Changing Global Governance Context for Food Security and Nutrition

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Abstract Through collective action, global governance helps identify, understand, and address problems that spill over national boundaries. Those problems include maintaining peace and security; developing and implementing rules with regard to trade in commodities and services, capital flows, and migration; containing transboundary pests and diseases; slowing global warming; and providing aid for needy countries and peoples. Specific international organizations (five discussed in Chapter 6) address these issues). The difference between global and national governance is that there is no global government. Global governance, through various international bodies and institutions, complements regional, national, and local governance in an important way and is the sum total of the informal and formal ideas, values, rules, norms, procedures, practices, policies, and institutions that govern all actors—states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, nongovernmental organizations, transnational corporations, and the general public. The number of actors on the global governance scene has proliferated, as has the sheer number of international initiatives that have been started to mobilize incremental international funding in support of food security and nutrition since the 2007 food crisis. Many of the initiatives are reviewed in this chapter, showing that the amount of incremental funding in support of food security and nutrition, beyond traditional sources raised, was insignificant compared to the number of international consultations held. The Global Agriculture and Food Security Program was a notable exception, as well as the Agricultural Market Information System. This situation appears to have changed for the better since the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter examines the relationship between global, regional, national, and local governance.