Browsing by Author "Davies, Frances"

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    Reconceptualising urban food security : an analysis of the everyday negotiations of food access in Lusaka, Zambia
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-12) Davies, Frances; Haysom, Gareth; Oldfield, Sophie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. School of Public Leadership.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study calls to attention the everyday experiences of what is an increasing urban food insecurity crisis in southern Africa. It draws on a wide literature review and in-depth qualitative work conducted in Lusaka, Zambia. A critical assessment of the dominant food security agenda in southern Africa is discussed in reference to the grounded understanding of a food insecure family living in an impoverished neighbourhood in Lusaka. Illustrations of the deeper empirical context of urban-scaled food insecurity are examined from a feminist food systems perspective. This enables the identification of the gendered embodied experiences of crafting food security in the inequitable urban environment. Individual agency shapes alternative food security strategies that contain purpose, meaning and identity, beyond simplistic notions of food access and consumption. The study speaks to the lived reality of negotiating food security, which is currently unrecognised, and in some cases occluded from dominant patriarchal and neoliberal-centred food security perspectives. In contribution to theory, it is argued that the embodied everyday life realities of the inequitable urban and global food system need to be taken seriously and established as the departure point for setting food security agendas. This study is presented in the form of two journal articles. Article one, titled Money for eating: Everyday urban food insecurity in Lusaka, highlights the importance of agency as a food security determinant in the micro-relational spaces within and between households and food networks. In this sense, agency is both created, and implicated in, the crafting of daily food security. The study exposes how the grand narratives of the global food security discourse are disconnected from, and often contradict, the negotiations and dynamics of food security on the ground. Article two, titled Urban food security: rethinking Lusaka’s food system, builds on the findings expressed in the first article. It discusses how everyday urban food security strategies are contextual and relational – time- and place-bound. It explores how urban residents’ actively negotiate layers of power and inequality embedded within urban food and structural systems. This article argues that urban-scaled food security responses and their underpinning food system governance processes need to find ways to support the critical agentic interactions that are deeply enmeshed within the daily lives of urban food-system actors. In both articles, literature from outside of the narrow food security discourse is used because it better supports the conceptualisation of the everyday reality of urban food insecurity experiences and the inclusive urban food system governance processes needed to deal with the cumulating urban crisis. This broader literature review and a finely grained ethnographic reading of everyday food insecurity offers an alternative paradigm for urban food security work in Zambia and the wider region.