Manoeuvring between regulations to achieve locally accepted results: analysis of school meals in Latvia and Finland

Abstract

Rather than having a consistent food policy, countries often tend to regulate food from the margins of other policy domains such as agricultural, environmental, welfare or educational policies. Regulatory interventions perceive food as an instrument rather than a domain with its own specific set of policy issues and view food provision as an activity to achieve certain economic, social and environmental objectives. This fragments the food policy into disintegrated points of interventions from various policy areas and leaves unregulated voids that can be exploited either to improve or to reduce the effectiveness of the interventions. This article explores interlinkages between fragmented policies and regulations to offer a conceptual model linking regulated elements of the food system. The research is a multiple case study consisting of three cases: one Finnish and two Latvian. The aim of the study is 1) to expose the variety of perspectives used to set regulations for school meals and 2) to analyse how these regulations are aligned by the actors implementing them. The empirical data is composed of literature, regulatory documents, interviews, scenario workshops and media data. The results indicate that the key perspectives used to set regulatory interventions in both countries are entitlements, health and environment. However, actors implementing regulations have remarkable space for interpretation and manoeuvring.