Access to food security through multiple streams: local-level policy making and agenda setting

Food insecurity negatively affects vulnerable populations most severely. Additionally, unemployment, poverty, and the foreclosure crisis harm residents??? health in the deindustrialized city of Cleveland, Ohio. From 2007 to 2011, several policy proposals to increase food security made it on the city council???s agenda in Cleveland including the nation???s first zoning ordinance to protect urban gardens for food production. Then the Cleveland City Council unanimously adopted the ???Healthy Cleveland Resolution??? in 2011. I examine how and why these measures made it on to the policy agenda.\ud First, I present an overview of the food security problem and non-medical social determinants that affect the health of many Cleveland residents. To understand the recent policy-making in Cleveland on food security issues, I refine the agenda-setting model presented by John Kingdon in his seminal 1984 classic, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. Then I test the applicability of this modified Kingdon model using Cleveland???s recent policy-making on food security as a case study. I hypothesize that Kingdon???s model is a good framework for understanding agenda setting such as that in Cleveland. However, I also hypothesize that interest group coalitions play an essential role as part of a broader policy community in local-level policy making and agenda setting, something that Kingdon did not stress.\ud I interviewed various actors to analyze the policymaking that produced the Healthy Cleveland Resolution. The interviews reveal various factors and conditions that show my modified Kingdon model is useful for understanding such local-level policy making and agenda setting.CSU, Chic