that focussing on technical dimensions affecting food production and distribution alone is indeed not enough.

Hence, contextual factors are extremely important for understanding whether and how food becomes available, how people access food, how food is utilized and how stable these factors are over time. For example, the evolution of food security in different regions is suggested to have a strong relationship with specific agricultural policies, which in turn are shaped by local societal factors, international relations and changing conditions in urbanized areas (Koning, 2017). Actual food security thus appears to be a location specific outcome of how biophysical, geographical, societal and political factors combine (Huisman et al., 2016; Sheahan and Barrett, 2014). This calls for a more thorough contextual understanding of how evolving social orders and the related institutions configured in the state, market and civil society, (Dubbink, 2003) direct and condition the ways societies arrange the provision of food. This contrasts with debates focusing on the enabling or constraining conditions for the adaptation of technological packages or juxtaposing organisational preferences reflected in either public or private-led strategies.

The discussion in this special issue therefore shifts attention to the role of institutions, which is examined in a variety of fields in the social sciences. In general, institutions can be defined as “systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions” (Hodgson, 2006, p. 2). Given macro characteristics like demography and scarcity, institutions set ‘the rules of the game’ (North, 1995) that guide and steer society in its collective behavior. Institutions are difficult to manage or direct towards societal purposes, such as food security. This is partly because institutions are intertwined with societal histories, values and dominant discourse and are therefore known to be persistent (Scott, 1987; Struik et al., 2014) and slow to change (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010; North, 1990; Peters et al., 2005).

While institutions do never account for all the variance of human-environment interactions, there is a general agreement that institutions are important determinants of the trajectories of socio-ecological systems (Young, 2002). Given the larger context of biophysics and demographics, institutions are considered important for understanding how innovation, agricultural development, food processing, and access to food get shape (Acemoglu et al., 2012; Booth et al., 2015; Frankema, 2014; Rodrik et al., 2004; Ruttan and Hayami, 1984). In building a proper understanding of food security in Africa, institutions need to be taken seriously, both in terms of their rule setting nature in societies’ attempt to manage food production, as well as their persistent and slow to change characteristics.

In this special issue, we argue that better diagnostics of institutional contexts in Africa is necessary if we want to make sense of the variety of developments in food security. Ostrom and Cox (2010) call for a diagnostic approach that supports policy makers, practitioners and analysts to move beyond panaceas, such as idealised property regimes, for responding to disturbances in environmental or, in our case, food systems. They recognise the need for a diversity of working institutions that fit local contexts and match the scale and nature of the problem. With diagnostics, we do not mean the identification of a problem, or the classification of its severity in the way doctors diagnose a patient’s disease. We refer to diagnostics in its fundamental sense; the precise description and analysis of how institutions work, what institutional contexts are ‘good at’ (Rodrik, 2010), and where they show opportunities to stabilize interventions or invoke innovation (Jiggins, 2012; Röling et al., 2012).

2 Aim of the special issue

For developing institutional diagnostics related to food security in Africa, the special issue finds its inspiration in the work of economist Dany Rodrik who argues that:

“development economists should stop acting as categorical advocates (or detractors) for specific approaches to development. They should instead be diagnosticians, helping decision-makers choose the right model (and remedy) for their specific realities, among many contending models (and remedies)” (Rodrik, 2010, p.35).

In his work on economic growth, Rodrik (2010) suggests that a diagnostic approach entails the identification of the most binding constraints in a given context and remove these with locally suited remedies. Such “diagnostics requires pragmatism and eclecticism, in the use of both theory and evidence. It has no room for dogmatism, imported blueprints, or empirical purism” (Rodrik, 2010, p. 174). Although focussing on macroeconomics, institutional context does play a role in most of Rodrik’s work. Rodrik contrasts diagnostics with (economic) blueprint thinking that followed from the Washington Consensus at the end of the 1980s. Similarly to how Rodrik and others (Hausmann et al., 2006; Rodrik, 2010) propose to diagnose what an economy ‘is good at’, the contributions in this special issue evaluate, discuss and develop approaches and methods that enable us to diagnose what each institutional context ‘is good at’ in view of increasing food security.

In our view, Rodrik’s perspective does not only apply to development economics, but also to other fields in the social sciences that tend to concentrate on organisational fixes or treatments. In this special issue, we try to further the institutional part of Rodrik’s diagnostic approach by: 1) going beyond a pure macroeconomic perspective, and 2) highlighting the variety of institutional contexts and what they imply for food security and 3) addressing the methodological side of diagnosing institutional contexts in view of food security. We argue that institutional diagnostics is a necessary step for imagining and implementing intervention strategies tailored to the context-specific ways of producing, distributing and accessing food. We therefore ask the general question: how to perform institutional diagnostics to understand processes regarding food security in Africa better?

Institutions influencing food security are present in different societal domains (state, market and civil society) and can be found at different levels and scales. In the public domain, this includes for example international and national laws and regulations, administrative traditions, and state traditions. In the societal domain, this refers to norms, values, culture, family and clans among other things. In the economic domain, we can think of institutions related to property rights and contracts. At a fundamental level, institutional diagnostics is concerned with questions on: which type of institutions affect food security; how do different types of state organization, administrative tradition, or state business relations conditions food security; or what degree of decentralization allows for what types of interventions to achieve food security (Helmsing and Vellema, 2012; Hyden et al., 2010; North, 1990). At an operational level, this also concerns the question of how to diagnose what contexts are good at. For example, a diagnostic approach suggest to look for pockets of effectiveness in a state bureaucracy (Bierschenk and de Sardan, 2014), to assess how different types of bureaucracies or decentralization encourage development of context-specific knowledge, innovation or extension (Adjei-Nsiah et al., 2013; Muilerman and Vellema, 2016; Vellema and van Wijk, 2015), or to analyse tenure systems in view of interventions to increase food production (Adjei-Nsiah et al., 2008).

In its diagnostic focus, the special issue emphasizes the relevance of interdisciplinary approaches and aims at analysing how different development related disciplines diagnose institutions in the organization of food security. In line with the vision of the NJAS journal, the societal and technical challenges in addressing persistent problems such as food insecurity, requires research that integrates scientific disciplines and is able to find novel combinations of methodologies and conceptual frameworks. The concept of institutions seems to be suitable in this regard, because it is used in a variety of different disciplines, most notably in political science, sociology, anthropology and economics and might therefore act as a bridging concept. Within these broad disciplines, however, there exists a wide variety of definitions and (conflicting) approaches towards the concept. Peters (2000), for example, identifies six different institutionalisms in the political sciences alone. There are however unifying elements to these approaches: a) structures – however defined – matter, b) these structures persist while individuals come and go, c) these institutions create greater regularity of human behaviour than would otherwise exist (Peters, 2000). While embracing a variety of approaches to institutions, we do want to avoid confusing institutions with organizations in the special issue. Rather, social entities such as organizations are “held together by institutions and institutional principles tied to work, property rights, employment forms, performance measurement and rewards, etc.” (Abdelnour et al., 2017, p. 15).

By using or combining different institutional approaches the papers of this special issue (for an overview see Table 1 below) present a variety of diagnostic approaches anchored in different institutionalisms, which enables us to get a better understanding of the role that institutions play in African food security. For example, some articles use an institutional economic perspective based on the work of Douglas North or Hodgson, while others lean on more sociological and political science interpretations of institutions as found in for example the work of Ostrom, Douglas and others. Other articles in this special issue use a combination of different institutionalisms to illuminate the role of institutions in African food security (e.g. Alpha and Fouilleux, this issue, Gebreyes, this issue, Gomez and Vossenberg, this issue). The diverse range of institutional approaches included in the special issue allows for investigating a variety of approaches and methods of diagnosing how institutions influence food security in various African contexts.

Table 1 Overview of the contributions in the special issue.

		Focus of institutional diagnostics	Geographical scope
Interventions as institutional endeavours
1	Akullo et al.	Agricultural innovation in public-private partnerships and smallholder production	Uganda
2	Osei-Amponsah et al.	Institutional logics and institutional bricolage in partnerships	Ghana
3	Totin et al.	Institutional embeddedness and innovation platforms	Ghana
4	Gomez and Vossenberg	Ripple effects from new market institutions to household rules	Malawi
Contextualising interventions
5	Berkhout et al.	Local institutions for inclusive green growth
6	Bhaduri et al.	Frugality and cross-sectoral policymaking	Kenya
7	Voors	Diagnostics and field experiments	Sierra Leone
Policy and politics
8	Termeer et al.	Food system governance arrangements	South Africa
9	Sidibé et al.	Multi-scale governance in agriculture systems	Mali
10	Candel	Integrated food security strategies	South Africa
11	Alpha and Fouilleux	Inter-sectoral food security policies	Burkina Faso
12	Gebreyes	'Producing' institutions of climate change adaptation and food security	Ethiopia

3 Contributions of the special issue

The articles in this special issue differ in terms of theoretical positioning, level of analysis, and the object of diagnostics. In our presentation of the articles, we focus on the diagnostic tools developed within the papers. Three broad sets of articles can be identified: the first one focussing on development interventions as object of diagnostics; the second one addressing the methodological consequences of the tension between top-down interventions and local institutional contexts for institutional diagnostics; and the third one focussing on policies and politics in institutional diagnostics.

The first set of articles in this special issue diagnoses specific interventions as ‘institutional endeavours’. Most of these interventions concern, or touch upon, new packages of institutions aimed at increasing food security performed through collaborative efforts, such as public-private partnerships and innovation platforms. This set of articles focuses on evolving interventions, which require a careful diagnostic to understand how outcomes result from the interaction between what persists (structure) and what can be altered (agency). This is studied by using a variety of concepts and institutionalisms, including institutional bricolage and rippling effects. Akullo et al. (this issue) present a diagnostic framework to identify institutional processes in the creation of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for agricultural innovation and combine a conceptualisation of institutions as performance with a conceptualisation of technology as affordance. This conceptualisation aims to help understand the variation in responses to agricultural innovation in different societies, and between different groups in a society. Osei-Amponsah et al. (this issue) propose to use institutional logics as a core ingredient for their diagnostic approach. They aim to gain insight into context-embedded negotiations induced by project-based partnership interventions, and use the idea of bricolage to characterise the adherence to and blending of institutional logics by actors. Totin et al. (this issue) propose the lens of institutional embeddedness and show how the organisational position–and related vested interests–of facilitating agents contribute to shaping platform agendas, functions, and outcomes. Gomez and Vossenberg, 2018(this issue) conceptualise the notion of ripple effects from an intervention at the institutional field of the market upon the institutional field of the household, and designed a diagnostic tool to identify these. These articles thus present theory-informed institutional diagnostic tools, which allow for careful contextualised analysis of interventions and of the relation between institutional context and institutional change. An overarching conclusion following from this first set of papers is the importance of dovetailing interventions with a local institutional context in order to enhance food security.

The second set of articles makes an explicit attempt to address the methodological consequences of the tensions between top-down interventions and local institutional contexts and presents different lenses and methods attentive to institutional contexts. Berkhout et al. (this issue) use a systematic literature review to assess the impact of development interventions that aim to build and strengthen local-level institutions to facilitate inclusive green growth. They visualize interventions and outcomes in an Evidence Gap Map, which highlights both the available evidence and remaining knowledge gaps.

The article discusses how Evidence Gap Maps may serve as a knowledge repository and identifies where evidence is lacking, thereby setting the agenda for future work. Bhaduri et al. (this issue) embrace a frugality lens as diagnostic tool, which emphasizes the need to better diagnose local institutions and to better appreciate the strengths of a bottom-up approach for effective policy formulation to dovetail ‘top-down' and ‘bottom-up' paradigms to food security intervention. Voors (this issue) focuses on the role institutional diagnostics can play in improving the design of field experiments and ultimately to aggregating knowledge and improving development policy. He argues that more time and resources need to be spent on the design of field experiments before experimental testing of treatments takes place. This set of papers shows the importance of performing ex ante diagnostics, instead of focusing on interventions right away. Doing this would allow for learning what institutional context are good at, which in turn might lead to more effective interventions.

The third set of papers in this special issue focuses their diagnostic tools on the state and scrutinizes the entanglement of policies and politics related to food security. Termeer et al. (this issue) focus on food systems governance and provide a diagnostic framework for assessing whether a governance arrangement has the capacity to govern food systems in a −well-coordinated- holistic way, taking into account the various dimensions of a food systems approach. Sidibé et al. (this issue) focus on multi-scale governance in agricultural systems and contribute to the diagnostic of institutional variety across scales. The paper aims to understand what institutional logics at different scales are “good at” in terms of the capacity to coordinate food security. Candel (this issue) puts forward a framework to diagnose the degree of integration of distinct food security policies. His approach identifies mechanisms that explain (dis)integration, and the outcomes of integrated food security strategies. While these contributions are very suitable for studying variety, change and capacity of policy and governance variables in coordinating the various aspects, views and interests involved in food security, they pay less attention to the role of politics in the analysis of food security. Although these contributions show great strength in systematically analysing the often larger scaled institutional context as the prime machinery enabling a country or region to work towards food security, the reader could run the risk of getting a too depoliticized image of institutional context and therefore of the food security issue.

Therefore, the diagnostic approaches focusing on policy and governance are complemented by two contributions in this special issue, which do explicitly take power and politics as an integral part of institutional contexts. By zooming in on policy processes Alpha and Fouilleux (this issue) take food security policies as object of their diagnostics. Their diagnostic tool focuses on three factors: 1) the path dependency arising from the way food insecurity has been historically framed; 2) the instruments used to measure and assess food security and how these shape both policy debates and decision-making; and, 3) the institutional configuration of the policy debate. Gebreyes (this issue) presents a type of institutional diagnostics, which is sensitive to dynamic social and political processes of ‘production' of institutions for resource management, climate change adaptation, and food security. The diagnostic framework used in this paper combines a Strategic Relations Approach with the Gramscian notion of hegemony and Foucauldian notions of governmentality in order to detect actions of the state that have the power to produce institutions of containment in local settings. The theoretical framework adds one other dimension, counter-containment, to understand responses by local communities to the state’s containment strategies. These contributions show the importance of recognizing the inherent political nature of food security interventions, even when based on careful contextualized Institutional diagnostics.

4 Reflection: the need for ex ante diagnostics and triangulation

Two main lessons can be drawn from this special issue. Firstly, there is a clear need for ex ante institutional diagnostics. In the array of articles in this special issue, we see a tendency to diagnose interventions or treatments instead of the existing institutional context itself. We think this tendency is indicative for a broader development in the social sciences. Although very valuable for gaining insight in what interventions might ‘do’, diagnosing the effect of interventions or treatments is not enough to understand why specific areas are more food secure than other. The focus on treatments and interventions seems to go hand in hand with a tendency to search for best practices. Although acknowledging that different problems might require different institutional interventions, assessing interventions alone might suggest that interventions takes place in a food insecure, though institutionally ‘empty’ space. For understanding cross country differences in food security, and for learning from those differences, the researcher should first of all look at what ‘is’ in terms of institutional context before problematizing and developing remedies for what ‘ought to be’.

Many of the articles in this special issue explicitly point to the importance of dovetailing interventions with local institutional context and processes in order to be better able to enhance food security (e.g. Osei-Amponsah et al., this issue; Bhaduri et al., this issue; Akullo et al., this issue; Sidibé et al., this issue; Berkhout et al., this issue). To understand the local institutional context is thus considered of key importance (cf. Schouten et al., 2016). The discussion in this special issue confirms that researchers should take a step back and become ex ante institutional diagnosticians before diving into assessing the effectiveness of interventions. In this way, they can inform and guide decision-makers in designing locally appropriate interventions. However, diagnostic methods are not meant to yield simple recipes that anyone can use with a high probability of success, rather it provides a way forward that can increase the likelihood of success of interventions in the hands of skilled and experienced practitioners (Young, 2002).

Secondly, ex ante diagnostics requires sophisticated theorization. This special issue shows that not one theoretical approach to institutional diagnostics is able to provide the complete picture or an all-encompassing diagnostic devise. Developing institutional diagnostics in view of sustainable food security therefore requires theoretical triangulation; food insecurity is typically a problem emerging from a configuration of distinct processes. Institutional diagnostics should be an “ongoing and iterative process which may require long term investigation with multiple sources to cross-check and provide a deep understanding of historical, political, and social contexts that all play a role in institutional mechanisms” (Sidibé et al., this issue), which requires combining different theoretical frameworks. Voors (this issue) reaches a similar conclusion: “in the diagnostic process, input from across the disciplines is essential; both formal theorising and insights emerging from qualitative investigations are essential for sound diagnostics. It helps prioritize what constraints are most binding, what interventions may work, and what researchers could expect in terms of possible programme effects”. However, theoretical triangulation alone is not enough. As Bhaduri et al. (this issue) point out “a better appreciation of the plurality of knowledge is needed to identify which institutional set-ups can strengthen localized and context-specific ways to enhance food security”. To develop a contextual and precise understanding of how institutions work and to identify what an institutional context ‘is good at’, the special issue therefore argues in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences that is strongly rooted in evolving practices (re)arranging institutions affecting food security.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is initiated by PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and organized in collaboration with the Partnerships Resource Centre and Wageningen University. The authors would like to thank PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency for their generous funding, including a writeshop in preparation of the special issue, and making the special issue publicly available. We are greatly indebted to Martha van Eerdt for her continuous involvement. Moreover, we would like to thank our two reviewers for their very useful comments on this introductory paper of our special issue, and we thank all the reviewers of the contributions collected in this special issue.