Analysing nutrition governance in fragile contexts: lessons and implications

Abstract

This MQSUN Briefing describes lessons learnt and implications from a MQSUN assignment which main objective was to analyze the research and policy challenges for improving nutrition governance in a context of state fragility.

Efforts to strengthen government commitment to reduce under nutrition in Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FCAS) face a number of context specific challenges:

First, most nutrition investments tend to adopt short-term humanitarian approaches to tackle food and hunger crises.

Secondly, FCAS usually lack the capacity to design and implement their own nutrition strategies, thus reinforcing their dependency on the policy advice, technical training and funding from the donor community.

Thirdly, there are very weak or nonexistent accountability linkages between the state and society in FCAS, so that citizens lack the means to hold their governments to account and political elites lack the incentives to respond to citizens’ demands.

This briefing offers practical recommendations and policy advice to address nutrition governance challenges in a context of fragility.