A systems thinking approach to the integration of food insecurity policy

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1862
• Author: April M. Roggio
• Date: 01 August 2019
• Published date: 01 August 2019

ACADEMIC PAPER

A systems thinking approach to the integration of food

insecurity policy

April M. Roggio

Sayre Policy Research, Medusa, New York,

United States

Correspondence

April M Roggio, Sayre Policy Research, 6 Red

Barn Ln Medusa, NY 12120.

Email: amroggio@sayrepolicy.com

Food insecurity represents a growing problem in the United States, with levels of

household insecurity hovering around 12.5% of national population. Policy leaders

and advocates have long struggled to define adequate solutions, mired in concerns

about food access and affordability, as well as overlays of equity and social justice,

in part because of the numerous many ways we have measured the problem and

defined and evaluated solutions. Most food security programs are designed as tempo-

rary assistance and few policy leaders or advocates are well‐placed to address lever-

age points for durable policy change, both because they are focused on short term

solutions and because they are unable to collaborate to identify leverage points within

the food policy system that would enable long term solutions. This paper offers a sys-

tems thinking assessment of a recent food policy symposium, illuminating the problem

and causes as perceived by those practitioners involved in addressing household food

insecurity, highlighting the lack of coherence among current stakeholders and an

inability to collaboratively address the problem of food insecurity. It concludes with

suggestions for future research.

1|INTRODUCTION

Food insecurity is a multifaceted dilemma. It is a complex system of

individual decisions and community behavior and a complicated

entanglement of diverse stakeholders acting to solve what they con-

sider to be one of society's basic challenges: providing adequate food

for everyone. It is a social justice challenge to one group, a resource

distribution challenge to another, a matter of building local foodsheds

to some, and a matter of altering the system of subsidies to agribusi-

ness giants to others. Food insecurity compels one group of stake-

holders to aim for a greater share of public attention and another to

embed themselves more deeply in community politics; it compels all

to compete for scarce dollars. Food insecurity affects households with

and without children, minorities and White populations, rural and

urban and suburban, and both those who are employed and those

who are not. In practice, this results in a universe of actors attempting

to affect change within a diverse policy landscape, with competing

agendas.

From an investigator's perspective, why are so many people going

hungry in the United States, and why, despite numerous interventions,

has the problem gotten worse, not better? And for the purpose of this

paper, why is it that many of the stakeholders working hard to “solve”

this problem have failed to create coherent conversations around food

insecurity and collaboratively identify solutions?

I argue in the following pages that the arena of food policy, which

includes questions of food access, hunger, and food insecurity, might

be better understood through the lens of systems thinking, as it high-

lights both a deep practitioner understanding of the struggles of those

facing food insecurity, while also indicating how difficult it is for the

same practitioners to collaboratively address the root causes of

hunger, namely, poverty. In the following pages, I review the previous

literature concerned with food security in the United States, as well as

previous studies that have examined how well solutions have

mitigated hunger.

With that background, I summarize the results of a June 2017

food policy symposium hosted by the Center for the Advancement

and Understanding of Social Enterprise at the University at Albany,

providing a series of causal loops using the system dynamics modeling

methodology based on symposium workshops. Additional material is

provided through the use of interviews of symposium participants

and used to further inform causal loops and develop a conceptual

systems map of the regional food insecurity problem.

Received: 17 April 2018 Revised: 12 August 2018 Accepted: 14 August 2018

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1862

J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1862.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1862

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of9