Food governance for better access to sustainable diets: A review

Abstract

‘Governance’, understood as organizational governance, is essential to more sustainable food provisioning systems ensuring sustainable health, heritage, and natural environments. Governance enables regional and local perspectives to be aligned with commitments from national and international organizations. Within the wealth of scholarship on food systems governance, agricultural governance and agency is a rarely interrogated dimension, despite the clear impacts of agricultural decisions on health and environmental outcomes. In this paper we discuss the findings of a scoping review that focuses on the question “How can food governance transform food systems to ensure better access to sustainable diets?”, meaning diet that protect health, cultures, and the natural environment. Our results show that it is first needed to determine the governance level and the expected outcomes. From a national perspective, policy coherence is described as a way in which different public institutions can add to the sustainable diets access goal. From a local perspective, community supported activities and the incorporation of local knowledge are also described as ways that can help achieving an improvement on sustainable diets access. Either from a regional or local perspective, commitment from organizations must be ensured for common objectives being aligned. Also, it is necessary to request more from the agricultural sector role in delivering nutritionally and environmentally appropriate food. Thus, the idea of governing agriculture as a health and environmental activity is an approach that should be considered when designing, implementing, and assessing food systems.

A Scoping Review of Food Systems Governance Frameworks and Models to Develop a Typology for Social Change Movements to Transform Food Systems for People and Planetary Health

“…More than a dozen different terms have been used to describe food systems governance in the published and grey literature that vary based on the actors, context, geography, scale, level, and type of governance processes that influence diets and agri-food systems. These terms include food, nutrition, and/or food systems governance [21,[32][33][34][35]; food safety governance [36]; food security governance [37]; aquaculture governance [38]; agri-food chain and agroecosystems governance [39]; sustainability governance for food systems [40]; and private or corporate food governance [17,[41][42][43]. Many UN system and grey literature sources described aspirational principles to transform food systems, such as collaborative shared governance [44], inclusive food systems and rights-based governance [45][46][47][48], good governance [49,50], responsible governance [51], regulatory and accountable governance [52], and transformative food governance [53].…”

Food security status in Cirebon Regency and how it could lead To sustainability

“…Regulating the food system is a subject of concern and aspiration, as well as an effective remedy. This represents a fundamental factor in the execution of sustainable alteration [7], [26]. Numerous obstacles emerge at this alteration : 1).…”

Redefining Food Sources: Exploring the Disconnect between Goat Farming and Its Perceived Sustainability—A Case Study in Chitima, Mozambique

“…When relating food and sustainability, although most studies are focused on the "health-environment" duality [5], recent approaches have started considering other context-specific concerns as sustainability drivers, such as the affordability and socio-cultural acceptability of diets at the global, regional, local, and individual level [6,7]. From this sustainability perspective, it becomes critical to understand the way local food sources, either animal or vegetable, are perceived in order to better understand how they can tackle regional challenges such as food insecurity.…”