What is good governance?

 

Good governance within the SUN movement means developing processes and ways of working that will ensure the following for and from everyone:

• Transparency and information sharing

• Accountability - as a mutual responsibility with a focus on the realisation of rights and ensuring responsibilities of duty bearers.

• Responsibility – clear roles and responsibilities

• Participation that is inclusive and open to everyone[1]

• Responsiveness – being constructive, supporting and strengthening

• Effectiveness – dynamic , strategic leadership that achieves results

 

This means working towards realising the human right to food and ensuring that all human rights principles are respected by all parties with a guiding foundation being that the right to food for all is not compromised. This also means understanding the roles and responsibilities of duty bearers and rights holders and the ways in which accountability can be ensured.

Rights holders: All human beings are rights holders. When states sign human rights treaties they commit to realising rights for their citizens.

Primary duty bearer: The government. Governments have a responsibility to protect, respect and fulfil the human right to food.

 

While the government is the primary duty bearer there are also secondary and tertiary duty bearers who are those who are in direct contact with rights holders. Duty bearers can be classified as follows:

Primary:  family, teachers, police, medical staff, employers.

Secondary: community organisations, school principals and administrative bodies.

Tertiary: Private sector organisations, NGOs and aid agencies

with the final scale of duty bearer being countries, institutions and organisations that have no direct involvement in the lives of rights holders such as UN agencies, INGOs, the African Union and in the context of SUN the SUN movement as an institution.

 

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The International Legal basis for the Human Right to Adequate Food

The human right to is recognised in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 25. It is expanded in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This has been ratified by 157 States. Further details on states which have ratified this can be found here: http://indicators.ohchr.org/

The right to food for all children is also implied in Articles 24 and 27 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations in 1989, and now ratified by all States of the world with two exceptions, Somalia and the United States of America.

 

[1]   To everyone means without discrimination and regardless of gender, disability, age or ethnicity.