Beyond the Shadow State: The Public–Private Food Assistance System as Networked Governance

Rosenthal, Amy; Newman, Kathe

doi:10.1177/1078087418763551

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Additionally, focusing on food quality alone ignores sociopolitical determinants of health. The time and care expended by certain foodbanks should be treated as expressions of improvement within a system that many staff realise is imperfect, with small improvements potentially leading to more systemic changes (Rosenthal and Newman 2019 ).…”

Section: Towards ‘Better’ Foodbanking or No Foodbanking? Pre-covid Co...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking- and Counter-responses- Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2022

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COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus’ unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity’s growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities’ efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven philanthropic and state funding flows have bolstered foodbanking and the food system logics that support it. By contextualising the complex and variegated politics of foodbanking in broader movements, from community food security to food sovereignty, we reframe simplistic narratives of charity and highlight the need for justice-oriented structural changes in wealth redistribution and food system organisation if we are to prevent the kinds of emergency-within-emergency that we witnessed as COVID-19 revealed the proximity of many to hunger.

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Section: Towards ‘Better’ Foodbanking or No Foodbanking? Pre-covid Co...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking- and Counter-responses- Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2022

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“…The functions that food banks fulfil form the third element. Besides the evident function of providing emergency food aid, food banks often provide a place for social interaction with an informal, approachable ambiance where recipients can interact with others in similar situations of poverty and food insecurity (Rosenthal & Newman, 2019 ; Salonen, 2017 ). Additionally, food banks can fulfil a function of reducing food waste (Galli et al, 2018 ; van der Horst et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: Systems Of Food Assistance and Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

“Too big to fail”: the resilience and entrenchment of food aid through food banks in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic

2022

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This paper aims to better understand the resilience and further entrenchment of food aid through food banks in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first months of the pandemic in the Netherlands, concerns quickly rose about the number of people falling into conditions of food insecurity. Adding insult to injury, food banks reported problems in their operations. The analysis shows that after some adaptations to initial problems, food banks were largely able to continue their service. This ability was partly based on organizational flexibility. However, in order to understand the resilience of food aid through food banks, it is imperative to understand food banks as part of a system of food aid that extends beyond the organizational boundaries. This system includes a range of other actors and resources, including donors, public support and governmental backing that contributed to the resilience of the food aid system. While this embeddedness in a system as well as broad public support were essential for the resilience of food aid through food banks, both factors also indicate the further entrenchment of food banks in the understanding and practices of ensuring food security for people in poverty. Ultimately, when the root causes of a need for food aid are not addressed, a resilient system of food aid through food banks can eventually prove detrimental to societal resilience, specifically the ability to ensure dignified access to adequate food.

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“…Thus, local lawmakers have strong incentives to develop a competitive advantage by maximizing the efficiency of local budgets in an attempt to provide more to its residents for less. It can sometimes even be used to provide goods, namely social-welfare, that local government alone would not provide (Rosenthal and Newman 2018).…”

Section: Local Government and Private Contractingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Private Contracting and Citizen Attitudes Toward Local Government

Dawkins

2020

Urban Affairs Review

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Lawmakers use privatized service delivery to simultaneously maintain low taxes while also satisfying citizen demands for high-quality public goods and services. However, what effect does private contracting have on people’s attitudes toward local government? I design a survey experiment that tests how public–private collaborations alter how people attribute responsibility to government for the successes and failures of the delivery of goods and services. I show that private contracting makes it less likely that people will connect public services to government, which erodes their evaluations of government performance and the feeling that local government represents their interests. Moreover, I show that citizens are also more likely to blame local government for private service delivery failures than they are to praise it for private service delivery successes. This asymmetry in responsibility attribution makes it difficult for local governments to build support among its citizens when it relies on private contracting.

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Beyond the Shadow State: The Public–Private Food Assistance System as Networked Governance

Cited by 15 publications

References 40 publications

Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking- and Counter-responses- Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking- and Counter-responses- Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“Too big to fail”: the resilience and entrenchment of food aid through food banks in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic

Private Contracting and Citizen Attitudes Toward Local Government

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