Raising awareness and advocating change: The work of Nova Scotia food security NGOs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although Nova Scotia nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been working on local food security for many years, there is limited research that has analyzed their activities and impacts. Employing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' (FAO) four dimensions of food security—food availability, food access, food utilization, and food stability—to guide data collection and analysis, we examined the work of nine Nova Scotia NGOs through document analysis, media analysis, and interviews with NGO representatives. We categorized the findings according to two broad themes of raising community awareness and conducting research/policy advocacy, and two more focused themes of partnerships and funding. We then discussed the rich array of food security “orientations” throughout the province, spanning community food security, household food insecurity, food justice, food sovereignty, and policy work. We found that the FAO’s four criteria, based as they are on larger scales (e.g., the national level), could not easily capture the myriad community-level food security work in Nova Scotia. We did note, however, that at the subnational level, indicators point to the continued dominance of the agri-food system in the province. We suggest that the relations forged by the food security NGOs with local universities and civic organizations could be reinvigorated in the post-COVID era with longer-term, joined-up sustainable food policy approaches coupled with institutional mapping of key actors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".