Agency in Food Systems - a metric approach and its implications for Food Security

Project: PhD

Project Details

Description

Food systems became a key interest in food related research as well as in the conceptualisation of programmes in international cooperation. When leaning on the concept of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE), food systems consist of all actors and their interlinked value-adding activities in the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal of food as well as the social and natural environments in which the food-actors are embedded. This holistic view on the interacting and interlinked food-actors recognizes the importance of linkages, feedback mechanisms and drivers present in a food system (FAO, 2018; HLPE, 2014; HLPE, 2017). HLPE defines food security as a context in which “all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (HLPE, 2020, p. 10). When relating the food systems approach with the definition of food security, functioning food systems are productive and prosperous to ensure food availability, while being equitable and inclusive to provide access to food for all people. Food systems must produce healthy and nutritious food to ensure absorption and utilization of nutrients, and they must be resilient to be stable when facing shocks and crises, as well as regenerative to secure sustainability in all its dimensions (Paganini et al., 2021). Agency was initially defined by Amartya Sen (1985; 1995) as an individual’s act to pursue his or her own values or goals. Alkire (2005) continued to refine Sen’s definition by translating what agency means in the life of an individual. She elaborates that agency is an individual’s ability to participate in economic, social, and political actions. With a rise of attention for agency in the last years, it is not surprising that it also gained attention in food security and food systems (e.g. Devereux et al., 2020). In a food system, an individual navigates while being influenced by political, economic, socio-cultural, demographic, and biophysical drivers (HLPE, 2014; HLPE 2017). Leaning on Sen and Alkire, agency in a food system could mean the ability of this individual to pursue his or her own values and goals in a food system while drivers are supporting or hindering him or her to do so. Agency was recently introduced as one of the five dimensions of food security which acknowledges the importance of people as active food system actors (HLPE, 2020). There, agency is defined as: “the capacity of individuals or groups to make their own choices about what foods they eat, the foods they produce, how that food is produced, processed and distributed within food systems, and their ability to engage in processes that shape food system policies and governance” (HLPE, 2020, XV) The definition directly articulates food security as a result of the ability to make choices and shape the food system. Combining the description of the new dimension of food security with the refined concept of agency by Alkire and the food systems approach, agency in the food system can be understood that access, influence, or exposure to drivers within the food system lead to more or less favorable results for people and groups depending on their ability to consciously shape their food system to their needs. While the working definition offers a first approach to the subject of agency as a dimension of food security, its inherent meaning for food security, food systems and finally an individual still remains unclear. It demonstrates the need for a thorough discussion of literature that should result in a better understanding of the mentioned concepts, what they actually mean for an individual and how it can be operationalized for monitoring and evaluation purposes. The introduction and recognition of agency as a dimension of food security has the consequence that agency will be integrated into policy and project development which implies the need for its measurement for monitoring and evaluation efforts. A lack of a metric would result in a discrepancy between the concept of food security and its transparent implementation (Clapp et al., 2022). Another knowledge gap relevant for policies and project planning is the relation between agency and the other dimensions of food security that already have widely used indicators such as the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). Agency is already used in evaluation tools that are applied to aspects of life that are related to food security and food systems.1 An index to measure food agency from Paganini et al. (2021) and Mewes (forthcoming) used a mixed-methods and co-research approach. Results from a household survey conducted in marginalized communities in South Africa showed a statistical relation between the FIES and the metric that was developed to measure food agency. Even though the research’s results are promising, it is only the starting point for the development of a refined tool to measure agency in the food system and to understand the relation between agency and other dimensions of food security.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/03/23 → …

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