The goal of this project is to promote adequate levels of public investment in rural areas and to ensure that such investment is efficient and effective in terms of its impact on agricultural growth and poverty reduction. It is planned to conduct this type of research in a sample of African countries and in India. The governance component of the project aims at (1) studying the political processes by which public investment decisions are made, and (2) developing analytical tools for identifying governance principles, especially at the local level, that improve the efficiency and efficacy of public investment and subsidies. The project is in the planning phase.

The objective of this project is to contribute to an improved management of water resources at the sub-basin level. Using an example from Ghana and one form Chile, the project will research the use of decision-tools (based on simulation models) by water management boards that are comprised of different stakeholders. The governance component of this project will analyze the existing governance structures, the process of establishing multi-stakeholder boards and the way in which decision-tools influence decision-making processes of such boards. The analysis will focus on issues of efficiency, legitimacy and power in such “multi-stakeholder governance structures.” The project started in June 2004 and is funded by the Water Challenge Program.

Based on concerns about increases in obesity and diet-related chronic diseases worldwide, FCND has recently initiated a program on diet change in the developing world. The overall aim is to find food policy solutions to address the health threat. But it is already clear that such solutions face barriers and conflicts in policy making: the development of a strategy to address unhealthy diets by the World Health Organization (2004) revealed tensions between the agriculture and health sectors, within the nutrition community, and between the private and public sector. Recognizing these tensions, we intend that each research project within the diet quality program develop policy solutions in the context of the policy processes involved. But to do so, we need to gain a better understanding of the political, economic and cultural forces shaping the policy discourses in the countries we are working in, and the role of the different actors. We also need to learn about how to engage the variety of different stakeholders to whom our research will be targeted. The first step will be to understand the methods we could use to achieve these goals in our ongoing and emerging programs on: (i) the food subsidy program in Egypt; (ii) obesity and micronutrient malnutrition in Mexico; (iii) linking agricultural production and health promotion.

For decades, governments in several Asian countries have intervened in their domestic markets to stabilize staple food prices across time and space. Over time, the degree of intervention in some countries has increased significantly, with governments being involved in almost every aspects of marketing. There is a growing amount of evidence that these programs are becoming increasingly expensive, being dictated by special interests, and diverting public resources to unjustifiable subsidies. The objective of this project is to (a) identify policy option to reduce intervention, increase private sector participation, and minimize subsidies and (b) study costs and benefits of alternative options in terms of explicit and implicit welfare gains. The project will generate various estimates using economists’ toolkit, but the numbers alone are not likely to get translated into policy action. Therefore, we would like governance team’s inputs on studying various interest groups in the policy process in order to (i) identify a feasible policy space and (ii) suggest governance / institutional principles to enhance implementation likelihood.