Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016 International Agreements and National Policy Change: The Political Origins of (Mal)nutrition

Description

Human rights are firmly entrenched in international law, however, the protection of these rights remains a serious challenge. While the right to health can be upheld through the state provision of public goods and services, states vary in their willingness to prioritize health on the national agenda. What role can international actors play in eliciting national policy change? The influence of international agreements has long been the subject of a lively discussion amongst scholars and policymakers alike. Conventional scholarship has focused on investigating international treaties and formal, legally binding agreements. The United Nations (UN), however, has increasingly turned to the use of more informal approaches. For this reason, my dissertation examines a non-binding agreement, the UN-led Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative. SUN requires country signatories to improve maternal and child nutrition policies, but the agreement has no legal charter, provides no direct financial incentive, and uses no formal mechanism for punishing non-compliance. Does SUN contribute to national policy change? If so, under what conditions? Since SUN emerged in 2009, country signatories have travelled down dramatically different paths. Certain countries pushed through rapid national policy change, while others remained stagnant. What explains these diverging trajectories? And what do these outcomes reveal about the UN’s ability to influence policy change? Drawing upon original fieldwork carried out in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, and Thailand, I show how the same agreement can drive policy change in certain countries, while constraining improvements in others. My dissertation introduces a theoretical framework to elaborate on the causal mechanisms explaining these outcomes.

Carmen Jacqueline Ho is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science. At the Munk School of Global Affairs, she is the Health and Human Rights Senior Doctoral Fellow with the Comparative Program on Health and Society and a Doctoral Fellow with the Asian Institute. At the Hospital for Sick Children, she is affiliated with the Centre for Global Child Health. Her research interests include global governance, the political economy of development, comparative social policy, and health politics. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, International Development Research Centre, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya is a family physician and the Frigon-Blau Chair in Family Medicine Research at Women’s College Hospital. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and an assistant professor at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto. He received his medical degree at McGill University. He has a PhD in health services research from the University of Toronto and was a Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.