“Magic Concepts” and USAID: Framing Food Systems Reform to Support the Status Quo

Lia Kelinsky-Jones
Research Assistant Professor
Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation
Virginia Tech

Dr. Kim L. Niewolny
Professor, Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education
Founding Director, Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation
Virginia Tech

Dr. Max O. Stephenson, Jr.
Professor, Public and International Affairs
Founding Director, Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance
Virginia Tech

The future of agricultural policy is increasingly a subject of debate within international development as many civil society organizations actively engage with alternative production and delivery frameworks that challenge the prevailing neoliberal food system. Meanwhile, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) embraced what it termed “self-reliance” in its food systems policy framework in 2018. This article employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore how the agency employed the construct in that statement and other documents published between 2018 and 2020. We also explored how focus groups comprised of US university food system scholar-practitioners with projects funded by USAID perceived our findings concerning the agency’s policy turn.

Overall, we found that USAID’s concept of self-reliance simultaneously de facto supported the continuation and even deepening of existing policy and processes while, at least formally, also embracing local community self-reliance, and therefore, experimentation. Our analysis of the agency’s policy rhetoric revealed that those efforts depicted market actors as active leaders while assigning local government representatives passive roles. For their part, our focus group respondents agreed on the vital importance of local responses to effective development outcomes, but differed in their estimation of the relative primacy USAID was assigning local market actors and organizations in that process.

Our analysis has three major policy implications. First, the primacy of the neoliberal conception of self-reliance in USAID initiatives continues to limit the possibility of self-directed development in targeted countries. Second, U.S. government efforts to frame self-reliance as principally a market-driven process is likely to deepen existing food system dynamics. Finally, this turn in USAID policy is at odds with the efforts of many civil society organizations across the globe now pursuing alternate paths to agricultural system reform.

Dr. Lia Kelinsky-Jones is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose integrated research, teaching, and community development work focuses on sustainable and resilient food systems using an agroecological lens. She advances this work via two primary domains: 1) praxis including the role of university-based community development, engagement, and education in advancing agroecology and resilience; 2) policy including how collaborative and participatory governance approaches shape regional and local food systems and resilience. Most recently, she served as a Civic Science Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Agora Institute where she investigated university-based sustainability policy engagement. She has more than a decade of experience in university engagement, international development, intercultural learning, and program development. Dr. Kelinsky-Jones grew up in five different countries and speaks both Spanish and French in addition to her native English. She is an avid gardener of both food and flowers and enjoys road and mountain biking and crafting pottery.

Kim Niewolny is Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education and serves as the founding director of the Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation at Virginia Tech. Since 2009, Kim’s research, teaching, and extension programming has emphasized the role of power and praxis in food systems–based community development from an interdisciplinary and critical social theory perspective. As a scholar-practitioner, Kim focuses on the interface of sustainable food systems and the praxis of community food work from classroom to community spaces at the local, regional, and global level. Her research training and experience in qualitative research methods with special interest in discourse analysis and narrative inquiry. Currently funded initiatives include urban agriculture and sustainable food systems; farmworker food, health and wellness; the “Stories of Community Food Work initiative” and more. Kim teaches graduate courses and provides teaching leadership in Virginia Tech’s undergraduate Pathway minor, Food Agriculture, and Society. She has previously served as President for the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society and has been a board member of the Virginia Food Systems Council since 2018. At the Center, her focus is on supporting research, outreach, and education that generates and promotes creative possibilities for food systems that are abundant and resilient so that all may thrive.

Max Stephenson, Jr. serves as a Professor of Public and International Affairs in the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). He also serves as Director of the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance. Dr. Stephenson’s research interests include civil society, democratic governance and political agency, and social equity and social change. He is widely recognized for his interdisciplinary approach, integrating constructs from political science, public administration, and community development to address complex social challenges in diverse policy domains. He is the author or editor of 14 books, more than 100 articles and book chapters and more than 400 commentaries on the changing contours of United States policy and politics for democratic possibility in the U.S. and abroad.