LIST OF PANELS

Since the food price crisis of 2008 various governments have developed comprehensive national food policies, strategies, and policy councils including Scotland (2009), UK (2010), Wales (2010), Australia (2013), Ireland (2014). Canada has been a rather hesitant late comer to the food policy making process and launched its first comprehensive federal food policy, The Food Policy for Canada (FPC) in June 2019. This was followed by the announcement of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council in February 2021. While the advocates of an integrated, comprehensive, and coherent food policy environment hope that these developments address a diverse range of issues dealing with food from field to table, they are also cautious in their optimism, remembering Canada’s earlier failures such as A Food Strategy for Canada (1977) and Canada’s Action Plan for Food Security (1998).

Various studies have been attributing this slow development to complexities dealing with the wicked nature of food policy and challenges arising from multi-stakeholder policy processes (Bancerz, 2019), the multi-jurisdictional nature of the policy making process and limitations to cooperation among different branches of governments (Andrée, Coulis and Ballamingie, 2018; FSC, 2017;Koc, MacRae, Desjardins and Roberts, 2008; Koc and Bas, 2012; Levkoe, 2017; MacRae and Abergel, 2012; Skogstad, 2012).

However, as MacRae argues, the problem is not necessarily in the content of the policies or the challenges during the policy making process, but often due to a lack of clarity and commitment to their implementation including weak instrument design choices (MacRae cited in Briere, 2022). Even the best policies with great transformative potential can fail in the face of these many forms of implementation deficiency. One of the best international examples was the hostility towards the successful Zero Hunger policy in Brazil by the Bolsonaro government (Maluf, 2022; Burlandy, Rocha, Camacho Dias, 2022).

This session invites papers examining enabling factors as well as obstacles to the implementation of food policies at federal, provincial/territorial, and local levels in Canada. We also welcome international case studies that address implementation deficits in food policies. We are interested in discussion of complications and solutions related to the multi-jurisdictional governance, multi-stakeholder politics, instrument choices and design, and policy silos such as food safety, food security, health and nutrition, agriculture, environment, and trade policies. We also welcome insights from policy debates in other sectors and jurisdictions that would contribute to our understanding of enabling factors in implementation of food policies.