Mapping the main food safety governance actors at the time of the 2017/18 Listeria outbreak in South Africa for improved lessons in governance.

Abstract

In 2017/18 South Africa experienced the world’s largest ever outbreak of listeriosis, a foodborne disease. Listeriosis emanates when the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes which is common in soil, water and plants; converts itself to a disease that manifests in humans. 978 National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) confirmed cases from all nine of the country’s provinces resulted in the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring it an epidemic outbreak in 2017. In the search for the source of and attempts to contain the outbreak; a rare opportunity presented itself to shine a spotlight on food safety governance in South Africa. This dissertation set itself against the 2017/18 listeriosis outbreak to develop a map of the main food safety governance actors in South Africa at the time. This was to fill a gap in the South African body of food safety and food safety governance knowledge. There was a research space in this foundational area of understanding who the main food safety governance actors were, their roles, responsibilities and linkages including leveraging of resources, with power relations considered. The study was undertaken using a transformative philosophical worldview, a network and power balance governance conceptual framework, scoping literature review methodology with methods of purposively selected documents for documentary analysis and thematic analysis complementing each other to maximise meeting the aim of mapping the main food safety governance actors in South Africa at the time of the 2017/18 outbreak. The mapping exercise provided not only a clear indication of who the actors were in legislation and practice but also pointed to locally contextualised solutions to address food safety governance challenges having learnt governance lessons that emerged from the outbreak within the South African socioeconomic and political landscape during this period and in the short-term aftermath.