Evaluating Transition Pathways beyond Basic Needs: a Transdisciplinary Approach to Assessing Food Assistance
- PDF / 879,862 Bytes
- 34 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 49 Downloads / 199 Views
Evaluating Transition Pathways beyond Basic Needs: a Transdisciplinary Approach to Assessing Food Assistance Agathe Osinski 1 Accepted: 27 August 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
This article applies the findings of a transdisciplinary research project conducted in 2018– 2019 involving food aid beneficiaries, practitioners and academics to evaluate the current food assistance system as operationalized in several high-income countries. Using a wellbeing framework developed by a participatory study led by the World Bank in 2000, it analyzes the capacity of the current food assistance system – and alternative pathways – to fulfill material, bodily and social well-being, as well as security, freedom of choice and action and interpersonal justice. The results of the transdisciplinary research project show that the dominant pathway currently in place for achieving food security among individuals and households experiencing poverty insufficiently fulfils criteria related to bodily and social well-being and largely fails to provide beneficiaries with freedom of choice and action as well as interpersonal justice. Through ex-ante and ex-post interviews conducted with the participants of the transdisciplinary research project, the article proposes an exploratory analysis of the social learning and empowerment generated through the process. It finds that food aid beneficiaries, practitioners and university researchers modified their empirical policy beliefs, albeit to varying degrees. In terms of empowerment, results suggest participants’ collective empowerment was strengthened, while individual empowerment waned. Keywords Poverty . Transdisciplinarity . Social learning . Transition pathways . Food security
Introduction As inequalities grow and poverty persists in high-income countries, so too does the demand for food assistance, a symptom of households’ increasing difficulties to provide for their basic
* Agathe Osinski [email protected]
1
Centre for Philosophy of Law (CPDR), Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
19
Page 2 of 34
Food Ethics
(2020) 5:19
nutritional needs (Gentilini 2013). Whilst the international agro-industrial system produces more food than is required to satisfy the nutritional needs of the world’s population, more and more people in the rich world turn to charity and faith-based organizations to eat (Ibidem). The indicators concerning inequality, poverty and food insecurity are closely linked to sustainable development, with the first and second Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) devoted to eradicating poverty and hunger respectively. The growing concern for addressing poverty, its causes and consequences in a multidimensional perspective posits that SDGs 1 and 2 must be considered beyond the satisfaction of basic necessities: indeed, policies and transition pathways must be considered in relation with other objectives, human rights and needs such as health (SDG 3), dignity and respect, security (SDG 16), freedom of choice and action,
Data Loading...
