Food Systems Transformation And Local Governance

Spiraling food prices and global supply chain disruptions precipitated by the Ukraine war, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and regional conflicts have worsened hunger for millions of people, requiring humanitarian and resilience-building responses to be urgently scaled up. These current crises and urgent needs, discussed in more detail elsewhere in this report, amplify longstanding structural deficiencies in the global food system, which is inadequate for sustainably ending poverty and hunger as envisaged by the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda (Barrett et al. 2020; Webb et al. 2020). Several high-level gatherings in recent years have reinforced this message, including the UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November 2021, and the Nutrition for Growth Summit in December 2021 (von Braun et al. 2021). Yet the crucial topic of food systems governance, which plays a core role in determining whether people have nutritious and sustainable diets, has largely been marginalized in these global assemblies (Canfield, Anderson, and McMichael 2021).

Food systems consist of the interactions among the many actors involved in growing, processing, distributing, consuming, and disposing of food products, and their links with the social, environmental, and economic structures in which they are embedded (Fanzo et al. 2021; HLPE 2017). Governance of these food systems encompasses the actors and institutions that exert power over food access, availability, and quality; the ways through which priorities are deliberated, coordinated, and acted upon; and the responsibilities for financing, delivering, and monitoring results (Delaney et al. 2018).

Because food systems are multifaceted—spanning agriculture, health, environment, gender, markets and trade, humanitarian assistance, and several other domains—food systems governance is always complicated by the need to reconcile competing interests and values and to achieve policy coherence across sectors. Recent political trends further circumscribe efforts to improve food systems governance. At the global level, rising nationalism and geopolitical tensions— underscored by the war in Ukraine—threaten prospects for multilateral cooperation on food systems and food and nutrition security. At the national level, civic spaces and freedom of expression are becoming increasingly repressed (CIVICUS 2021; Dupuy, Fransen, and Prakash 2021), with at least 50 countries legally limiting the operations of civil society organizations (Amnesty International 2019). The narrowing of such spaces hinders citizens from claiming and realizing their right to adequate food, as enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as from participating in decisions on how to tackle hunger and from learning about and exercising their constitutional entitlements (Elver 2016; Fakhri 2020).

Given these dynamics, this essay focuses on opportunities to improve food systems governance at the local level. In some countries, citizens are finding innovative ways to amplify their voices in food system debates—including by using data to track government performance and by engaging in multistakeholder platforms—and keeping decision makers accountable for addressing food and nutrition insecurity and hunger. Encouragingly, examples of empowerment are just as visible in fragile contexts with high levels of societal fractionalization as they are in more stable settings with longer traditions of local democracy.

While recognizing that transforming food systems ultimately requires interventions at multiple levels, a greater focus on local governance of food systems is warranted for five main reasons.

First, consumer preferences, natural resource management practices, and farming and livestock rearing methods are often grounded in local cultural traditions, historical experiences, and agroecological conditions.

Second, as the world urbanizes and cities demonstrate their own unique food security challenges (Crush and Riley 2019; Fan 2017), mayors and municipal councils have become more influential in transnational development networks (Barber 2014). In initiatives such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, leaders of major world cities express shared commitments related to climate action and food policies. These initiatives have given mayors a platform to proceed with their own food systems goals that may reinforce, bypass, or intersect with national-level aspirations (Moragues-Faus 2021).

Third, the trend toward decentralizing government functions over the past 20 years has given greater political autonomy and functional authority to subnational governments (Rodden and Wibbels 2019). Consequently, local governments increasingly have more functional authority over key elements of food systems, such as the location of and infrastructure in informal markets, which are main sources of food for the urban poor (Smit 2016). In many countries— from Ghana to Nepal, Kenya to Pakistan—authority for budgeting, designing, and implementing food systems policies in the agriculture, health, and environment domains has been devolved to provinces, counties, or districts (Kyle and Resnick 2019; Resnick 2022; Resnick and Rana 2016).

Fourth, a local lens is particularly necessary in fragile states where—owing to ongoing conflict, weak capacity, or both—national governments are unable to exert power, authority, or legitimacy across the full range of territory that they legally govern. Instead, informal sources of governance, such as traditional authorities, may have greater credibility with local communities (Baldwin and Raffler 2019). Conversely, certain subnational areas, such as the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo or northeastern Nigeria, can be disproportionately infiltrated by armed groups and violent nonstate actors whose presence limits opportunities for community engagement. Consequently, these areas, which tend to be the worst affected by hunger (Delgado and Smith 2021), are least likely to experience the benefits of national food system commitments.

Finally, a local perspective can help reveal whether and how national food system priorities actually reflect local needs and preferences. Food corporations and agribusiness interests can, through corporate concentration and lobbying resources, play an outsized role in national and global decision making around food and agriculture policy (see Clapp and Fuchs 2009). Yet at the subnational level, there may be circumstances where such actors are less prominent, creating a more even playing field for understanding the concerns of communities and the frontline service providers who are ultimately responsible for implementing agrifood systems policies.

When adopting a local lens, however, it is important to remember that the same tools for participation and accountability cannot be used everywhere. The nature of civic engagement in food system processes at the local level, and the degree to which local governments can be held accountable for food and nutrition security outcomes, depends on the extent of community power relations and social cohesion as well as on the broader governance setting. For instance, participation is naturally more limited in countries where the state limits freedom of association and speech. Moreover, where local government leaders are appointed rather than elected, those leaders often feel more accountable to the central government that appointed them than to the community residents they serve (Faguet 2012). Fragile states characterized by high vulnerability to societal conflict and weak oversight may require especially careful approaches to citizen engagement. Figure 2.1 illustrates how these different dimensions correspond with each other, highlighting that while there is a strong association between more empowered local governments and those that allow greater space for civil society participation, fragility can be present in a wide variety of settings. Thus, tools for engaging citizens and promoting accountability need to be appropriate for the degree of local government autonomy, the space citizens have to engage in freedom of speech and association, and the level of government fragility, which can affect the capacity of local authorities.

How exactly can communities in these different settings engage at the local level to improve accountability for food and nutrition security outcomes? Many innovative approaches have emerged in recent years. Here, two mechanisms are considered. One is the use of data and technology to track performance at the local level. The other consists of local platforms that bring many stakeholders together to contribute their perspectives on food system challenges and policy options. These approaches are relatively new, so their direct impacts on food security and long-term sustainability will require further study, but it is worth examining here their potential and initial achievements in improving food security policy processes.

Tracking Local Performance

One set of accountability mechanisms centers on surveillance of policy and project implementation. Because implementing policies and projects that affect food and nutrition security often requires spending money, budget tracking has gained prominence. For several years, the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement has worked with its member countries to analyze government budget allocations toward policies that are nutrition-specific, such as micronutrient supplementation and infant and young child feeding programs, and nutrition-sensitive, such as clean water, sanitation, and access to healthcare (Fracassi et al. 2020). While this approach captures the amounts that are budgeted by governments for nutrition, it does not capture the amounts they actually disburse, so other complementary approaches have also emerged, such as the World Bank’s nutrition public expenditure reviews (Wang et al. 2022).

For both budget and expenditure tracking, the lack of publicly accessible subnational data on nutrition, agriculture, and other food system dimensions—due to either unavailability or unaffordable license fees—poses a challenge for accountability. Yet some local actors have found ways around this information shortfall. In Nigeria, for example, the civic organization BudgIT has since 2011 aggregated all state-level budgets and uses its open data Tracka platform to enable the public to provide information about the implementation of government projects in their communities (BudgIT 2022; Tracka 2022; Herbst and Onigbinde 2017). This is increasingly facilitating civic awareness and participation in a country traditionally characterized by its opaque budget processes (Bisong and Ogwumike 2020).

Another approach focuses on incentivizing local governments to perform better through peer comparisons. In Ghana, District League Tables (DLTs) have been published annually by UNICEF and Ghana’s National Development Planning Commission since 2014 to enhance civic awareness and improve social accountability. The DLTs are scorecards that rely on administrative data for all of the country’s 260 districts to calculate 17 indicators focused on five domains: education, health, water and sanitation, governance, and information and communication technology (NDPC and UNICEF Ghana 2021). The highest- and lowest-ranked districts are often profiled in the media, encouraging public scrutiny of performance. More recently, the government announced the launch of the National District Awards, which will reward the best-performing districts on the DLTs with additional financial support (Aniagyei 2022).

Yet scorecards can result in minimal impact if they reflect idealized outcomes that are not feasible given the capacities of local government; if they exacerbate tensions between communities, bureaucrats, and politicians; and if they fail to generate interest among policymakers (Kelley 2017). Several initiatives have therefore shifted to developing such tools in a more interactive way with local governments, with opportunities for feedback and refinement. In Malawi’s Mangochi District, the Community Initiative for Self Reliance (CISER), in coordination with local civil society organizations, started developing community scorecards in the 2020–2021 agricultural season to capture residents’ experiences with one of the national government’s flagship programs, the Affordable Inputs Program (AIP), which provides subsidized fertilizer and seeds to vulnerable farmers. The indicators were initially developed with several communities in the district and the District Agricultural Extension Coordinating Committee (DAECC), based on AIP guidelines.

The communities and civil servants from the District Agriculture Office scored the performance of the program based on the indicators. The scorecards revealed several weaknesses in the AIP: among other things, the mobile application used for redeeming input coupons was slow and volatile, inputs were disbursed too late in the planting season, poor roads in the rainy season affected people’s ability to access input distribution sites, individuals who lost their national identity cards had problems obtaining the inputs, and mechanisms for airing grievances were lacking. The DAECC communicated many of these issues to the central government, which addressed several of them in the subsequent agricultural season. For instance, farmers are now allowed to obtain their inputs from a different location than originally allocated, and inputs are delivered to agro-dealers earlier in the season. Furthermore, a new indicator—experience with gender-based violence when trying to access the AIP inputs— has been added to the scorecard (interview, Felix Sanudi, CISER, June 10, 2022).

In Nepal, the civil society organization Aasaman Nepal has used a similar interactive approach to develop community scorecards. In two municipalities within Madhesh Province, residents, municipal representatives, and service providers convene to discuss their expectations for their health facilities and the quality of the health services to which citizens are entitled. They organize an assessment of health services, jointly discuss and develop indicators to score the performance of health facilities and services, separately assess those indicators, and then reconvene. If a health facility’s performance falls below a certain threshold, all participants agree on an action plan and identify their roles and responsibilities for improving performance. In each of the health facilities, this action plan is publicly posted and regularly monitored; the following year, performance is reassessed (interview, Mani Ram Acharya, Aasaman Nepal, June 2, 2022).

Such collaboration may be more challenging in contexts that are fragile or that lack formal venues for meaningful civic engagement. Sudan’s resistance committees represent one example of a grassroots movement aimed at promoting accountability and addressing gaps in service delivery. First arising in Khartoum in 2013, these committees emerged organically, encompassing students, unemployed youth, and activists from urban neighborhoods. The committees made efforts to oversee bread distribution in Sudan’s main cities by using a mobile application to record data on flour deliveries, bakery closures, and smuggling. In this way, they aimed to prevent bakeries from siphoning off subsidized flour for illegal purposes (Resnick 2021). Although the long-term sustainability of this volunteer-based initiative remains questionable, the committees nonetheless remain an important feature in urban Sudan almost a decade after their original formation.

Meaningfully Engaging Local Stakeholders

Multistakeholder platforms, which aim to foster dialogue and collaboration among a diverse range of constituents, are a popular tool for addressing the complexities of agricultural and food system transformation (Hermans et al. 2017; Thorpe et al. 2022). They are especially popular for promoting citizens’ entitlements to the right to food (see Box 2.1). There are, however, several concerns about such platforms, including whether they create unrealistic expectations from participants about policy outcomes (Resnick and Birner 2010) and whether they simply reinforce existing power asymmetries in the food system (Canfield, Anderson, and McMichael 2021; Gleckman 2018; HLPE 2018). This is particularly problematic in local settings with entrenched forms of patriarchy and other asymmetrical power relationships.

Attuned to these concerns, several multistakeholder platforms are sensitive to how voices are heard in these fora. In Bolivia, for example, the civil society organization Fundación Alternativas has been working with the municipal food security committee in La Paz since 2013. The committee, which aims to ensure that resources are devoted to food security and food system policy priorities, includes participants from all levels of government, the private sector, and civil society. Organized into specific thematic groups, the participants meet monthly to identify where parts of the food system need to be improved and collaborate on either normative draft laws to be considered by the legislative branch or work on proposals for targeted investments (interview, Maria Teresa Nogales, Fundación Alternativas, June 6, 2022). In 2018–2019, the committee was instrumental in drafting a municipal law for urban agriculture, which is now legally recognized as an appropriate use of land (Nogales 2019).

Critically, the thematic groups in the municipal food security committee must reach consensus before proceeding with a policy recommendation. The committee’s deliberations are bolstered by the use of the Dialogic Change Model (interview, Maria Teresa Nogales, Fundación Alternativas, June 6, 2022); this model is a structured collaborative approach to planning and implementation that emphasizes the need to hear everyone’s voice in multistakeholder platforms (Collective Leadership Institute n.d.).

In Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Peru, subnational platforms focusing on collaborative management of land and forestry resources revealed several power asymmetries among stakeholders that affected the groups’ efficacy. For instance, indigenous communities felt marginalized, or only those civil society actors with travel budgets could participate (Barletti 2022). Consequently, the “How are we doing?” tool developed by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its partners is based on the principles of adaptive collaborative management and is aimed at increasing trust and equity in these settings through continuous feedback from participants, resulting in iterative shifts in the design of the multistakeholder platforms (Barletti et al. 2020).

In Peru, roundtables for local development in food security have been led by Consorcio Agroecológico Peruano (CAP) and Red de Agricultura Ecológica del Perú (RAE) in five districts surrounding metropolitan Lima in the Lurín and Chillón valleys. The roundtables build on existing, organic community structures that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, when residents of low-income neighborhoods in those valleys and elsewhere in the capital city organized soup kitchens known as “common pots.” These kitchens have continued as a survival strategy during the global inflation spurred by the war in Ukraine (Briceno 2022). CAP, RAE, and other nongovernmental organizations work with these networks of popular kitchens and also incorporate farmer organizations, youth groups, and religious associations. As in Bolivia, these roundtables meet regularly either in person or virtually, organize around thematic groups, and focus on improving local laws relevant to food systems (interview, Juan Sanchez, CAP/RAE, June 6, 2022).

While Bolivia and Peru deepened their decentralization processes in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, respectively, with executive mayors who have functional autonomy over specific aspects of the food system, Nepal’s experience with local government is much more recent. The country’s 2015 Constitution provides for three tiers of government: national, provincial, and municipalities. Following the passage of the Local Government Operations Act (LGOA) in 2017 and the 2017 local elections, municipalities received legal authority to formulate and implement policies in 22 domains.

In this delicate environment of newly empowered and elected local governments, the civil society organization Aasaman Nepal has focused on ensuring municipalities’ responsiveness to residents’ concerns about food and nutrition security, health, and other development needs. Since 2018 Aasaman Nepal has leveraged the seven-step local planning process that is integral to the LGOA, working in eight municipalities in Madhesh Province where gender inequality, landlessness, food insecurity, and malnutrition are high. In each municipality, participatory planning begins each year in February at the settlement level, where communities discuss priorities and development plans that are then streamlined at the next-highest administrative level, the ward, before being incorporated into the municipal-level plans. Over the past three years, more and more plans have been approved by the municipalities, and in 2021 the eight municipalities approved 341 settlement plans submitted by the groups through this process (interview, Mani Ram Acharya, Aasaman Nepal, June 2, 2022).

Niger represents a particularly fragile environment owing to growing desertification, a struggling economy, and the presence of many nonstate armed groups along its borders. Nonetheless, community groups have coalesced in several thematic multistakeholder platforms to address targeted food system problems with support from the High Commission for the Nigeriens Nourishing Nigeriens (HC3N) initiative. For instance, in 2021, HC3N facilitated an exchange between farmers’ organizations and processors in the flour value chain. The participants addressed challenges related to providing fortified flour from local millet and sorghum at an affordable price and of consistent quality for consumers while still ensuring that both processors and farmers can make a decent living from the value chain, given the variations in access to and prices for inputs. Jointly, the participants found consensus on several areas of action for policymakers to pursue (interview, Gervais Ntandou-Bouzitou, FAO-Niger and technical assistant to HC3N, June 10, 2022).

On their own, accountability tools may not directly improve food and nutrition security. However, as elaborated in this essay, the experiences of these various communities and civil society organizations with using performance tracking and multistakeholder platforms suggests several successes, such as the adoption of a new municipal law in Bolivia, more inclusive budgeting processes in Nepal, and improved service delivery in Malawi, all of which indirectly affect food access and quality. Moreover, the practice of exercising oversight and participation empowers communities to demand government responsiveness while increasing their awareness of their entitlements and the means to access them. Though not sufficient, these actions are surely necessary in the continued quest for better food and nutrition security.

At the same time, several key lessons emerge from these experiences.

First, it is important to recognize that local governments often have fewer resources and technical staff than their central government counterparts. Moreover, given the wide diversity of local government settings, it is important to ensure that governance efforts are well matched to conditions and capacities on the ground and to be realistic about the replicability of such tools. In more decentralized settings, citizens may be able to draw on established planning and budget structures, regular collection of administrative data, and skilled local bureaucrats to advance food policy. In countries that have only recently decentralized, citizens will need to internalize the practices of local democracy and set up ways to participate in implementing and overseeing development projects. In fragile and more autocratic settings, organic community efforts may be the only realistic channel for action on local food systems governance. When possible, partners can learn from such efforts and facilitate the scaling up of such measures to other communities.

Second, local leadership is pivotal to the sustainability of local interventions. In Peru, in mid-2022, concerns about whether local elections in October 2022 will derail momentum on food commitments has led the civil society organizations Consorcio Agroecológico Peruano (CAP) and Red de Agricultura Ecológica del Perú (RAE) to educate all mayoral candidates about the work of multistakeholder platforms in the Lurín and Chillón valleys. By contrast, in Nepal, a new cadre of motivated local leaders elected in May 2022 created a window of opportunity for Aasaman Nepal to scale up its activities. Similarly, while the municipal government of Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo, has been a partner in the city’s Food Policy Council since its inception in 2016, all projects are led by “champion” nongovernmental stakeholders who can ensure that momentum on food policy continues even as mayors change (Andrianarisoa et al. 2019).

Third, those local communities with the worst hunger have the most to gain from improved accountability. However, owing to weak or poor governance, high levels of displacement, and a lack of security, initiatives to enhance accountability will encounter greater risks of failure. Development partners need to be prepared for this potential trade-off and ensure that their planning and engagement with communities incorporate a sufficiently long timeline and flexibility in funding arrangements. In extremely fragile contexts affected by ongoing crises and dominated by humanitarian coordination structures, any interventions to empower local communities to shape food systems should also build on the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability—a set of nine commitments designed to hold humanitarian agencies accountable to affected populations (CHS Management Group 2022).

Overall, while the governance of food systems takes place at multiple levels, there are, even in the most fragile contexts, innovative mechanisms and tools that can empower local communities to shape food systems in ways that address hunger, food and nutrition security, and related concerns. In places where local democracy is relatively new, creating support for a culture of inclusion and accountability inevitably requires a high degree of learning, patience, and realism. The local milieu—whether neighborhood, district, or municipality— remains the main level at which citizens engage with the state and where they are most directly affected by food policy and service delivery performance. Harnessing their experiences and mobilizing their voices is therefore pivotal for meaningful food system transformation that ultimately benefits all people, especially the most vulnerable.