System Effects: A Hybrid Methodology for Exploring the Determinants of Food In/Security

摘要

Household food insecurity is the product of a wide range of environmental, social, and economic determinants, which themselves interact with and affect one another. On this point, though, much of the existing food security scholarship suffers from a lack of theoretical sophistication and tends to neglect the complex nature of the urban foodscape. This article develops an original systematic mixed method for understanding the determinants of food security, grounded in a new theoretical framework that integrates complex systems theory and the capability approach. Both theory and method have been developed by reference to a comparative empirical study of Afghan migrant communities in Sydney, London, and San Francisco. The efficacy of this (re)theorization and its accompanying system effects method are demonstrated by way of a worked example of their use in the case of the Sydney Afghan community.