Abstract
BackgroundThe 2012 visit to Canada of Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, led to a public rebuff by Canadian governmental officials. This paper adapts the frame-critical policy analysis of Schön and Rein (1994), to explore the rhetorical basis for this conflict. This examination is offered as an illustrative example of how food insecurity is framed as a public policy problem in a high-income nation and how this framing has changed over time.MethodsWe analyze Canada’s decade of sequential responses to the 1996 World Food Summit, spanning 1998–2008, in the form of Canada’s Action Plan on Food Security, and its subsequent Progress Reports. We conducted a qualitative policy analysis, adapting the frame-critical approach first delineated by Schön and Rein (1994). This analysis uses a social constructionist approach to map out the relationships between tacit understanding of policy by particular actors, explicit rhetoric in the public domain, and action in this policy area over time.ResultsWe identify three key ways in which competing rhetorical frames arise over time: frame shifts (e.g., a shift away from language highlighting the right to food and health); frame blending (e.g., discussion about poverty becomes obscured by complexity discourse); and within-frame incongruence (e.g., monitoring for health indicators that are unrelated to policy solutions). Together, these frames illustrate how the conflict embodied in the UN Special Rapporteur’s visit has been deeply woven into the policy discourse on food insecurity in Canada over time.ConclusionFrame-critical analysis is instructive for exposing and also predicting tensions that impede forward progress on difficult policy issues. Accordingly, such analyses may be helpful in not only dissecting how policy can become ‘stuck’ in the process of change but in active reframing towards new policy solutions.
Highlights
The 2012 visit to Canada of Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, led to a public rebuff by Canadian governmental officials
When asked about food insecurity at the close of his recent mission visit to Canada, Olivier De Schutter, the second United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, remarked, “frankly the question of hunger is not a technical question, it’s a political question” [1]
By asking how household food insecurity is “framed as a policy issue,” we refer to how actors communicate about household food insecurity in terms of its definitions, causes, consequences, who should participate in deciding upon appropriate interventions, why intervention would be necessary or not, and if so, what type of intervention would be appropriate and effective
Summary
The 2012 visit to Canada of Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, led to a public rebuff by Canadian governmental officials. This paper adapts the frame-critical policy analysis of Schön and Rein (1994), to explore the rhetorical basis for this conflict. This examination is offered as an illustrative example of how food insecurity is framed as a public policy problem in a high-income nation and how this framing has changed over time. Canada ranks sixth best of all the world’s countries on [the UN] human development index” [2] This seemed to be a departure from the language in Canada’s Action Plan on Food Security, which had expressed that ([3], p10): Memorial University, St. John’s, Canada 2Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
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