Cultivating Food Sovereignty Through School Food? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ghana’s School Feeding Programme
Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation explores Ghana’s School Feeding Programme as a site of discursive struggle, in which various political and ideological positions compete, coalesce and conflict in shaping the program. Over the past twenty-five years, school feeding programs (SFPs) – the provision of meals and snacks to children in school settings – have garnered growing attention from some civil society groups, governments, and scholar-advocates for their potential to serve as an approach to healthier, more equitable and sustainable food systems. Yet, research on how SFPs reflect and interact with discourses of food security, a major focus of food, nutrition, and public health policy, remains limited both globally and in Ghana. Discourses shape understandings of how problems are framed, and the ensuing solutions proposed. As such, discourses can play a critical role in informing the design and implementation of SFPs, and, in turn, their ability to catalyze changes in broader food systems at various scales. Through critical discourse analysis, this study examines the food security discourses underlying Ghana’s School Feeding Programme (GSFP) and their local articulations in the major urban centre of Kumasi, departing from other studies of rural school feeding in Ghana. Drawing on theoretical frameworks spanning critical political economy, Gramsci’s hegemony and postcolonial perspectives, this study explores (1) the differing food security discourses underlying GSFP related to how food is procured for the program; (2) how these discourses intersect with dominant and resistant food security discourses circulating globally; and (3) how these discourses are reproduced and/or transformed within GSFP in Kumasi. Data sources include six policy and program documents and 45 semi-structured interviews with GSFP stakeholders including government civil servants, teachers, farmers, and caterers. My study demonstrates how GSFP blends discourses that both resist and align with the mainstream capitalist food system, providing a complex picture of the (potential) contributions of GSFP to healthier, more sustainable, and just local foodscapes. My study’s findings offer original insights on the food security discourses taken up within GSFP and contribute new knowledge regarding the links between school feeding and the larger contexts of food systems transformation oriented towards food sovereignty.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Yanful, Bernice
Institution: University of Toronto
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7133069766