Food riots and food rights: the moral and political economy of accountability for hunger

This research falls within the theme of Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction, addressing the question of how to mitigate the risk of social and political conflict around resource scarcity in poor and food insecure countries. The challenge of world hunger is not only about growing more food for more people with fewer resources: it is also about making sure people can access that food. This means ensuring that governments can be made to answer when they fail to protect people's access to the food they need. But how can governments be made more accountable for hunger? This research aims to answer this question.

Food prices began to rise and became more erratic after 2007; at the same time, people in developing countries have taken two different approaches to making their governments more accountable for food security. One is right-to-food movements - efforts by human rights and antipoverty activists to secure and realise a legal right to food which have taken off in 20 countries over the 2000s. The second is food riots, mostly unorganised protests over sharp rises in food prices, which were seen in 60 developing countries in 2008 and others in 2011. They led to several governments falling and others acting to protect people's access to food. Some people argue that the Arab Spring was triggered by fury over the cost of food.

European history shows that similar food riots have often succeeded in holding governments to a rough kind of account. But it has also shown that people rarely protest out of sheer hunger: they usually have ideas about their rights to adequate provisions, and hold government responsible for protecting them - a set of ideas known as the 'moral economy'. This research plans to look at whether and how these riots and right-to-food campaigns actually worked in this recent food crisis. By this we mean whether they triggered government action to protect people's rights to food, now and in the future.

The study will take place in developing countries with large problems of poverty and hunger - Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique - where there have also been efforts to get governments to respond to people's concerns about the cost of food. To answer whether and how these efforts work to make governments more accountable, the research will ask three questions: 1) do officials and policymakers fully understand how food price rises affect people? Specifically, do they understand how quality of life, stress and the work (mainly by women) needed to keep families fed is affected by food price rises? 2) Do people hold ideas about the 'moral economy' that mean they think governments should put people's access to affordable food first? If so, what can governments do when food prices rise because of international factors not in their control? And 3) under what conditions do riots and right-to-food campaigns actually work to make governments more accountable for hunger?

The research will work at two levels. First, it will study what motivates protests and other direct actions, by looking closely at such events over the food crisis (2007-12), and holding interviews and focus group discussions with activists, protestors and affected groups (particularly women on low incomes). Second it will study official statements and policy changes, and interview key officials and policymakers. It will combine findings from these two levels in an analysis of whether the protests or campaigns worked and the general conditions under which popular mobilisation is likely to increase accountability for hunger.

The research will help policymakers and donor agencies understand the full impact of food price rises so that they can do better at anticipating and monitoring their effects, and protecting people against them. It will also create opportunities for activists fighting for the right to food to meet and communicate more constructively with policymakers and government officials.

The project aims for impact on policy and practice among civil society organisations and social movements focused on accountability and rights to food (e.g. the Indian Right to Food Campaign, Oxfam GB's Grow Campaign); officials and policymakers in Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique, specifically food security units and social protection agencies; and sections of bilateral donor and multilateral agencies (e.g. FAO and World Bank) responsible for food security and social protection. The project will also engage researchers interested in the politics of accountability for hunger.

The research aims to contribute to strengthening accountability for food security by i) improving understanding of the grievances people have for mobilising around food, to help activists and civil society groups link with popular concerns, provide officials and aid donors with more sensitive indicators of food crisis, and enable donors to promote 'politically-optimal' social protection responses; ii) generating knowledge of how governments respond to mobilisation, to enable more informed political risk analyses, set more realistic parameters for donor technical advice and policy conditions during crises, and inform food security accountability initiatives (e.g. the Hunger Reduction Commitment Index); and iii) amplifying voice for right-to-food activism, by creating new platforms and spaces for constructive policy engagement by activists.

Potential political sensitivity around food security suggests the need for close and sustained engagement with key actors rather than a more public engagement. The strategy will be delivered in two ways. First, by creating a Reference Group comprising representatives of the audience groups identified above, to be invited to engage at key stages: the inception stage workshop (Phase 2), findings workshop (Phase 5), and final international and/or national workshops (Phase 6). The Reference Group will create a receptive environment for the research findings and a space for open engagement between activists and policymakers. It aims to ensure the relevance of the research, provide feedback, and facilitate connections to aid data collection and policy influence.

The second element of the Impact Strategy involves communicating with a wider set of key stakeholders and opinion leaders on food security and economic crisis, rights, civil society and protest. A database will be constructed from the teams' in-country networks and the IDS contact management system. This group will be contacted through regular brief email updates on progress throughout the project, and policy briefing notes when results are available.

Research outputs will include individual country case studies, to be disseminated to a national audience, and a comparative synthesis report, to be disseminated at an international workshop in Phase 6. To ensure the research remains connected to the concerns of food insecure people, findings will also be disseminated through at least one local level workshop to which participants from the communities in which focus group discussions were undertaken will be invited.

The Impact Strategy will be managed by a dedicated team member with extensive international expertise in facilitation of multi-stakeholder engagement processes in policy and civil society networks. The costs will include staff time, travel and subsistence costs for five Reference Group members to participate in three stakeholder research workshops; and the costs of national and local research workshops.

The impact of the research will be monitored quantitatively by tracking communications and interactions with key stakeholder groups, and qualitatively, through discussions with the Reference Group members, feedback from community level workshops, scrutinising statements, documents, media coverage and public discourse, and evaluating changes in the policy space for civil society engagement over the right to food.