Business and its Role in Improving Nutrition: Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions for Nigeria. Case Studies and Key Messages from the Workshop

This workshop report presents the findings from a workshop held by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in partnership with the Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network in Abuja, Nigeria, 14 October 2015. The workshop convened individuals from the private sector, civil society, the donor community and government to discuss the opportunities, challenges and potential impacts of using market-based solutions to improve nutrition.UK Department for International Developmen

Multi-level Advocacy for Nutrition

Over the past decade, nutrition has received strong global attention as a development problem. Concerted efforts by international donors, philanthropical foundations, national and international non-government organisations and civil society have pushed nutrition further up global and national policy agendas. This has led to growing convergence on goals, strategies and interventions to tackle undernutrition, seeking to support country-owned, country-led strategies for addressing undernutrition. Policy advocacy has played a critical role in getting to this stage; it has raised awareness among key stakeholders of the underlying and immediate causes (direct and indirect) of malnutrition and its human, economic and other consequences. Advocacy is hence seen as essential for strengthening and supporting actions towards sustained political commitment, and effective multi-stakeholder and multi-level governance for nutrition. Domestic advocacy initiatives – including those related to international campaigns such as Scaling Up Nutrition (http://scalingupnutrition.org) and the 1,000 Days Partnership (www.thousanddays.org/) – have tended to focus on policymaking at international and national levels. This has also characterised many studies of nutrition and health advocacy. Pelletier et al. (2013) study national-level nutrition advocacy to present a useful set of ‘principles and practices of nutrition advocacy’. However, they do not set out to discuss advocacy or the potential catalytic role of civil society at the subnational level. Indeed, few studies have looked at nutrition advocacy beyond the international and national levels. This sharply contrasts with parallel nutrition debates, which underline that policy implementation dynamics mediate the outcomes of nutrition policy initiatives, and thus require greater analysis. This demands an analytical shift away from capital cities and the hubbub of central government administrations, donors, international and domestic pressure groups and national media to the realities, practices and political economies at subnational level.UK Department for International DevelopmentThe material has been funded by UK aid from the UK Government, however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government’s official policies

Assessing the Policy Impact of ‘Indicators’: A Process-Tracing Study of the Hunger And Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI)

In recent years, the global literature on reducing hunger and malnutrition has come to view progress as much an outcome of a political process as of (nutrition) technical interventions. Political commitment is now seen as an essential ingredient for bringing food and nutrition security higher up on public policy agendas. As a consequence, a range of new indicators and scorecard tools have proliferated seeking to promote accountability and transparency of policy, legal and spending efforts and outcomes in the battle to reduce hunger and malnutrition. While a literature on indicators is emerging and underlining their governance and knowledge effects, relatively little is known about if and how indicators affect public policy. Accordingly, the policy impact of well-established annual metrics such as the Global Hunger Index, the Access to Nutrition Index or The Economist’s Global Food Security Index is often assumed but rarely explored. This report innovatively applies a process-tracing approach to understand the policy impact of indicators and contributes to debates about assessing the impact of development research. It focuses on the case of the Hunger And Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI). The HANCI project publishes annual indices of countries’ political commitment to reduce hunger and undernutrition, as well as complementary knowledge products (e.g. expert surveys and community voices).UK Department for International Development; Government of Irelan

Process Tracing the Policy Impact of ‘Indicators’

In recent years, a range of new indices, benchmarking and scorecard tools—also known as ‘indicators’—have been developed to influence public policy and to pro- mote accountability. While subjected to important technical and political critiques, the policy impact of ‘indicators’ is often assumed yet rarely demonstrated. Suitable evaluative methods are in their infancy. This article adopts an innovative process tracing analysis to assess the policy impact of the Hunger And Nutrition Commit- ment Index (HANCI) in Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Zambia and globally. We pre- sent a rare and empirically rich application of this systematic qualitative evaluative method. We further contribute to the theorisation of ‘indicators’ by positing a central role for equitable producer–user relations in mediating policy impact, and demon- strate that such relations can overcome significant political critiques on ‘indicators’. Publishers Note: Due to a production process error the original version of this paper was inadvertently published without Open Access. We apologise to the author that this was not applied before first publication. No other changes have been made to the content

Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses in seismic risk assessments on the example of Cologne, Germany

Both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties associated with different sources and components of risk (hazard, exposure, vulnerability) are present at each step of seismic risk assessments. All individual sources of uncertainty contribute to the total uncertainty, which might be very high and, within the decision-making context, may therefore lead to either very conservative and expensive decisions or the perception of considerable risk. When anatomizing the structure of the total uncertainty, it is therefore important to propagate the different individual uncertainties through the computational chain and to quantify their contribution to the total value of risk. The present study analyses different uncertainties associated with the hazard, vulnerability and loss components by the use of logic trees. The emphasis is on the analysis of epistemic uncertainties, which represent the reducible part of the total uncertainty, including a sensitivity analysis of the resulting seismic risk assessments with regard to the different uncertainty sources. This investigation, being a part of the EU FP7 project MATRIX (New Multi-Hazard and Multi-Risk Assessment Methods for Europe), is carried out for the example of, and with reference to, the conditions of the city of Cologne, Germany, which is one of the MATRIX test cases. At the same time, this particular study does not aim to revise nor to refine the hazard and risk level for Cologne; it is rather to show how large are the existing uncertainties and how they can influence seismic risk estimates, especially in less well-studied areas, if hazard and risk models adapted from other regions are used

Impact Forecasting to Support Emergency Management of Natural Hazards

Forecasting and early warning systems are important investments to protect lives, properties, and livelihood. While early warning systems are frequently used to predict the magnitude, location, and timing of potentially damaging events, these systems rarely provide impact estimates, such as the expected amount and distribution of physical damage, human consequences, disruption of services, or financial loss. Complementing early warning systems with impact forecasts has a twofold advantage: It would provide decision makers with richer information to take informed decisions about emergency measures and focus the attention of different disciplines on a common target. This would allow capitalizing on synergies between different disciplines and boosting the development of multihazard early warning systems. This review discusses the state of the art in impact forecasting for a wide range of natural hazards. We outline the added value of impact-based warnings compared to hazard forecasting for the emergency phase, indicate challenges and pitfalls, and synthesize the review results across hazard types most relevant for Europe

Climate Risk Sourcebook

The Climate Risks Sourcebook provides an updated methodological approach on how to design and conduct climate risk assessments and provides the necessary and state-of-the-art knowledge incorporating findings of the sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC. It is a user-friendly, step-by-step guide to operationalizing the theoretical concept of risk. The approach is location and context-specific and gives guidance on how climate risk assessments can inform and support evidence-based decision making. This includes impact chains as tailor-made conceptual models that illustrate key risks and their drivers for a specific context. The Climate Risk Sourcebook additionally offers expert material for further in-depth knowledge. Another novelty is its focus on communication, gender and vulnerable groups