System Effects: A Hybrid Methodology for Exploring the Determinants of Food In/Security

Abstract

Household food insecurity is the product of a wide range of environmental, social, and economic determinants, which themselves interact with and affect one another. On this point, though, much of the existing food security scholarship suffers from a lack of theoretical sophistication and tends to neglect the complex nature of the urban foodscape. This article develops an original systematic mixed method for understanding the determinants of food security, grounded in a new theoretical framework that integrates complex systems theory and the capability approach. Both theory and method have been developed by reference to a comparative empirical study of Afghan migrant communities in Sydney, London, and San Francisco. The efficacy of this (re)theorization and its accompanying system effects method are demonstrated by way of a worked example of their use in the case of the Sydney Afghan community.

家户粮食不安全, 是一系列广泛的环境、社会与经济决定因素的产物, 而这些决定因素之间有所互动并相互影响。但就这方面而言, 诸多既有的粮食安全学术研究, 饱受缺乏理论复杂度所苦, 并倾向忽略城市粮食地景的复杂本质。本文发展一个原初的系统性混合方法, 以理解粮食安全的决定因素, 并根据整合复杂的系统理论和能力方法的崭新理论架构。理论与方法, 皆透过参照悉尼、伦敦与旧金山的阿富汗移民社群之比较经验研究建立之。此一 (再) 理论化的效用, 及其伴随的系统效应方法, 通过其在悉尼的阿富汗社群之案例研究进行展现。

La inseguridad alimentaria familiar es el resultado de una amplia gama de determinantes ambientales, sociales y económicos, los cuales interactúan entre sí y se afectan los unos a los otros. No obstante, en relación con este punto, la mayor parte de la erudición existente sobre seguridad alimentaria sufre de una falta de sofisticación teórica y tiende a desatender la compleja naturaleza del paisaje alimentario urbano. Este artículo desarrolla un método mixto sistemático original para comprender los determinantes de la seguridad alimentaria, fundamentado en un nuevo marco teórico que integra la teoría de los sistemas complejos y el enfoque de capacidad. Tanto la teoría como el método han sido desarrollados con referencia a un estudio empírico comparativo de las comunidades migratorias afganas en Sídney, Londres y San Francisco. La eficacia de esta (re)teorización y su método de efectos sistémicos que la acompañan se demuestran por medio de un ejemplo trabajado de su uso en el caso de la comunidad afgana de Sídney.

Key Words:

• capabilities approach
• complexity theory
• food security
• methods

关键词：:

• 能力方法
• 复杂性理论
• 粮食安全
• 方法。

Palabras clave:

• enfoque de las capacidades
• teoría de la complejidad
• seguridad alimentaria
• métodos

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the valuable feedback I received from David Schlosberg, Bill Pritchard, and Julian Agyeman on earlier drafts of this article. I am particularly grateful to Mei-Po Kwan and four anonymous reviewers for their generative comments, all of which greatly improved this finished product. All remaining errors are solely my own.

Notes

1. Defined broadly, a household is considered to be food insecure “whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or the ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways is limited or uncertain” (Anderson 1990, 1560).

2. Other notable examples include Hammond and Dubé (2012), Pieters, Guariso, and Vandelplas (2013), Friel and Ford (2015), and Friel et al. (2015), which are all referenced throughout this section.

3. Recently, Burchi and Du Muro (2012) used the capabilities approach to provide a new set of indicators for use in measuring food insecurity in the developing world, although they focus on food security as an output variable, rather than on the determinants of food insecurity, which are the focus of the approach I outline here.

4. The extant literature treats conversion factors as positive vectors (e.g., holding all other factors constant, the more educated a person is, the more able he or she is to convert the available resources into a given functioning). Barriers operate as negative vectors, so that the greater a given barrier, the less able a person is to convert resources into functionings. In a nondynamic model of a person's capability set, the sum of these vectors would represent the extent to which a given conversion process can be achieved.

5. These features have been adapted from Byrne and Callaghan (2014), Cilliers (1998), Elliott and Kiel (1997), and Mitchell (2011).

6. This approach and its immediate antecedents are influenced by early work in systems dynamics, particularly Forrester (1961) and Meadows (2008).

7. As background, many Western languages have a subject–object–verb structure, which creates a cognitive bias of linear causality (see Senge 1992, 74). In my experience, this bias manifests itself in practice as the inability of respondents to express the varied determinants of food insecurity through oral elicitation.

8. This section draws on Newman (2010) and Barrat et al. (2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke K. Craven

LUKE K. CRAVEN is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney and the Sydney Environment Institute, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. His interests lie in the application of social and political theory to contemporary policy problems, with a focus on food, health, and environmental issues.