Explaining the development policy implementation gap: A case of a failed food sovereignty policy in Bolivia

The food sovereignty concept has gained prominence in public policy discourses in the global South dur-ing the last decades. However, food sovereignty has contested definitions and is interpreted differently by conflicting societal interests. Consequentially, the translation of food sovereignty concepts into concrete policies and practices is often characterized by conflicts and controversies rooted in different institutional logics guiding the involved actors. In this article, we analyse how the logics of the corporatized agro-food system affected the local implementation of top-down state-induced public food sovereignty-based poli-cies in Bolivia. We conducted a multiple-case study of public food procurement markets for school feed-ing programs involving three rural municipalities and small-scale producers in the Altiplano region. The data consists of 53 interviews conducted during 2011-2015. We found that corporate food regime logics influence the local policy implementation process in three ways. First, by framing the chosen policy design as neoliberal individualistic and transaction-based market-orientated. Second, by envisioning for the Aymara subsistence peasants a socially and culturally undesirable identity and class transforma-tion; and thirdly, indirectly through the dependency of the school feed program on adjacent field-level institutions shaped by the corporate food regime logics. We conclude that the corporate food regime log-ics shaped the notion of what was considered legitimate practices and processes required for smallhold-ers to access the public food procurement market, whereas their own conceptions aligned with food sovereignty principles were disregarded. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

The concept of food sovereignty has become increasingly important in public policy discussions in the global South. However, there are contested definitions and interpretations of food sovereignty due to conflicting societal interests. This article examines how the logics of the corporatized agro-food system affect the implementation of top-down state-induced public food sovereignty policies in Bolivia. The study finds that the logics of the corporate food regime shape the implementation process and disregard smallholders' conceptions aligned with food sovereignty principles.