“Magic concepts” and USAID: Framing food systems reform to support the status quo

Motivation International development policy is increasingly a contested site of agricultural politics. Many civil society organizations actively engage with alternative frameworks including sustainability, sovereignty, and self‐reliance to challenge the prevailing neoliberal construct of food systems. Recently, development policy actors have used the term “self‐reliance” in international development policy discourse, but its meaning, purpose, and underlying political ideology vary. Understanding how development actors define self‐reliance is critical for understanding whether the term is being used to maintain the neoliberal status quo or to support food systems change. Purpose In 2018 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released its “The Journey to Self‐Reliance” policy framework. This article explores how USAID represented self‐reliance by examining the vocabularies, discourses, and ideologies the agency drew upon to conceptualize self‐reliance. Approach and methods We analysed a corpus of USAID policy documents published between 2018 and 2020, using critical discourse analysis (CDA), and triangulated CDA findings with corpus linguistics. We then presented our analysis to focus groups of US university scholar‐practitioners funded by USAID who responded to the findings. Findings We found that USAID's construction of self‐reliance simultaneously sought to reproduce neoliberal ideological outcomes while, at least formally, embracing localization in terms of community self‐reliance. We also found that USAID placed market actors as active leaders and presented local governments in passive roles. Focus group respondents agreed on the importance of localization but differed as to the primacy USAID afforded market organizations. Policy implications We identified three major policy implications. First, the primacy of the neoliberal conception of self‐reliance limits self‐directed development among the targeted countries. Second, framing self‐reliance as market driven is likely to deepen consolidated power in agricultural development. Third, at a global policy level, we observe a lack of solidarity with civil society organizations addressing agricultural development efforts, which seek greater representation in development policy deliberations.