scholarly journals Historicising global nutrition: critical reflections on contested pasts and reimagined futures

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (11) ◽  
pp. e006337
Author(s):  
Erica Marie Nelson ◽  
Nicholas Nisbett ◽  
Stuart Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Health And Nutrition ◽  
Previous Cycle ◽  
Global Systems ◽  
Global Nutrition

The COVID-19 pandemic has provoked a range of economic shocks, food systems shocks, public health crises and political upheavals across the globe, prompting a rethink of associated global systems. Prepandemic anticolonial movements that challenged hierarchies of race, space, gender and expert knowledge in global health took on new meaning in the context of the unequal impacts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it moved through different kinds of spaces and distinct political contexts. In light of these dynamics, and the desire of many current practitioners in global health to reimagine the future, the need for critical analyses of the recent past have become more urgent. Here we challenge linear understandings of progress in global health—with a focus on the field of nutrition—by returning to consider a previous cycle of dramatic social, political and economic change that prompted serious challenges to the dominance of Western powers and US-based philanthro-capitalists. With a ‘global’ health and nutrition audience in mind, we put forward considerations on why a better understanding of the continuities and divergences between this past and the present moment are necessary to challenge a status quo that was, and is, highly flawed.

scholarly journals Legal and human rights-based approaches to healthy diets and sustainable food systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
D W Patterson ◽  
K Buse ◽  
R Magnusson ◽  
B C A Toebes
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Sustainable Food Systems ◽  
Sustainable Food ◽  
Healthy Diets ◽  
Health And Development ◽  
The Right

Abstract Issue Malnutrition in all its forms poses daunting challenges to global health and development. The agriculture sector is a significant contributor to global warming. COVID-19 has pushed many people into poverty, including food poverty. A radical rethink of business models, food systems, civil society involvement, and national and international governance is required to address the interlinked crises of COVID-19, obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. International human rights law, institutions and mechanisms provide important opportunities for norm setting, advocacy and accountability. Yet these pathways are under-utilised by both governments and civil society. Description The global AIDS response demonstrated the power of a human rights-based approach. United Nations' HIV/AIDS and Human Rights Guidelines greatly influenced the global consensus for effective, evidence-based approaches. The Guidelines also informed resolutions of the UN General Assembly and its Human Rights Council, contributing to more affordable medicines, an unprecedented increase in people on treatment, less stigmatising health services, the empowerment of marginalised groups, and the institutionalisation of norms, including “no one left behind.” Human rights-based approaches have also been successfully utilised in tobacco control. Results In 2019, 180 experts from 38 countries published an open call on WHO and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to initiate an inclusive process to develop guidelines on human rights, healthy diets and sustainable food systems. Most signatories were from the health and development sectors, demonstrating the increasingly broad interest in using human rights mechanisms to address global health challenges. Lessons Opportunities exist to transform food systems and create healthier food environments and a healthier planet by clarifying existing international obligations to progressively realise the right to food and the right to health. Key messages Market forces, alone, are failing to deliver healthy diets and sustainable food systems. International legal frameworks and accountability mechanisms provide opportunities for engagement and action. Human rights guidelines can help mobilize multisectoral action, strengthen State and private sector accountability, and deepen community engagement in the urgent task of achieving Agenda 2030.

scholarly journals Verbesserte Finanzbedarfsmessung im nordrhein-westfälischen Finanzausgleich und ihre Verteilungswirkungen

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-218
Author(s):  
Thomas Brenner ◽  
Thomas Döring
Keyword(s):  
Robust Regression ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Time Stability ◽  
Fiscal Equalization ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Parameter Variations ◽  
Regression Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Fiscal Equalization System

Abstract Within the local fiscal equalization system of North Rhine-Westphalia, anticipated financial needs of municipalities are estimated by the use of regression analysis. In the recent past the previously exercised regression approach shows unexpected results concerning the main parameters determining intra-system allocation of general grants. Against this background the paper analyses the reasons for these parameter variations in order to identify an alternative approach to achieve regression results with higher accuracy and time stability both of which are of particular importance from a fiscal equalization policy perspective. It will be shown that the so-called robust regression is such an alternative method which leads – in case of its implementation – to divergent distributional effects compared to the status quo.

scholarly journals Digital epidemiology and global health security; an interdisciplinary conversation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Eckmanns ◽  
Henning Füller ◽  
Stephen L. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Disease Surveillance ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Surveillance Systems ◽  
Global Health Security ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Infectious Disease Surveillance ◽  
Digital Epidemiology ◽  
Perception Of Health

Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches – imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public health praxis into a dialogue, this conversation style contribution points out several broader implications of changing disease surveillance. The conversation covers epidemiological issues such as the shift from expert knowledge to algorithmic knowledge, the securitization of global health, and the construction of new kinds of threats. Those developments are detailed and discussed in their impacts for health provision in a broader sense.

Balancing agri-food systems for optimal global nutrition transition

2017 ◽  
pp. 233-246
Author(s):  
Linley Chiwona-Karltun ◽  
Leif Hambraeus ◽  
Friederike Bellin-Sesay
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Nutrition Transition ◽  
Global Nutrition

Global Health and Nutrition

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Brestoff ◽  
Jan Van den Broeck
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health And Nutrition

scholarly journals Power in Global Nutrition Governance

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Louise Lie
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Power Analysis ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Global Partnership ◽  
Health And Nutrition ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
Global Nutrition

Abstract Global public-private partnerships for health and nutrition have proliferated since the 1990s—a trend raising important questions about authority and legitimacy in global governance. Yet within the fields of international relations and public health, there has been only limited empirical research into the global politics and power dynamics behind such partnerships. This article explores how and why the Scaling Up Nutrition partnership was established. Drawing on interviews, observations, and document analysis, it demonstrates how public and private actors exercise combinations of instrumental, structural, and discursive power to normalize and institutionalize their interests and values at the global level. The study highlights as such the complexities behind the increased privatization of global nutrition governance and the importance of power analysis to uncover the normative contestations and asymmetries of power behind global partnership creation.

scholarly journals ‘I’m Not that Kind of Doctor’

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-20
Author(s):  
Erica Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Sexual And Reproductive Health ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Health Interventions ◽  
Health Practice ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
The Status ◽  
Complex Relationships

Within multi-disciplinary global health interventions, anthropologists find themselves navigating complex relationships of power. In this article, I offer a critical reflection on this negotiated terrain, drawing on my experience as an embedded ethnographer in a four-year adolescent sexual and reproductive health research intervention in Latin America. I critique the notion that the transformative potential of ethnographic work in global health remains unfulfilled. I then go on to argue that an anthropological practice grounded in iterative, inter-subjective and self-reflexive work has the potential to create ‘disturbances’ in the status quo of day-to-day global health practice, which can in turn destabilise some of the problematic hubristic assumptions of health reforms.

“Workarounds and Roadblocks”: Risk and Resistance among Food Movement Activists

2020 ◽  
pp. 232949652096562
Author(s):  
Andrew Raridon ◽  
Tamara L. Mix ◽  
Rachel L. Einwohner
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
Alternative Food Systems ◽  
Regional Food ◽  
The Social ◽  
Regional Food Systems ◽  
Food Movement

This article examines how activists involved in the food movement use different tactics intended to challenge and subvert the agrifood structures they encounter. We use data from interviews and participant observations with 57 food movement activists operating in less robust alternative food systems throughout the Southern Plains states of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Our respondents describe how they interpret their regional food systems as deliberately restrictive to the food movement and explain some of the tactical choices they make to maneuver around various constraints they claim hinder their food movement activism. In actively resisting the agricultural status quo, we find that some activists knowingly engage in forms of high-risk activism. We then examine the different framing devices food movement activists use to explain the risks generated by their tactical workarounds. Our findings contribute to the social movements and food system literature by showing how activists interpret and justify the risks generated by their resistance and by emphasizing the contextual nature of tactical choices and risk in social movement activism.

scholarly journals Agroecology in Mediterranean Europe: Genesis, State and Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Migliorini ◽  
Vasileios Gkisakis ◽  
Victor Gonzalvez ◽  
Ma Raigón ◽  
Paolo Bàrberi
Keyword(s):  
Food Systems ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Grey Literature ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Sustainable Food ◽  
Agriculture Sector ◽  
Mediterranean Countries ◽  
Mediterranean Europe ◽  
The Mediterranean

The Mediterranean agro-food systems need to be properly managed. A promising pathway is the transition towards more sustainable food systems through agroecology, which represents the ecology of food systems. In this paper, the state-of-the-art of agroecology is described for three representative euro-Mediterranean countries: Italy, Greece, and Spain. The analysis has been partly based on results of a dedicated literature search and partly on grey literature and expert knowledge. After an overview of the history of agroecology, targeted research and education, collective action (political and social), and some agroecological practices in the three countries are presented. These countries share a rather similar use of the term “agroecology”, but they differ regarding (i) the existence/extent of strong civil and social movements; (ii) the type of study/educational programmes, and the relative importance of different scientific disciplines and their evolution; (iii) the development of political support and legal frameworks; and (iv) the elaboration of concepts to rediscover traditional practices and apply new ones, often taken from the organic agriculture sector. Agroecology is an emerging concept for the Mediterranean agricultural sector, with huge potential due to the peculiar socio-cultural, bio-physical, and political-economic features of the region. To boost agroecology in Mediterranean Europe, better networking and engagement of different actors within a coherent institutional framework supporting the transition is strongly needed.

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