Ensuring the right to food for indigenous children: a case study of stakeholder perspectives on policy options to ensure the rights of tamariki Māori to healthy food

Promoting health in the digital environment: health policy experts' responses to on-demand delivery in Aotearoa New Zealand

Services offering on-demand delivery of unhealthy commodities, such as fast food, alcohol and smoking/vaping products have proliferated in recent years. It is well known that the built environment can be health promoting or harmful to health, but there has been less consideration of the digital environment. Increased availability and accessibility of these commodities may be associated with increased consumption, with harmful public health implications. Policy regulating the supply of these commodities was developed before the introduction of on-demand services and has not kept pace with the digital environment. This paper reports on semi-structured interviews with health policy experts on the health harms of the uptake in on-demand delivery of food, alcohol and smoking/vaping products, along with their views on policies that might mitigate these harms. We interviewed 14 policy experts from central and local government agencies and ministries, health authorities, non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and university research positions in Aotearoa New Zealand using a purposive sampling strategy. Participants concerns over the health harms from on-demand services encompassed three broad themes-the expansion of access to and availability of unhealthy commodities, the inadequacy of existing restrictions and regulations in the digital environment and the expansion of personalized marketing and promotional platforms for unhealthy commodities. Health policy experts' proposals to mitigate harms included: limiting access and availability, updating regulations and boosting enforcement and limiting promotion and marketing. Collectively, these findings and proposals can inform future research and public health policy decisions to address harms posed by on-demand delivery of unhealthy commodities.

The rights way forward: reconciling the right to food with biodiversity conservation

The current paradigm of biodiversity conservation, with its continued focus on the notion of pristine nature, has resulted in the separation of humans and nature at the expense of both biological and cultural–linguistic diversity. The continued annexation of land for the cause of conservation has resulted in the curtailment of both rights and access to local and diverse food sources for many rural communities. Indigenous Peoples and local communities are fundamental to conserving biodiversity through sustainable use of nature despite repeated attempts to dispossess them from their lands, cultures and knowledge. It has been this traditional and land-based knowledge that has contributed to the conservation of biodiversity whilst also supporting healthy, diverse and nutritious diets. If we are to achieve a more just and sustainable future, we need to continue to centre conservation initiatives around rights, access and equity whilst respecting a plurality of perspectives, worldviews and knowledge systems. Here we review alternative approaches that help reconcile the right to food with biodiversity conservation, such as biocultural rights, rights-based approaches and integrated land management schemes, with the aim of identifying optimal ways forward for conservation that break away from the dichotomous view that pits people against nature and instead embrace the importance of this symbiotic relationship.

Diversifying Indigenous Vulnerability and Adaptation: An Intersectional Reading of Māori Women’s Experiences of Health, Wellbeing, and Climate Change

Despite evidence that Indigenous peoples’ multiple subjectivities engender diverse lived experiences both between and within Indigenous groups, the influence of multiple subjectivities on Indigenous peoples’ vulnerability and adaptation to climate change is largely un-explored. Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper provides empirical evidence that subjectivity-mediated power dynamics operating within Indigenous societies (at the individual and household scale) are important determinants of vulnerability and adaptation which should be considered in both scholarship and policy. Using an intersectional framework, I demonstrate how different Māori women and their whānau (families) live, cope with, and adapt to the embodied physical and emotional health effects of climate change in radically different ways because of their subject positionings, even though they belong to the same community, hapū (sub-tribe), or iwi (tribe). In underlining these heterogenous experiences, I provide an avenue for reconsidering how climate adaptation scholarship, policies, and practices might better engage with the complex, amorphous realities within Māori and other Indigenous communities. I argue it is possible to develop more inclusive, tailored, and sustainable adaptation that considers divergent vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities within Indigenous communities, groups, and societies and supports customised vulnerability-reduction strategies.