New Research: Food Systems Advocacy In The Global South: A Framework And Pilot In India

By JLRiedi @ 2026-03-02T22:21 (+6)

Advocacy doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but many global strategies assume a “one-size-fits-all” approach. In our latest study, Faunalytics with The Good Growth Co. developed and tested a new contextual advocacy framework in India to help advocates navigate local political, cultural, and economic realities.

We found that external factors, like religious norms, livelihoods, and government priorities, influenced campaign outcomes 40% of the time. This resource provides advocates and funders with actionable recommendations for conducting “context scans” and organizational readiness checks to ensure your next campaign is built for its specific environment.

Background

Executive Summary

This study develops a framework for contextualized food systems advocacy, and tests it in the Indian context. Drawing on global implementation science and India-specific literature, we created a framework organized into four dimensions: External Environment, Organizational Conditions, Advocacy & Movement Landscape, and Stakeholder Characteristics. We then tested this framework via a pilot survey of 11 India-based advocates, who described a recent campaign and reported the contextual factors they perceived as most influential; we then coded and mapped these reported factors to the four framework dimensions to assess fit and practical coverage. Key findings include that political and cultural factors were most frequently cited as influencing outcomes (40% of responses), while organizational factors shaped adaptation capacity. Key recommendations include conducting structured contextual scans before launch, building organizational readiness checks into planning, and explicitly addressing caste, livelihoods, and economic realities in campaign design.

Why Context Matters

Across the animal advocacy movement, there is growing recognition that a strategy’s success is closely tied to the environment in which it is implemented. Recent commentary emphasizes the need for context-driven change (A Just World, Mehrotra, 2025), the value of deploying the most appropriate tactics for each setting (Animal Ask, 2024), and acknowledgment from funders that different cultures may require distinct approaches (Thrive, 2024). This is especially salient across many Global South settings, where advocacy often operates amid wide variation in institutional capacity, enforcement, infrastructure, and political constraints, making it difficult to assume that evidence, tactics, or policy pathways will transfer cleanly across contexts (Theobald et al., 2018).

The importance of context is especially visible in India’s food system, where public norms around animals are closely tied to identity, religion, and political narratives (PEW Research, 2021, Giacalone & Jaeger, 2024; Sarma & Hari, 2023). India-specific studies describe recurring contextual conditions such as upper-caste vegetarianism, religious dietary traditions, stigma around certain meats, and sensitivities around livelihoods and hunger.

Most established advocacy frameworks assume conditions like consistent policy enforcement and predictable policymaking that do not always apply in India. Research on India’s food system highlights distinct dynamics: social norms linked to caste and religion shape advocacy reception (PEW Research, 2021; Sarma & Singh, 2023), policy reform involves navigating competing priorities rather than linear pathways (Giacalone & Jaeger, 2024), and outcomes depend on variable enforcement capacity and both formal and informal influence channels (ACE, 2019). For example, national animal welfare laws exist but enforcement varies widely across states, with some lacking basic infrastructure while others maintain active committees (Sudhan & Nayyar, 2024); policy influence often flows through informal networks and party intermediaries alongside formal processes (Montes et al., 2018); and plant-based advocacy can be read as reinforcing caste hierarchies, triggering resistance when campaigns ignore these identity dynamics (Sarma & Singh, 2023). While India-specific literature describes these forces, it rarely translates them into structured planning tools. This gap motivated the development of a contextual advocacy framework grounded in both global evidence and India-specific realities.

In this study, we treated these as examples of contextual conditions in India and used them as reference points when extracting and clustering factors for the pilot framework’s four dimensions.

Objective Of The Study

Advocacy for food system transformation often relies on global narratives around climate, sustainability, and animal welfare that may not resonate in local contexts. This creates challenges for adapting and localizing advocacy campaigns across different cultural and political settings (van der Werf, 2020). To address this, we need a practical framework that helps advocates and funders identify which contextual factors matter most for campaign design.

This study follows three steps to develop such a framework. First, we built a pilot framework by drawing on global advocacy literature and existing frameworks from public policy, implementation science, and food systems research. Second, we cross-checked and refined the framework using India-specific literature on food systems, vegan advocacy, and case studies, to accommodate contextual factors specific to India. Third, we tested this framework in India as our first pilot site. India was chosen because it presents a distinct advocacy landscape shaped by caste, religion, moral norms, and complex policy dynamics around food and health (Sarma & Hari, 2023; Thow et al., 2016; Giacalone & Jaeger, 2024). 

This pilot study examines whether the framework reflects the contextual factors Indian advocates describe working with, and whether it can help them make more strategic decisions. Based on feedback from this pilot, the framework can be refined and adapted for other contexts across the Global South.

The resulting framework examines contextual advocacy through four dimensions: (1) External Environment, (2) Advocacy & Movement Landscape, (3) Organizational Conditions, and (4) Stakeholder Characteristics (see Section 2 for framework development and Section 3 for detailed findings).

Key Findings

• Political and cultural factors were the most frequently referenced by Indian advocates as influencing campaign progress and outcomes. Around 40% of the 395 coded responses describing campaign factors and influences referred to political, cultural, or regulatory factors, such as government attention, policy priorities, or public sentiment, when respondents explained why campaigns moved faster or slower than expected. Across questions on planning, success, and challenges, respondents most often explained why campaigns sped up, stalled, or changed direction by referring to political and cultural shifts rather than internal or movement-level factors.
• Advocates highlighted India-specific social and economic conditions as central considerations for campaign planning. Six of 11 respondents (54.5%) referred to contextual forces such as caste, hunger, malnutrition, livelihoods, and price sensitivity when explaining how their campaigns were received. They described these conditions as factors they needed to keep in mind when setting campaign goals and choosing strategies rather than as general background. For example, one respondent argued that legal advocacy “must be done strategically and keeping in mind the complexities in India between farmed animals, livelihoods, malnutrition, chronic hunger and stunting, and the severe price sensitivity of the market” (Resp. 35).
• Organizational factors shaped how far campaigns could be adjusted once they were underway. Most respondents (nine of 11; 82%) rated organizational factors such as staffing, funding, internal systems, and leadership alignment as highly influential on campaign outcomes. Around one quarter of the responses we analyzed described how these internal factors shaped the kinds of changes teams could make once campaigns were underway, such as slowing or pausing campaigns, scaling back planned expansion, or redesigning program structures when they could not be implemented as originally intended.
• Organizational factors were mentioned more often in mid-campaign reflections than in early planning. Mentions of staffing, resources, internal coordination, and related organizational elements appeared primarily in responses describing challenges, pivots, or adjustments rather than in answers about initial campaign design. This pattern may indicate that some internal factors became more salient once campaigns were underway instead of being explicitly considered at the outset. A key question for future work is whether using the contextual advocacy framework can help teams bring these considerations into earlier planning and campaign review, or whether it mainly formalizes practices already used by a subset of organizations.
• Stakeholder groups were more often described as constraints to navigate than as primary audiences for influence. Stakeholder-related reflections represented a smaller share of the data (12%). When respondents did mention stakeholders such as government agencies, businesses, media, or communities, they typically described them as sources of risk or resistance (for example, a strong dairy lobby or risk of government pushback) rather than as primary audiences for engagement within the timeframe of their campaigns. In this small sample, advocates often focused on managing backlash and regulatory risk, so their reflections emphasized working around powerful actors rather than trying to change their positions directly. Taken together, these responses indicate that, in this sample, social identity and socio-economic conditions were treated as key contextual factors to weigh alongside political and organizational conditions when assessing possible campaign directions.

Conclusions

This pilot study examined how advocates in India described the conditions shaping their campaigns and how those accounts align with a contextual advocacy framework developed from a literature review. Respondents most often pointed to external conditions (such as political timing, regulatory clarity and enforcement, cultural norms, and structural realities) to explain when campaigns advanced or stalled. Internal capacity and the advocacy landscape then shaped how teams adapted. Campaigns were not fixed plans; choices were made in response to the settings in which they operated.

The framework’s four dimensions captured many of these influences, but three gaps emerged. Stakeholder groups (such as government, industry, media, and consumers) were often treated as powerful and relatively fixed, described more as features of the landscape than as audiences whose views or behavior might change. Internal factors were most visible when advocates looked back on why campaigns had been slowed, scaled back, or redesigned, and appeared less often in descriptions of early planning. Respondents also stressed social and economic realities (such as caste, hunger, livelihoods, malnutrition, and price sensitivity) as central to how campaigns are interpreted.

The study also points to a gap in when and how these factors are discussed within campaigns. Many respondents attributed stalled or slow-moving campaigns mainly to external political, legal, or cultural factors, even when their narratives suggested that some problems might have been avoidable if internal capacity, assumptions about key stakeholders, or social identity dynamics had been considered more explicitly before launch. A key question for future work is whether using this framework helps teams bring these issues into earlier planning and adjust campaign design, or whether it mostly formalizes practices already used by a subset of organizations. Addressing this will require testing the framework in other settings with methods that follow campaigns over time, include multiple participants per campaign, and trial simple, low-burden tools (such as short reflection guides or mapping exercises) that fit into real planning and review routines.

Taken together, these findings have several implications for practice and research. For advocates and funders, they reinforce that campaign design needs to take political, legal, cultural, and socio-economic conditions, as well as internal capacity, seriously rather than assuming that approaches that worked elsewhere can be copied without adjustment. The practical recommendations in this report set out concrete ways to do this in planning, review, and funding decisions. For researchers, the pilot framework offers an empirically grounded starting point and a set of specific questions that can be tested in larger and more varied samples, including how different combinations of factors relate to strategy choices and perceived progress. Overall, this phase should be read as exploratory. It is intended to inform reflection and guide further testing of the contextual advocacy framework, not to provide definitive prescriptions for advocacy in India.