School Feeding Programs in Pandemic: Chile 2020, Lessons for a New Constitution

Abstract

This article examines the implementation of Chile’s School Feeding Program (PAE) in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis is grounded in a comparative perspective of the Latin American context. It systematizes government documents to track changes and continuities in the formal aspects of the program’s adaptation, such as coverage and nutritional contents as well as logistical aspects, including the speed of adaptation, distribution networks and intersectoral coordination. It engages process-tracing techniques using media accounts for observations on snags in implementation and a sense of how it was experienced by citizens at the ground level. It concludes with reflections on how the long-term trajectory of the program, which transcends changes in types of social provision and is previous to the installation of the neoliberal model, was the sustenance for the installation of the infrastructural, logistical and human capital capacities necessary for a rapid and effective adaptation.