The Integrated Food Security Strategy of South Africa: An institutional analysis

Methodological Challenges in Urban Food Systems Research: Case Study of Local Food Institutions in South Africa

“…While national departments create policy, provincial or district level departments implement policy. This often creates distance between progressive abstract policies and challenges in actual places, and thus minimizes the potential for polices to be effective, as was the case in urban agriculture policy [19]. For this reason, many government food policy administrators simply do not know how to communicate the experiences of policies, given that they may not have visited field sites or understand the structure, strengths, weaknesses, or real impacts of policies in real places.…”

“…Given that inter-departmental resources are contested by multiple units, many government administrators actively try to manage the way that their programs are being marketed. This provides further complications as policy is not only inefficient or ineffective, but also confusing and difficult for policy makers, government administrators, scholars, or community members to communicate or understand when there are so many different messages projected on food policy [19].…”

“…Foremost, scholars often focus on alternative and local food institutions without adequately addressing the role that principal food systems institutions such as the central state and private agri-businesses play in reproducing the structure of the food system [3,17]. Although it is true that some recent scholarship has been dedicated to the role of food retail in the Southern African context [18] and food governance regimes and state formation in Southern Africa [19], more scholarship is needed which speaks to these important aspects of the food system.…”

“…In this way, I was often given a 'smokescreen' of facts and figures without real access to information on key personnel, real numbers, and true motivations behind state policy. Examples of this 'smokescreen' are evident in the inaccurate numbers pertaining to the quantity and impact statistics associated with urban agriculture projects [28], government program structure [19,23], and politically laden food scandals associated with food parcel delivery [29].…”

Holy Grail or inflated expectations? The success and failure of integrated policy strategies

“…This is not to say that nothing is known at all; this paper starts from the researcher's observation that various scholars have attempted to assess the implementation and performance of integrated strategies across a range of governance systems and sectors (e.g. Drimie and Ruysenaar 2010;Vince 2015). At the same time, these attempts have remained fragmented and have not yet led to a more general scholarly debate about the impacts of IPSs.…”