The Evolution of Humanitarian and Development Nutrition

The aim of the workshop was to explore and debate how and why humanitarian and development nutrition came to be dominated by medical science, what the effects have been for aid agencies and beneficiaries, and how historical conditions have shaped humanitarian and development practices more broadly. By bringing together nutritionists, humanitarians, historians, sociologists, economists and anthropologists, the workshop will promote critical debate about the future of preventing and treating acute malnutrition.  Participants include key researchers and practitioners who have been directly involved in the development of current medicalised practices, and those who have criticised it for neglecting the social and political dimension of nutrition in emergencies and in development.

The workshop has been recorded and recordings are available here. Please select the session titles below to listen to the recordings.

Session1: Where have we come from – the long history of humanitarian nutrition

In this session we look at the main transformations since the start of the 19th Century, when the soup kitchen model first came to dominate relief. We discuss early missions overseas, the impact of colonial science, and the development of norms and standards and of modern procedures such as the MUAC band. The session will explore how prevailing approaches to emergency nutrition reveal a great deal about wider socio-political trends.

• Tom Scott-Smith. On an Empty Stomach: Humanitarian Approaches to Hunger
• Norbert Gotz. Crisis and Nutrition: The 1809 Swedish Mission of Wilhelm Friedrich Domeier
• Joel Glasman . Measuring Malnutrition: A short history of the MUAC-tape
• C. Sathyamala. Of norms and standards of nutritional status: A critique.

Session 2: Contemporary practices - why we do what we do

In this session we will discuss the different contemporary practices and approaches to addressing malnutrition, and how they emerged in the past five decades.  We will discuss in detail the origins of Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) and the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, and the evolution of different practices and approaches within them.

• Stuart Gillespie (presented by Jody Harris).  Different approaches to nutrition in the past five decades
• Steve Collins. The Treatment of Severe Acute Malnutrition: The origins of CMAM
• Megan Pennell.  Progress and Challenges in the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement

Session 3: Recent changes in nutrition practices: social and political dynamics and effects

In this session we will discuss the shifts in nutrition practices in the last thirty to fifty years from a social and political perspective.  We will explore the recent shift towards contemporary medicalised and behavioural practices, and the political and organisational factors that have influenced this shift.  We will also analyse the political effects of medicalised nutrition and of the increased role of the private sector in the diagnosis and treatment of malnutrition.

• Susanne Jaspars.  Resilience or abandonment? The evolution of nutrition practices in Darfur
• Samuel Hauenstein Swan. The effect of funding and operational challenges on changes in nutrition practices, with examples from Chechnya, Somalia, Yemen, CAR
• Jean-Herve Bradol. Challenging the shift towards medicalised and behavioural practices
• Jody Harris. Stunting as a buzzword: strategic ambiguity in nutrition discourse.

Session 4: The dangers of simplification and the role of social nutrition

In this session we will discuss in more detail the advantages of more context-specific approaches and what has been lost with increased simplification and standardisation of nutrition practices.  We will examine the complexities of malnutrition causality with examples from different contexts, and explore what role social nutrition can play in analysing and addressing nutritional problems in development and emergency settings.

• Sara Stevano and Deborah Johnston. Better decisions are not enough: a study of food-decision making and practice among schoolchildren in urban Ghana
• Lauren Blake. The wrong focus: malnutrition, gender and interventions in Guatemala
• Lizzie Hull. The influence of medicalised knowledge regimes on South Africa’s school feeding programme
• Nick Nisbett. Nutrition, systems and embodiment: a review of current models in policy and critical thought

Conclusion and discussion

Organiser: Susanne Jaspers (SOAS),Elizabeth Hull (SOAS), Tom Scott-Smith (University of Oxford)

Contact email: eh17@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: (020) 7898 4766