Determining the transformative potential of circular agriculture initiatives.

Policymakers and scientists regard emerging circular initiatives as levers for transformations towards more sustainable food systems. However, it remains unclear how to determine the extent to which circular initiatives have transformative potential. That is, can these initiatives foster a transformation as a result of how they currently bring circularity into practice? In the transformation literature, the characteristics of transformative initiatives are conceptualised in a generic and abstract way. To address this gap, we develop a heuristic of five characteristics for potentially transformative circular agriculture initiatives, which we illustrate with examples of existing initiatives. The heuristic builds on the 'small wins' and circular agriculture literature. Initiatives that hold transformative potential contribute to circular agriculture principles with outcomes that are concrete, in-depth and both technological and social in nature. Additionally, these initiatives faced barriers and overcame them. The heuristic enables policymakers, who call for circular solutions, to identify truly transformative circular initiatives.

Benchmarking policy goals and actions for healthy food environments in Ethiopia to prevent malnutrition in all its forms using document analysis.

OBJECTIVE: Unhealthy diets resulting in overweight and obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases are of increasing concern in Ethiopia, alongside persistent undernutrition, and have been linked to unhealthy food environments. Little is known about the policy response to unhealthy food environments in Ethiopia. The objective of this study was to assess how different food environment domains have been addressed in Ethiopian policy goals and action over time and how this compares with global good practice benchmarks. SETTING: Ethiopia. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: We analysed intentions and plans of the government to act, using policy documents (outputs of decision-making in the form of published strategies, plans or policies) related to improving diets and nutritional status through healthy food environments in Ethiopia between 2008 and 2020. Our coding framework was guided by the policy component (n=7 domains) of the Healthy Food-Environment Policy Index, which was modified to include food quality and safety as an eighth domain. RESULTS: From the 127 policy outputs identified, 38 were retained, published by 9 different government ministries and institutions. Our results show that eight food environment domains have been addressed to some extent, but gaps remain compared with global best practice, especially in food promotion, processing, retail, price and trade. From 2018, policy began to embrace the wider food system, with more explicit food environment interventions becoming apparent. CONCLUSIONS: Policy efforts achieved in food safety, food processing, marketing and labelling are important stepping stones to building future policy actions addressing the food environment domains of food retail, food provision and food trade. Benchmarking of food environment policy actions should also consider actions on food fortification, agro-processing and informal markets in the context of multiple forms of malnutrition.

Power to the people? Food democracy initiatives' contributions to democratic goods.

In order to foster a transition of the food system toward more sustainable outcomes, scholars have increasingly pointed at the need for organizing strengthened food democracy. By increasing the participation of citizens and food system actors, democratic innovations, such as food policy councils, are believed to promote the quality and legitimacy of food policymaking. However, the question of whether and how food democracy initiatives do indeed contribute to more democratic modes of governance largely remains unexplored. This study addresses this gap by performing a systematic literature review of the existing scholarship on food democracy, assessing democratic innovations for their contributions to four democratic goods: inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment and transparency. The analysis shows that food democracy initiatives tend to be dominated by organized interests, have more influence on agenda-setting and implementation compared to decision-making, and generally aim for some form of deliberation or knowledge exchange. The precise selection mechanisms, processes and quality of deliberation, and transparency of democratic innovations remain important research gaps. The paper ends with a plea to better connect food democracy scholarship with the broader political sciences, as well as various suggestions for future research. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10460-022-10322-5.

Integrating Nutrition Actions in Service Delivery: The Practices of Frontline Workers in Uganda.

BACKGROUND: Integrating nutrition actions into service delivery in different policy sectors is an increasing concern. Nutrition literature recognizes the discrepancies existing between policies as adopted and actual service delivery. This study applies a street-level bureaucracy (SLB) perspective to understand frontline workers' practices that enact or impede nutrition integration in services and the conditions galvanizing them. METHODS: This qualitative exploratory study assesses the contextual conditions and practices of 45 frontline workers employed by the agriculture, health and community development departments in two Ugandan districts. RESULTS: Frontline workers incur different demands and resources arising at societal, organizational, and individual level. Hence, they adopt nine co-existing practices that ultimately shape nutrition service delivery. Nutrition integration is accomplished through: (1) ritualizing task performance; (2) bundling with established services; (3) scheduling services on a specific day; and (4) piggybacking on services in other domains. Disintegration results from (5) non-involvement and (6) shifting blame to other entities. Other practices display both integrative and disintegrative effects: (7) creaming off citizens; (8) down prioritization by fixating on a few nutrition actions; and (9) following the bureaucratic 'jobs worth'. Integrative practices are driven mostly by donors. CONCLUSION: Understanding frontline workers' practices is crucial for identifying policy solutions to sustain nutrition improvements. Sustaining services beyond timebound projects necessitates institutionalizing demands and resources within government systems. Interventions to facilitate effective nutrition service delivery should strengthen the integrative capacities of actors across different government levels. This includes investing in integrative leadership, facilitating frontline workers across sectors to provide nutrition services, and adjusting the nutrition monitoring systems to capture cross-sector data and support policy learning.

Conceptualizing controversies in the EU circular bioeconomy transition.

The transition towards a circular bioeconomy (CBE) in the European Union is not without contestation. In particular, research has highlighted potential trade-offs of the large-scale production of bio-resources, for instance with environmental quality goals. To date, however, it remains underexplored in the CBE literature how controversies develop throughout a transition process. To address this gap, this paper explores where controversies are situated in a transition, how they change throughout, and how they influence the transition process. First, we suggest that controversies can be situated on and between different system layers within a transition. Second, we offer an explanation of how controversies evolve, as actors confirm, integrate, disintegrate and polarize underlying storylines. Third, these controversies can have both productive and unproductive outcomes while they unfold throughout a transition. We illustrate this understanding with the example of biorefineries as CBE key technology and discuss a research agenda on controversies in sustainability transitions.

Do we need a new science-policy interface for food systems?

Credibility, legitimacy, and diversity of knowledge are critical.

The framing of malnutrition by parliamentarians in Uganda.

The quest for political commitment to reducing malnutrition in sub-Sahara Africa draws attention to the role of national parliamentarians. Whereas parliamentarians have the authority to ratify legislation, monitor policies and budgets and transform behaviour, to date little is known about how malnutrition is understood and debated in sub-Saharan African political arenas. This study addresses that gap by exploring how (mal)nutrition has been framed by parliamentarians in Uganda between 2001 and 2017. Applying framing theory we performed a qualitative content analysis of 131 Parliament Hansards transcripts to determine the different meanings of nutrition. Our analysis distinguishes seven co-occurring frames that entail different, sometimes competing, understandings of the drivers and possible solutions of malnutrition. The frames are: (i) the emergency nutrition frame, (ii) the chronic vulnerability frame, (iii) the school feeding frame, (iv) the disease-related frame, (v) the diversification frame, (vi) the overnutrition (among politicians) frame and (vii) the poverty and inequality frame. These frames are sponsored by different groups of parliamentarians, most notably politicians representing constituencies with high degrees of malnutrition, the president, some ministers and politicians in parliamentary forums concerned with children and women issues. Our analysis helps to understand why policy measures get prioritized or disregarded by policymakers. Overall, we show that frame sponsors prioritize short-term tangible solutions, such as food assistance and agricultural inputs, over longer term solutions. We suggest that a more comprehensive policy frame is prerequisite to developing a more effective governance approach to malnutrition in Uganda.