Hunger, food security and governance

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12/26/2013

Hunger, food security and governance

The last couple of days I have reflected on two measures that I think could be useful if we need governance indicators in the post 2015 development discourse. These were measures of road deaths and peace / conflict. The idea behind both is simply that governance is about governments exercising authority on behalf of citizens to further the interests of citizens.

There are many ways in which citizens give governments authority to manage things like roads, vehicle registration, military and policing affairs, diplomacy, and a range of other factors that influence road deaths and peace/conflict. Improvements in these metrics undoubtedly reflects some improvement in governance. And these improved measures also reflect real improvements in the well being of people in developing countries.

This is the kind of measure that matters. It's not a measure of process or of some normative characteristic of good governance. Rather it captures the results of governments exercising authority in better ways.

A third indicator in this spirit captures hunger or food security. Governments influence key factors that determine levels of hunger and food security (like affordability and availability and quality and safety of food...see http://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/).

There are a variety of measures in this area, including the Global Food Security index and the Global Hunger Index (shown below). It is amazing to think that a range of the countries that do really badly on this index (and on the peace and road safety measures I showed the last few days) actually do well on so-called governance indicators and measures of things like transparency and public financial management. They have the right form but lack the necessary functionality to actually govern. A hunger index would show this and would not let countries get away with reforms that only made their governance look better.

Posted at 03:05 PM in Ideas for governance indicators, Post 2015 indicators (my thoughts) | Permalink

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12/26/2013