Food systems and adaptive governance: Food crisis in Niger

Many developing countries are struggling to provide adequate food to their population. The impact of global environmental change on food security is largely unknown, and this increasing uncertainty highlights the need to identify the governance institutions that underpin food security and the potential of these institutions to adapt to changing circumstances. Considering the increasing population and the increasing number of under- and malnourished people in the world, this is increasingly important. Current understandings of food security, drawing on agricultural economics, have largely been dominated by a research agenda that focuses on the demand for and supply of food, but since the 1990s a more holistic concept of food security has been advocated. It is argued that a systemic understanding of food security includes not only the production and consumption of food but also processes within the environment in which the activities related to food take place, and interactions between those activities and the environment. A new way of understanding food security opens up the possibility of discussing adaptive governance and adaptive institutions in changing environments in relation to food security, as more emphasis is placed on issues of governance and institutions.