The Global Governance of Food Security

The global governance of food security provides an important policy field to study the dynamics and consequences of inter-organizational relations. However, a significant challenge for scholars and students alike is that the global governance of food security is a relatively understudied domain of inter-organizational relations. This chapter examines the diverse networks of international organizations that constitute the global governance of food security and the key issues, actors, and dynamics. Seven issue areas are identified in which there are significant clusters of international organizations interacting. Cooperation and rivalry among international organizations in the field of food security is reviewed across issue areas and over time. A review of the existing literature suggests that equal parts of inter-organizational cooperation and rivalry are characteristic of the global governance of food security, however, the causes, dynamic, and scope are shaped by wider developments in the global political economy. Special consideration is given to the transformation of inter-organizational relations following the 2008 Global Food Crisis, which prompted a major reordering of inter-organizational relations and the dynamics in the global governance of food security.


Introduction
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations defines food security as "a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life" (FAO 2001).This definition acknowledges the complex factors and dynamics that contribute to food insecurity at the individual, household, national or global level; in particular, the FAO's definition emphasizes the potential range of barriers to food that may be physical (i.e., distance to food sources and/or markets faced by rural and isolated communities or the existence of food deserts in lower-income urban neighbourhoods), social (i.e., cultural practices that ensure women and children eat after adult males) or economic (i.e., when sufficient safe and nutritious food are unaffordable or when a government imposes food export bans that may limit food supply at the international level).Yet despite major advances in food production and distribution, knowledge about nutrition and health, and substantial reductions of hunger and malnutrition in developing countries, food insecurity remains a formidable global challenge (Godfray et. al. 2010).In 2013 the FAO estimated that 842 million people, approximately one in eight people in the world, suffer from chronic hunger (FAO 2013).
The global governance of food security too is a complex field of international cooperation and policymaking.As the international consensus definition of food security suggests, an individual's, community's or nation's access to food is determined by far more than good weather and bountiful harvests (however, these are important factors too); there is a complex set of micro-and macro-level factors that may produce food insecurity.The global governance of food security can thus be conceptualized as the set of global-level international organizations (including formal inter-state organizations and non-governmental organizations [NGOs]), norms and policy actions oriented towards progressively achieving world food security at multiple-scales (Cohen and Clapp 2009;Margulis 2013;Candel 2014;McKeon 2014).Achieving world food security is not simply an aspirational goal; it is an area of concerted activity with demonstrable (albeit incremental) success.Reducing world hunger has long been a major objective of the post-war order.The establishment of the FAO in 1943 can be considered the origins of the contemporary global governance of food security (Shaw 2008).In recent decades, there has been increasing global governance activity for food security.For example, reducing the number of hungry people worldwide was enshrined as a collective international objective in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 (Fukada-Parr and Hulme 2011;Fukada-Parr and Orr, 2014).In 2004, nation states negotiated a set of international guidelines for implementing the human right to food at the national level (FAO 2004).More recently, the 2007-2008 Global Food Crisis spurred further changes to the global governance of food security, including the reform of existing global institutions an creation of new ones to address nascent and emerging future drivers of food insecurity such as climate change and the financialization of food (Cohen & Clapp 2009;Clapp 2012).
The global governance of food security provides an important policy field to study the dynamics and consequences of inter-organizational relations.However, a significant challenge for scholars is that global food security governance is an understudied domain of inter-organizational relations; there is not an established body of literature in this field as compared to security or climate change.The reasons for this state of affairs are as follows.Food security has tended to receive irregular attention from International Relations (IR) scholars; indeed, the literature is characterized by spikes of output following Margulis M The Global Governance of Food Security.In: Koops J, Biermann R (ed.).Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations, 2016, London: Palgrave MacMillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited.The definitive, published, version of record is available here: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36039-7 The Global Governance of Food Security major international food crises such as the world food crisis of the early 1970s (Weiss and Jordan 1976;Hopkins and Puchala 1978;Puchala and Hopkins 1978;Nau 1978;McClin 1979;Bergessen 1980;Cépède 1984) and the 2008 crisis (Margulis 2008;Cohen and Clapp 2009;Lang 2010;Benhassi and Yaya 2011).Such irregular flurries of scholarly attention is a simple reflection that during periods when food insecurity has a greater profile in world politics there is more interest in the subject by IR scholars; in sharp contrast, interest in the international organizational dimensions of food security are of a more constant interest to scholars of International Development and Food Policy.More importantly, and relevant to the subject of inter-organizational relations, food crises tend to produce major changes in inter-organizational relations and arrangements and thus are key starting points for understanding changing and transforming inter-organizational relations in the global governance of food security.
Since the 2008 global food crisis, scholarship on the inter-organizational dimensions of food security has grown.We can observe the following characteristics of the areas of focus of this emerging literature.First, the number and type of international organizations with a mandate to work on food security has rapidly expanded in recent years (Margulis 2012(Margulis : 2013;;Barling and Duncan 2015;Duncan 2015;Margulis and Duncan forthcoming).As a result of this institutional proliferation, there is increasing interaction among international organizations that vary significantly in their missions, policy preferences, and memberships.Second, because a unique feature of the global governance of food security is the highly diverse range of factors that may affect food security outcomes on the ground (i.e., bad weather, a regional conflict, introduction of a new biotechnology, biofuel mandates, and so on), there are no clear-cut demarcations or mutually recognized boundaries among international organizations about which one has which has centralized political authority (Margulis 2013).As a result, contemporary global governance of food security is not captured well by the concept of an international regime because of a lack of agreed-upon norms, principles and expectations of behaviourthis is most acute to diverging visions among international human rights bodies and the Bretton Woods organizations (see Gonzalez 2002;Forsyth and Faran 2013;Hawkes and Plaha 2013).Rather it displays more characteristics akin to that of a regime complex because of the overlap of various international organizations across issue areas that matter for food security (Margulis 2013).A third and significant feature is the growing number of interdisciplinary studies on the relationships among formal international organizations in the field of food security with a variety of NGOs (Leise 2010;Burnett 2013;McKeon 2014), new social movements such as peasant organizations (Claeys 2014;Brem-Wilson 2015), philanthropic organizations (Brooks 2011) and private sector organizations (Clapp and Fuchs 2009;Margulis and Porter 2013;Nesadurai 2013).
Contemporary global governance of food security can be conceptualized as a complex and fluid set of inter-organizational clusters that work on one or multiple dimensions of world food security.Within and across inter-organizational clusters, we can observe variation across organizations with respect to the following characteristics: degree of formality/informality, specialization/generality, organizational mission, financial and human resources, and penetrability to principals and outside agents (Margulis 2013).The variation of organizational clusters is addressed in further detail below.

Mapping the Organizational Dimensions of the Global Governance of Food Security
The global governance of food security is characterized by a non-hierarchical, clusters of international organizations.In this context, global governance refers to the set of norms, rules, organizations, actors and practices that govern an issue area across global to local scales (Rosenau 1995;Dingworth and Pattberg 2006).This includes international and public modes of global governance such as formal international organizations, legal agreements and treaties.However, the role of non-state/private modes global governance relevant to food security, and their overlap with international/public ones, is also an The Global Governance of Food Security important feature (Clapp and Fuchs 2009;Sikor et al 2013;Auld 2014).Clusters of international organizations refers to sets of international organization-based actors (most often staff of these organizations) working on specific policy, scientific, programmatic and legal dimensions of food security, however, in practice such clusters are often augmented with experts including State-level officials, private sector officials, academics and global civil society actors.Relevant organizations cover a wide spectrum of policy fields and vary significantly in institutional form (i.e., ranging from formal institutions linked to international treaties to informal clubs of nation states).Below I map out the contours of actually existing global governance of food security along the following issue areas: Nutrition; Agricultural Production; Agricultural Trade; Food Safety; Human Right to Food; Agriculture and Development; Agriculture and Climate Change.These seven issue areas are selected because they cover the key subset of policy, political and legal aspects of world food security most relevant to the study of international organizations and their interactions.Within these seven issues areas we find clusters of international organizations active within which organizations tend to exhibit varying mandates, operational functions, resources and expertise.In some instances, one international organization may be active in one or more of the issue areas; this is especially the case for large and complex international organizations.Below the global governance of food security is mapped out by issue area/policy field with the corresponding international organizations.

Nutrition
This issue area includes international standard-setting on nutritional, public health policy-making activities linked to nutrition, and the mobilization of resources, and direct provision, of international food assistance for food insecure and marginal populations.The main international organizations active in this cluster are the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP), and Food Aid Convention (FAC); in addition to these formal international organizations the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition and Food Security (SCNFS), UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis (HLTF) and Group of Eight (G8) are important informal organizations/networks working in this policy field.

Agricultural Production
This is a broad area of food policy.Activities in this issue area includes the production and dissemination of knowledge of food and agricultural production techniques (including applied research in plant breeding and disease eradication).The FAO, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) are the most prominent institutions.

Agricultural Trade
This spans policy harmonization of customs and tariffs applying to the cross-border flows of food and agricultural products, national support programs for the agricultural sector, technical barriers to trade, intellectual property rights for seeds and plant genetic materials, and settling of international disputes.In addition, this issue area has come to encompass linked issues such as foreign investment in the agricultural sector and the trading of agricultural financial products.The key international organizations active here are the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Grains Council (IGC), Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the World Bank.
The Global Governance of Food Security

Food Safety
This policy field is associated with the transnational standard setting on food safety, preventing outbreaks of international food-borne diseases and pests, and general promotion of food hygiene and health.This is the most institutionalized cluster of global food security governance with a global standard setting taking place at the Codex Alimentarius that is co-managed by the WHO and FAO; international enforcement takes place through the WTO's Agreement Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS).

Human Right to Food
Activity in this issue area primarily consists of promoting the human right to food at the international and national level, including the monitoring of state action.The main international organizations here are the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which services the UN Human Rights Council, supports the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs on the Human Right to Food, and implementation of the International Covenant on Cultural, Social and Economic Rights (ICCSER).The FAO is active in this field in assisting its member states to adopt and implement the right to food into national law and institutions.

Agriculture and Development
This intersects most closely with international development and encompasses a variety of policy interventions that, in general, seek to improve the material living standards of rural peoples and peasants in developing countries (there are an estimated 2.5-3 billion people whose livelihoods are linked to agriculture).Most active here are the World Bank, IFAD and regional development banks such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and African Development Bank (AFDB), which finance and monitor agricultural development projects.In addition, the FAO and UNCTAD are active in policy formulation and project evaluation in this field.

Agriculture and Climate Change
This is a nascent issue area of inter-organizational activity driven by improvements in knowledge about the linkages between agricultural production and a changing climate.The increasing production of bioenergy from agricultural products is also a key linkage.Key international organizations active in this field are the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), FAO and IFPRI; the main focus of work is transition to sustainable and low-carbon forms of agriculture production, including adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Institutional Characteristics of the Global Governance of Food Security
The list of issue areas identified above is not exhaustive nor does it represent an accepted consensus among scholars or practitioners about how best to slice up global food security governance.Indeed disagreement among states, international organizations, civil society and scholars over the optimal governance of food security is a ubiquitous feature of this policy field (Uvin 1994;Paarlberg 2002).However, this list provides a stylized reference point to the key issues areas where international organization activity is most focused in terms of information gathering, policy-making and action in the field.As such, the analysis offered below, which is limited to analyzing inter-organizational relations The Global Governance of Food Security related to the global governance of food security, admittedly does not capture the full gamut of interactions and dynamics that also include transnational-and global-scale politics of food security; relations of states, civil society organization, private actors and citizens receive secondary treatment here.
Yet these seven issue areas are analytically helpful in that they aid in revealing patterns and trends of inter-organizational relations within global food security governance.This section outlines the general inter-organizational structure in this policy.This provides context for the next section which delves into the dynamics of inter-organizational relationships.
The first pattern is that each issue area involves a cluster of international organizations with differentiated mandates, design and capacities.With respect to mandates there is a range of international organizations with very specific food security-related mandates such as the FAO, WFP and IFAD; other organizations have indirectly related mandates such as the WHO (i.e., to improve public health) or the UNFCC (i.e., reduce global CO2 emissions).International organizations range from: large and complex formal inter-state organizations such as the FAO and WHO; treaty-based organizations such as the OHCHR, WTO and UNFCC; specialized agencies such as the WFP; research-driven organizations such as the CGIAR and IFPRI; financial resource provisioning organization such as the World Bank, IFAD, ADB and AFDB; and, inter-organizational coordination platforms such as the HLTF and SCNFS.A list of relevant organizations is provided in Table 1 Below.Institutional form, similarly to mandates, is diverse in the global governance of food security.The design of individual international organizations varies in terms of the decision-making procedures, which includes one country-one vote in UN institutions (e.g., FAO, WHO), consensus-based decisionmaking among member states at the WTO, or combinations of delegated authority to executive heads and to subset of member states in the form of executive boards/councils (e.g., World Bank, IFAD, WFP, CGIAR, OHCHR, HLTF, OECD).Organizations like the FAO, WHO and World Bank have large secretariats that employ thousands of international civil servants.In sharp contrast, inter-agency platforms such as the HLTF and SCNFS or informal organizations such as the G20 do not have secretariats; instead these function as fluid networks of international and national governmental officials (Margulis 2012).
Institutional design is both present and absent in the global governance of food security.The socalled UN food institutionsthe FAO, WFP and IFADwere once a set of nested institutions under the FAO;1 today these three international organizations are autonomous from another (Shaw 2007).Similarly, the CGIAR and IFPRI have a long been associated with the World Bank; the World Bank has historically been a highly influential presence in the direct governance of CGIAR and continues to be a significant donor (IFPRI is one of fifteen Research Center nested under the CGIAR).The other general pattern is that many of the international organizations are part of the UN system (e.g., FAO, WFP, IFAD, WHO, UNEP, HLTF, SCNFS, etc.).However, these UN bodies are not nested in a hierarchal manner nor functionally specialized.For example, the FAO, WFP, IFAD and WHO are independent agencies.The HLTF and SCNFS, are horizontal networks with participation based on cooperation rather than a specialized division of labour (Margulis 2009).
Institutional capacitiesdefined here as the range and depth of resources (i.e., financial, human and political), and specialized knowledge and practices that international organizations deploy to achieve their goals and objectivesare highly differentiated across issue areas.Agricultural trade, food safety and the human right to food are highly legalized spheres and therefore involve international organizations with rule-making and enforcement capacity.In turn, this requires international organizations such as the WTO and OHCHR to possess specialized legal and technical knowledge and delegated authority to implement and enforce international rules.In comparison, the issue areas of nutrition, agricultural production and agricultural development involve specialized technical knowledge (e.g., human health, plant science and economic development), however, financial resources here are paramount to success in the field (e.g., feeding of large number of peoples, plant breeding, delivering agricultural extension services to rural communities, etc.).Specialized technical knowledge and financial resources are crucial, for example, to the work of the WFP, WHO and World Bank.Institutional capacities are preconditioned to a significant extent by individual institutional mandates, form and design;2 however, the international political context is also a key factor as international organizations that are supported by powerful principles are more likely than not to better financed and delegated The Global Governance of Food Security supranational decision-making authority (Hawkins et al. 2006).For example, the World Bank, which is highly supported by the US, boasts far more financial and human resources than the FAO in the field of rural development.The clustering of institutions across the seven issue areas of global food security governance results in varied configurations of institutional capacities.However, because such clusters are not generally organized to operate as collective units, the range of institutional capacities are not necessarily "pooled" in a rationalistic or planned manner.Instead, the collection of institutional capacities in a cluster these may be coordinated or synergistic while in other cases work at crosspurposes or in isolation.

Inter-Organizational Relationships of the Global Governance of Food Security
This section examines inter-organizational relationships in the global governance of food security.The global governance of food security is characterized by a complex and changing set of interorganizational relationships.That is, there is no singular inter-organizational dynamic such as cooperation, rivalry or conflict that best describes this policy field; instead, it is better conceptualized as consisting of polyvalent inter-organizational relationships (Bergessen 1980;Uvin 1994;Shaw 2007;Margulis 2009Margulis : 2012Margulis : 2015)

Cooperation
The post-war architects envisioned a specific international organization of food and agriculture.The creation of the FAO in 1945 as a specialized agency of the United Nations was to ensure a body that would improve the nutrition and health, spur agricultural modernization and increase production, and coordinate food markets on a worldwide scale (Shaw 2007).Being a specialized UN agencywith its own executive leadership and annual budget based on member's assessed contributionsprovided the FAO institutional autonomy within the UN system.The FAO was expected to be one of the key post-war institutional pillars alongside the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD -now World Bank Group), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the (failed) International Trade Organization (ITO).A 1946 proposal for a World Food Board to provide the FAO with the delegated authority and financial resources to manage world food production and consumption in coordination with the IBRD, IMF and ITO can be seen as an early multilateral effort to institutionalize interorganizational relations.Such early efforts received political support from FAO members but eventually the idea was dropped after the US refused to cooperate, the United Kingdom opposed and the USSR became suspicious of the plan (Shaw 2007;25-27).Despite early failures to institutionalize cooperative inter-organizational relations in the immediate inter-war period there is a historical pattern of cooperation in the field of food security (Shaw 2007;Uvin 1994).The examples discussed below are illustrative to provide a snapshot of key events and activities that illustrate concrete cases of cooperative inter-organizational relations.
International campaigns play a unique role in multilateral agenda-setting.In the case of food security, international campaigns have been frequently used to bring political attention and action to reduce world hunger.The FAO's Freedom from Hunger (FFH) campaign launched in 1960 sought to bring worldwide attention to the problem of hunger and promote greater national and international cooperation.The campaign was led by the FAO but involved participation across the UN system; this included the undertaking of international and regional studies by the UN Populations Divisions, WHO, International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNESCO.Inter-organizational cooperation on the campaign was instrumental towards establishing linkages across food, health and poverty that in turn increased global attention to the problem of hunger and forged greater international cooperation (Shaw 2007; see also Jarosz 2009;Leisse 2010;Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011).A more recent example of an The Global Governance of Food Security international campaign is the Zero Hunger Challenge launched by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon UN at the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development: Rio+20.This involves interorganizational cooperation among the FAO, IFAD, WFP and UNICEF to work with states, the private sector, and civil society organizations to increase efforts to reduce hunger.This includes an emphasis on reducing child stunting, promoting sustainable agriculture and the human right to food, and reducing post-harvest food losses.Similar to the FFH campaign, the Zero Hunger Challenge relies on interorganizational cooperation to establish policy linkages across policy fields (UN 2013); in this case hunger, sustainability and human rights are interlinked to set the stage for formulating international consensus on policy responses for the post-2015 development agenda.
International conferences, which are often linked to campaigns, also contribute to agenda-setting and social learning in global governance; these mega events matter as much for international organizations as for nation states because such events often (re)define organizational missions and values (Weiss and Jordan 1976;Rittberger 1983).In addition, the delegation of shared tasks can increase the facilitation of policy networks and epistemic communities among international civil servants.The 1963 World Food Congress in Washington, D.C., an international summit orchestrated to showcase the work of the FFH campaign, proved decisive in consolidating the international norm of states' collective responsibility to fight world hunger.The World Food Congress inspired a UN General Assembly resolution to propose a World Campaign against Hunger, Disease and Ignorance that took place during the second half of the UN Development Decade; this had strong personal support from the executive heads of the WHO, ILO and UNESCO (Shaw 2007;82-84).The 1974 UN World Food Conference, convened by heads of states in response to the World Food Crisis of the early 1970s, dramatically altered inter-organizational relations in the field of food security.The Conference reaffirmed international commitments to fight hunger and created new international organizations responsible for food security: the World Food Council (WFC), a high level political body to coordinate food policy across the UN system; the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), an international financial institution dedicated to providing financing for agricultural development in developing countries; and, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), an inter-governmental subsidiary body of the FAO to exchange information on hunger and best agricultural practices (Weiss and Jordan 1976;Shaw 2007).Institutional proliferation consolidated an international food security regime with cooperative interorganizational relations embedded within a shared norm and collective goal of reducing world hunger (Margulis 2013).Weiss and Jordan (1976) argue that the World Food Conference demonstrated significant leadership by international civil servants, which resulted in a successful institutional realignment of the international food security regime.Indeed, the 1970s marked an expansion of what Hopkins and Puchala labelled the "UN Food Network", which extended beyond the Rome-based agencies to include UNDP, UNCTAD, the World Bank and CGIAR (the latter outside the formal UN system) to work collectively to pressure states to address global food problems (Hopkins and Puchala 1978).In addition, the World Food Conference was characterized by successful NGO lobbying and regularized interaction with the FAO and UN system (Van Rooy 1997).
The 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) convened by the FAO differed from earlier international food conferences in that there was no immediate hunger crisis and its timing corresponded with a period during which the international community was suffering from 'conference fatigue' (Shaw and Clay 1998:60).Inter-organizational cooperation was evident in the 18-months of preparatory work in advance of the summit, including three consultative meetings to discuss how relevant international organizations would contribute to the WFS Plan of Action.This included participation by IFAD, WFP, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, WMO, WTO, UNDP, UNEP, UNFPA, UNHCR and IEAA representing a wider assemblage of international organizations than previously.An underappreciated outcome of the WFS was to produce the current international consensus definition of food security (see above), largely based on the work of the FAO and World Bank, which emphasized the inter-linkages between hunger and The Global Governance of Food Security poverty (Shaw and Clay 1996).In addition, the WFS established an international commitment to reduce the number of food insecure people worldwide by half by 2015; this goal was subsequently repackaged as the first Millennium Development Goals in 2000.Another important outcome of the WFS was the tasking of elaborating the human right to food to the newly established Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).This action established cooperation among the FAO and OHCHR, which set the stage for an international negotiation on voluntary guidelines on the right to food, mainstreaming the right to food in food policy, and firmly establishing the right to food in UN discourse and as policy (Mechlem 2004;Ziegler et al. 2011).However, unlike earlier international conferences which had created new intra-organizational coordinating mechanisms (e.g., FAO World Food Conference and Committee for World Food Security), the WFS did produce specific coordinating mechanisms to manage inter-organizational cooperation and coordination (Shaw and Clay 1996).
Turning away from mega events, there are several dimensions of inter-organizational cooperation that constitute what are regarded as more typical practices of cooperation.A major function of international organizations is to produce and disseminate information.For example, the FAO, World Bank, WFP, CGIAR and IFPRI collect, disseminate and analyze data on agricultural and food production, trade and distribution, malnutrition and undernutrition, levels of public and private investment in agriculture, number of individuals employed in agriculture, and so on.A common practice of inter-organizational cooperation in this sphere of activity is that international organizations regularly provide information updates of key trends in food security to main deliberative organs of other international organizations.For example, it is standard practice of the FAO and WFP to send officials to the meetings of the WTO Committee on Agriculture to provide updates and analyses on agricultural trade.This type of cooperation occurs widely throughout all the seven issue areas in the global governance of food security so much so that it is a ubiquitous feature.Yet its importance should not be underestimated.Given that food security is a multi-dimensional and complex problem, these cooperative informational exchanges play an important ideational role in global governance such as facilitating transnational knowledge transfer (Stone 1994), shared understanding of problems and appropriate responses, the "teaching" appropriate norms to states and other actors (Finnemore 1993) and multisectoral networks (Benner et al. 2004).In addition to information exchange, a related but different form of inter-organizational cooperation is the co-production of knowledge.At present the OECD and FAO produce the Agricultural Outlook on an annual basis that provides long-term projections of national, regional and global agricultural commodity markets.The WHO and FAO maintain the database on international standards related to food safety.
Since the 2008 Global Food Crisis there has been a scaling-up of inter-organizational cooperation in the co-production of knowledge: the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA), a synthesis policy document outlining multilateral food security strategies was co-produced by 22 international organization, including the UN agencies and Bretton Woods institutions (Lang and Barling 2012;Margulis 2012;Barling and Duncan 2015); the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) involves ten organizations (FAO, OECD, IGC, WTO, WFP, IFAD, IFPRI, World Bank, HLTF) that collect, analyze and disseminate food market information with the goal of promoting market transparency (Margulis 2015).
Inter-organizational cooperation is widespread in many areas of technical cooperation.The WFP and FAO jointly prepare Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission (CAFSAM) reports to estimate a country's food availability and needs; these reports are crucial for informing the appropriate type and size of multilateral food assistance in emergency situations.There are numerous cases of time-limited, program based cooperation; the recent IFAD and IFPRI Partnership in Market Access and Climate Change program assisted Ghana, Morocco, Mozambique and Vietnam by offering policy advice and financing to develop markets for high-value agricultural products and climate change mitigation.The The Global Governance of Food Security FAO and World Bank regularly cooperate on rural development policy implementation; examples include work on farm systems, reducing rural poverty, and commercializing agriculture in Africa (FAO and World Bank 2001;World Bank 2009).Increasing concerns about climate change's potential negative effects on world food production have spurred greater cooperation between the FAO and UNFCC; the FAO regularly provides technical advice to support work on the Clean Development Mechanism, technology transfer, and side events during multilateral climate change negotiations.
A more recent development in inter-organizational cooperation in the global governance of food security is the autonomous decision by international organizations to enhance coordination of action.The most prominent example being the decision by UN Secretary General in 2008 to create the High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis (HLTF), which includes 22 international organizations (non-UN bodies include the OECD, IMF, World Bank and WTO), that coordinates food security-related policies and interventions among a highly diverse set of institutions.The HLTF has been successful in negotiating consensus on strategic and programmatic priorities for food security and its capacity to speak as a collective voice for international organizations; this effort at system-wide coordination has also enhanced support from donor states (Margulis 2009;2012).Another example is the FAO and WFP establishment of a Food Security Cluster (FSC) in 2011 to coordinate food emergencies on a world scale.The FSC transformed what had been previously ad hoc and irregular cooperation into a more formalized structure to coordinate during humanitarian crises, establish best practices, training, and informationsharing both within the UN system and externally with non-governmental NGOs and other relevant actors (Maxwell & Parker 2012).Another instance of deepening inter-organizational cooperation are the series of inter-agency reports prepared by the FAO, World Bank, OECD, IMF, IFPRI IFAD, WFP and UNCTAD on global food issues to support policy formulation by the G8 and G20.Inter-agency reports encourage consensus-building among international organizations with diverse goals and interests; to date, inter-agency reports have addressed controversial issues such as issues of food price volatility (2011), responsible investment in agriculture (2011) and agricultural productivity (2012) (Clapp and Murphy 2013;Margulis 2015).
Perhaps the most significant effort and experiment in inter-organizational cooperation is the 2009 reform of the Committee for World Food Security (CFS).In response to the 2008 Global Food Crisis, the CFS has evolved from an inter-state body whose primary function was an information clearinghouse into a quasi-centralizing transnational authority for managing world food security.With respect to interorganizational relations, the reformed CFS now includes formal international organizations as more direct participants in the agenda-setting, policy-making and rule-making process (Margulis 2012(Margulis : 2015;;Duncan 2015).This role has also been extended to organizations representing global civil society and the private sector.Initial research on the CFS shows it is becoming a new global site of political contests for food security that span States, international organizations, global civil society and the private sector.The CFS is on the one hand increasing the legitimacy of the global governance of food security by providing policy space for global civil society and for discourses and policies that address the concerns of the most vulnerable (McKeon 2009;Brem-Wilson 2015;Duncan 2015).
The global governance of food security exhibits multiple and wide ranging examples of interorganizational cooperation.This ranges from technical forms of cooperation such as informational exchanges and program delivery in the case of international food assistance to experimental modes of governance such as the umbrella-like HLTF or the CFS.On the evidence, it appears that interorganizational cooperation in technical and programmatic issues, such as increasing the efficacy of international food assistance and sharing of scientific expertise for food production generate more routinized and formalized relationships.By comparison, efforts at inter-organizational to improve global-level coherence in the global governance of food security tend to be more informal and fluid, and on the whole, do not appear to be durable over the long-term.The exact reasons for this are unclear and remain understudied.However, the fact that efforts to transform inter-organizational relations often The Global Governance of Food Security occur during crisis, which themselves have short-time horizons, may not give rise to long-term, formalized relationships and/or arrangements.In the case of the disbanding of the UN World Food Conference, this appears to be clearly driven by a change in power relations and preferences among states.However, other exogenous factors, such as relative change in the authority and legitimacy of international organizations, including those of global civil society organizations and the private sector that are interacting more frequently and deeply within formal international organizations in the global governance of food security as in the case of the CFS.Such new multi-stakeholder dynamics, which is deepening the role of non-State actors in the global governance of food security, are likely to playing a greater role in determining whether inter-organizational relations become more or less formalized over time.

Rivalry
Inter-organizational rivalry is an important feature of the global governance of food security.Scholars regularly flag the lack of inter-organizational coordination for food security as a major challenge (Nau 1980;Shaw 2007); this is exacerbated by the sheer number (i.e., over 30) of international organizations directly and indirectly active in food security.Shaw and Maxwell (1998: 62) argue that coordination for food security is "at best checkered".Others, such as Talbot (1990), offer a pessimistic view and regard inter-organizational relations as dysfunctional.Indeed, from such studies we can observe that interorganizational rivalry has been frequently diagnosed by policymakers and scholars as a major challenge to the effectiveness of the global governance of food security, which stands in contrast to high levels of inter-organizational cooperation discussed above.However, the perception of inter-organizational rivalry in food security has been largely influenced by the historical events within the UN system; contemporary inter-organizational rivalry exists but it is significantly different to the past.
Inter-organizational rivalry in the policy field of food security is most strongly associated with the UN Rome-based food agencies and the historical development of the international food regime.Perhaps the most importance case is the inter-organizational rivalry between the FAO and the WFP during the 1970s and 1980s (McLin 1979;Shaw 2007;Ross 2011).When initially created, the WFP was nested within, and subordinate to, the FAO.Starting to in the late 1960s, by which point international food aid was a major component of official development assistance, successive heads of the WFP began to seek institutional independence from the FAO.In the 1970s and 1980s FAO leadership sought to retain its control over the WFP because it saw it as a potential rival to its authority (Ross 2011: 104) and in order to retain influence in international food aid policy.However, the WFP achieved full independence from the FAO and gained official status in early 1990s.However, the WFP's decades-long split from the FAO and pre-existing bureaucratic tensions engendered a culture of distrust of among these two institutions (Ingram 2006;Shaw 2007Shaw : 2009;;Ross 2011).
Similarly, the establishment of IFAD and World Food Council after the food crisis of the early 1970s ratcheted up inter-organizational rivalry within the UN system as the FAO no longer enjoyed exclusive leadership in the field of food security (Shaw 2007).However, the highly specialized nature of IFAD (and the short-lived nature of the World Food Council) did not result in the same degree of interorganizational mistrust as in the case of the FAO-WFP.Clapp and Murphy (2013) observe similar dynamics of inter-organizational rivalry following the 2008 Global Food Crisis in their analysis of the relationship between G20 and CFS.Both of these network-based bodies have taken on significantly greater roles in the global governance of food security (Margulis 2012).The G20's taking up of global leadership for food security has in turn resulted in a "chilling" of policy debates at the more inclusive CFS (Clapp and Murphy 2013).

The Global Governance of Food Security
Expertise and the production of "neutral" information are key characteristics of international organizations (Barnett and Finnemore 2004); it is also an area of inter-organizational rivalry in food security.In regards to expertise in the field of food security, there is inter-organizational rivalry in regards to which institution is most expert and therefore better positioned to influence international and national policy formation.Inter-organizational rivalry for expertise between the FAO and World Bank existed in the issue area of agricultural development.During the 1980s, the World Bank initiated structural adjustment programs across the developing world that emphasized reducing state support to agriculture (i.e., provision of credit, inputs, extension services and state-managed marketing), liberalizing markets to external agricultural competition, and reducing food subsidies for poor and vulnerable groups.The FAO's studies (FAO 1989) identified that structural adjustment undermined food security and led to worsening nutrition status.In other words, structural adjustment programs were undermining the efforts of the FAO and other UN organizations to support rural development and were thus seen to be as working at cross-purposes (Shaw and Clay 1998).
In regards to the production of information, there has been rivalry over the calculation of the number of hungry people worldwide since 2011.Measuring food insecurity is an extremely complex and imperfect process (de Haen et al. 2011).However, it plays an important role in signaling to the international community relative changes and trends that can be instrumental in generating political commitment for action.Historically, the FAO's statistics division has produced annual estimates on the number of food insecure people worldwide that it disseminates through its flagship publications, the State of World Food Insecurity in the World.However, in 2011, IFPRI started to produce the World Hunger Index, which is alternative composite measure of food insecurity.Whereas food policy experts disagree on the validity and shortcoming of each measure, from an inter-organizational relations perspective this is an example of inter-organizational rivalry with IFPRI competing with the FAO to be the standard reference point for the authoritative diagnosis of the scale of global food insecurity.
The human right to food has been a flashpoint of inter-organizational conflicts among the WTO and UN human rights bodies.These conflicts pertain largely to competing visions about the linkages between international trade and food security in international law; this has engendered misunderstanding and mutual distrust among trade and human rights officials (Howse & Teitel, 2007; see also Aaronson 2007).During the period following the implementation of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and during the early years of the Doha Round of multilateral agricultural trade negotiations, the OHCHR published several highly critical reports labeling the agreement a threat to the realization of human rights (OHCHR 2002;Dommen 2002;Margulis 2013).This prompted significant debate in Geneva (where both organizations are headquartered) between trade and human rights officials, including member states of these organizations and global civil society organizations, regarding whether agricultural trade liberalization was undermining the nascent human rights-based approach to food security (Petersmann 2001;Cottier 2002;OHCHR 2003).During this period, relations between the WTO and OHCHR were poor, including very public mutual recriminations by the WTO Director General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Margulis forthcoming).The 2008 Global Food Crisis rekindled these tensions as a result of the public debates between the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and WTO Director General regarding whether further agricultural trade liberalization would enhance or undermine global food security (Margulis 2014).Inter-organizational conflicts over the appropriate norms to guide the global governance of food security illustrate a form of rivalry not premised on competition for material resources but rather instead in the social construction of governance (Margulis 2013).
Inter-organizations rivalry in the global governance of food security is exhibited in different forms and guises.On the one hand, we can observe that inter-organizational rivalry occurring between executive heads and/or at the senior leadership of organizations.This friction is evident in the competition for control of mandates and resources between the heads of the FAO and WFP in the 1970s The Global Governance of Food Security and 1980s.Similarly, this can be observed in the normative and legal debates over human rights and international trade between the WTO and UN human rights system.This suggests that organizational leadership and values are two significant drivers of conflict in the global governance of the food system.Norm-divergence appears to be equally as important and widespread as a source of inter-organizational rivalry in the global governance of food security.This is consistent with expectations of a situation of increasing interaction among a growing number of organizations and actors with ever more diverse norms, goals and policy prescriptions without a central organizing authority.

Conclusion and Suggestions for Further Research
Food security is a complex, multi-sectoral and changing policy field populated by a diversity of international organizations and polyvalent inter-organizational relations.Indeed, there is no singular dynamic that best captures inter-organizational relations in the global governance of food security.Instead, we observe cases of inter-organizational cooperation and rivalry.However, several insights about the inter-organizational relations from the field of food security can be made.First, interorganizational cooperation and rivalry appears more pronounced during periods of crisis and institutional proliferation.For example, the 1970 and 2008 food crises and the establishment of the WTO marked significant moments of institutional proliferation in the global governance of food security.On the one hand this resulted in deepened inter-organizational cooperation on international policymaking; on the other hand, it also produced inter-organizational rivalry for political authority because of a lack of centralizing, coordinating role for any particular organization.
Second, the global governance of food security shows that inter-organizational rivalry is more likely the more population of organizations vary with respect to their missions, mandates, norms and respective policy paradigms and preferences.For example, inter-organizational rivalry among the FAO, WFP, IFAD, World Bank and IFPRIall of which are organizations that are predominately staffed by economists and food policy analystsexhibit patterns of rivalry that are more likely to revolve around technical and programmatic issues compared to rivalry among organizations that exhibit a wider divergence of missions, mandates, norms, and so on.This is shown in the rivalry between the WTO, an inter-state negotiating forum that promotes trade liberalization, and the OHCHR, which advances the human rights agenda (often associated with greater calls for regulation of markets).
Third, a recent trend in the global governance of food security is the creation of informal networks to manage inter-organizational cooperation instead of formal coordinating intra-organizations structures.During the post-war years, the preference for formalized arrangements was most evident with the role of the FAO as an umbrella organization in the 1940s.Another example is the creation of the World Food Council in the 1970s as an executive inter-state organization to coordinate across formal international organizations and States.In the period following the 2008 Global Food Crisis, a new pattern has emerged of the assembling of fluid, non-hierarchical inter-organizational networks to coordinate food security.This includes the HLTF, UN Standing Committee on Nutrition and the interagency groupings that support the work of the G8 and G20.Such networked forms of global governance also expand into other global policy spaces such as the CFS where international organizations participate alongside states, the private sector and global civil society in policy formulation (McKeon 2009;Duncan 2015).
These three general observations aside, there remains a deficit in the literature on the global governance of food security, and in particular with respect to inter-organizational relations.In fact, we know relatively little about inter-organizational relations when we take into account the numerous and extensive inter-organizational interactions at the global level that take place on a daily basis.In order to develop a more accurate and empirically-based picture of the world of inter-organizational relations for food security there is a strong case to be made for more in-depth studies of the precise dynamics and The Global Governance of Food Security effects of inter-organizational activities across the fields of Nutrition, Agricultural Production, Agricultural Trade, Food Safety, Human Right to Food, Agriculture and Development and Agriculture and Climate Change.
It is also important for future research to provide analysis of the dynamics of inter-organizational in the global governance food security over long time horizons.As discussed above, the majority of scholarship on inter-organizational relations has followed major international food crises.Whereas this scholarship points us towards the context for major organizational changes in the global governance of food security, it does not provide us with the full picture of how such organizational experiments pan out over the long term and whether they lead to significant changes in inter-organizational dynamics (i.e., cooperation, rivalry and/or conflict) and how these changes corresponds to governance and material outcomes on the ground.In other words, longitudinal analysis would be well positioned to provide us with a more robust understanding the long-term dynamics and consequences inter-organizational dynamics in the field of world food security.
The period between 2010 and 2015 has been an unprecedented and major period of interorganizational experimenting in the global governance of food security.It is not only the creation of the HLTF and reform of the CFS that are noteworthy; subsequent and more recent organizational developments such the creation of New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and Global Strategic Framework for food security and nutrition are ushering new global-scale arrangements characterized by inter-organizational relations among formal international organizations, global civil society organizations and private sector organizations.These new development are important for the study inter-organizational relations because they are building new modalities of inter-organizational approaches to global governance.It is also noteworthy that these new inter-organizational governance experiments have major financial backing by donor states and the private sector, which is indicative of strong support for their success.These developments could be read to suggest that the global governance of food security is at the cutting edge of new forms of inter-organizational arrangements for 21 st century challenges.Therefore, future research on these novel developments will not only provide a deeper understanding of the global governance of food security but such research will be well poised to provide greater insights into the wider field of inter-organizational studies.