title: A frame-critical policy analysis of Canada's response to the World Food Summit 1998-2008.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The 2012 visit to Canada of Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, led to a public rebuff by Canadian governmental officials. This paper adapts the frame-critical policy analysis of Schön and Rein (1994), to explore the rhetorical basis for this conflict. This examination is offered as an illustrative example of how food insecurity is framed as a public policy problem in a high-income nation and how this framing has changed over time.
  
  
  METHODS
  We analyze Canada's decade of sequential responses to the 1996 World Food Summit, spanning 1998-2008, in the form of Canada's Action Plan on Food Security, and its subsequent Progress Reports. We conducted a qualitative policy analysis, adapting the frame-critical approach first delineated by Schön and Rein (1994). This analysis uses a social constructionist approach to map out the relationships between tacit understanding of policy by particular actors, explicit rhetoric in the public domain, and action in this policy area over time.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We identify three key ways in which competing rhetorical frames arise over time: frame shifts (e.g., a shift away from language highlighting the right to food and health); frame blending (e.g., discussion about poverty becomes obscured by complexity discourse); and within-frame incongruence (e.g., monitoring for health indicators that are unrelated to policy solutions). Together, these frames illustrate how the conflict embodied in the UN Special Rapporteur's visit has been deeply woven into the policy discourse on food insecurity in Canada over time.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Frame-critical analysis is instructive for exposing and also predicting tensions that impede forward progress on difficult policy issues. Accordingly, such analyses may be helpful in not only dissecting how policy can become 'stuck' in the process of change but in active reframing towards new policy solutions.
authors: Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John's, Canada ; Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
authors: Catherine L
authors: CL
authors: Mah
authors: Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada ; Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
authors: Catherine
authors: C
authors: Hamill
authors: Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
authors: Krista
authors: K
authors: Rondeau
authors: Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada ; Institute for Public Health, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
authors: Lynn
authors: L
authors: McIntyre
keywords: Food insecurity; Framing analysis; Public policy; World food summit