An application of set theory to the classification of food security policies in eight African countries

Abstract

Despite the existing body of literature dealing with policies and policy change and the impact of institutions on these changes, very little is understood about how food security policies emerge on the policy agenda and what influences their design. This study used a set theory analysis to investigate the role of political institutions, institutional environment and the structure of a country’s economy in determining its food security policy choices, and what configurations of these determinants enabled or constrained food security policy outcomes in eight African countries. A taxonomy was created to organise the food security policy outcomes against four criteria: i) Policy coordination (the degree to which different policies consistently address the cross-cutting aspects of food security); ii) Geographic scope (distinguishing policies that apply and are implemented across the country from those targeting a specific geographic area); iii) Orientation (distinguishing producer- from consumer-oriented policies); and iv) Level of state involvement (dealing with the state’s engagement in the provision of goods and services as an approach to governance that involves the assertion of authority or its conscious limitation).

The food security policies of Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique were evaluated against these criteria. The conditions analysed included constitutional rules (electoral and governance systems, veto players), institutional environments (accountability, trust, state legitimacy and capacity) and structural economic characteristics.

A set-theoretic analysis was performed on the eight countries’ policies. Crisp and fuzzy analyses were applied to the same dataset to identify empirical patterns of sufficiency, necessity and INUS (insufficient but non-redundant parts of a condition, which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect) conditions. Expectations drawn from the literature were examined against the logical results of the analysis. The results identified the causally relevant combinations for each policy criteria. Based on analytical results, an Excel-based tool was developed to check for contradictory predictions in all African countries, informing on the level of generalisation of these findings outside the sample.

This work shows that formal political institutions matter for food security outcomes, but not everywhere. When (some) constitutional rules are in combination with conditions pertaining to country structural characteristics and informal institutions, policy outcomes can be explained and predicted.

This work contributes to understanding the design and implementation of food security policies in Africa. These insights have benefit for both governments and donors. The inclusion of factors relating to the institutional environment enabled an innovative operationalisation of the suppositions related to neo-patrimonialism, providing insight into how formal political institutions and informal rules related to food security policy work in Africa. However, the focus of analysis on exogenous factors, rather than sector-specific governance in a country, facilitates more general (and generalisable) findings.