Bas Hetterscheid, 2020. City Region Food System Governance; Guiding principles and lessons learned from case studies around the world. Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation, Wageningen University & Research. Report WCDI-20-118. Wageningen. The report 'City Region Food System Governance-Guiding principles and lessons learned from case studies around the world' is a harvest of insights from a wealth of case studies that focus on food system governance (in its broadest sense, or focusing specifically on food policy) in an urban context. These insights are complemented by key principles as formulated in guiding documents such as policy agendas and supporting frameworks that focus on urban food governance. Together, these insights come together in five guiding principles for city region food system (CRFS) governance. These guiding principles, together with a reflection on the findings from this endeavour, provide input for a knowledge agenda and future interventions that aim to contribute to more sustainable, resilient and equitable food systems in city regions around the world.

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The global nutrition community is currently putting significant efforts into supporting parliamentary advocacy, aiming to bring nutrition higher up on political agendas in low-income countries with high burdens of malnutrition. Evaluating the effects of parliamentary advocacy is fraught with methodological challenges and case studies are scarce. This article adopts a contribution analysis and process tracing procedure to evaluate whether parliamentary advocacy influenced political party manifestos in Tanzania in the run up to the 2015 general election. We present a rare and empirically rich application of this systematic qualitative evaluative method. We find that configurations of activities, actors and outputs can be plausibly understood to have had a contributory role in achieving increased attention to nutrition in the party manifesto of the election winner. We further identify key risks and assumptions that mediated parliamentary advocacy and development evaluators' ability to evaluate its outcomes, including: targeting; timing; circulation; intelligibility; power; elites; resources; and political space.

In recent years, a range of new indices, benchmarking and scorecard tools-also known as 'indicators'-have been developed to influence public policy and to promote accountability. While subjected to important technical and political critiques, the policy impact of 'indicators' is often assumed yet rarely demonstrated. Suitable evaluative methods are in their infancy. This article adopts an innovative process tracing analysis to assess the policy impact of the Hunger And Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI) in Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Zambia and globally. We present a rare and empirically rich application of this systematic qualitative evaluative method. We further contribute to the theorisation of 'indicators' by positing a central role for equitable producer-user relations in mediating policy impact, and demonstrate that such relations can overcome significant political critiques on 'indicators'.

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On September 23rd, Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation (WCDI) organised an online Workshop through Zoom. The workshop was organized together with the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Business Network (SBN), the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the World Food Programme (WFP) as part of the Flagship on Food Systems for Healthier Diets (FS4HD), one of the IFPRI-led CGIAR programmes of Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). This workshop was funded under the anchoring and scaling project, which seeks to find opportunities to support anchoring and scaling healthy diet narratives in Bangladesh, through supporting the work of SBN..

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