Recent trends in the global governance of food and nutrition security: Policy implications for the EU
The paper (PDF) published by IDDRI examines the complexity and fragmentation of the governance regime for FNS and the policy implications for the European Union and the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). It shows that the current governance regime is still highly fragmented and tends to privilege the best resourced actors and specific (political) approaches to FSN, and hence, risks impairing the input legitimacy of governance. The fragmentation is mainly linked to the existence of two types of arenas: multilateral ones and multistakeholder ones. Different international platforms that were set up show this fragmentation and other difficulties. The first difficulty relates to the issue of inclusiveness of international processes. Often civil society organisationss are not included in the platform as well as small private companies, or least developed countries. A second set of difficulties lies in the existing of overlapping and conflicting rules/norms (both formal and informal) that emanate from these platforms. The ways in which food security issues are framed indeed differ significantly from one platform to the other, along with the solutions that are proposed, which raises at least the question of which platform is to rule over which others when competing interpretations and policy options are on the table. This results in a lose control of the CFS over international policies and negotiations that impacts FSN. Against this backdrop, this policy brief concludes with two main recommendations for EU policies.