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In recent years, interest in alternative food systems (AFS) has grown both in the popular imagination and in the academic literature. The literature is rife with justifications (or hopes) for the continued and necessary expansion of AFS in the face of unsustainable conventional food provisioning. Within the next five years it will be important to determine how to make alternatives more stable in order for them to play a more prominent role in battling the food insecurity and other social and economic challenges equated with agro-industrial foods. The goal of this commentary is to demonstrate some highly context-specific challenges and possible research trajectories in both the global South and the global North. We argue that in the global South more robust data collection can strengthen local food systems and traditional foods research, while in the global North, food skills and food literacy research may be important for scaling up and making alternative food systems more stable without compromising important social and economic ideals.

Social policy development trajectories in post-colonial sub-Saharan African states deviate from those in highly industrialized countries. Recent research endeavours established broad patterns of global interdependencies dating back to colonialism. This article contributes to these efforts by presenting a case study of the dynamics animating social policy development in Cameroon. It examines the progressive evolution of global determinants and their impacts on Cameroon’s welfare system over three periods: (1) decolonialization and post-colonial restructuring in the mid-20th century, (2) structural adjustment in response to the 1980s’ debt crisis and (3) the contemporary era of market liberalization driven by accelerated economic globalization. The research draws on a mixed-methods approach involving a document analysis and a survey administered in 400 rural households. Findings indicate that horizontal interdependencies were predominant in the establishment phase of Cameroon’s national social insurance scheme, but eventually gave way to vertical interdependencies in the 1980s. Recent efforts to advance economic liberalization represent a return to horizontal transnational forces, given the growing influence of multinational corporations on the country’s social security landscape. The study reinforces existing research insights in showing that, unlike social protection in the global north, social policy dynamics in Africa tend to actively contribute to the marginalization of underprivileged groups.

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