Nicholas Nisbett - Institute of Development Studies

Person

Nicholas Nisbett

Research Fellow

Email

n.c.nisbett@ids.ac.uk

Telephone

+44 (0)1273 915839

Nicholas Nisbett is Professorial Fellow at IDS and a Professor of Global Public Policy, Nutrition and Health Equity at the University of Sussex.

With over 20 years of international development research and policy development experience, he has published and worked extensively on food and nutrition policy and politics. His recent work has focused on nutrition equity: he co-authored the introductory chapter to the 2020 Global Nutrition Report and is currently a member of the UN Committee on Food Security’s High Level Panel of Experts for a report on inequalities in food systems. He has consulted for a range of international organisations, including UNICEF, and the UK’s DFID, with evaluations and research focusing on equity; national and community level drivers of nutrition and community accountability in India, Bangladesh and W Africa. Prior to IDS, Nisbett led UK Government teams on agricultural trade policy; agricultural policy reform and land & marine-based natural resource management; and a major international policy research programme on the future of food and farming.

Academic links

Google Scholar

http://goo.gl/UoSKq8

Project

FRESH

Poor diets are a primary cause of malnutrition and the leading cause of diseases worldwide. Improving diets, including increasing fruit and vegetable intake, could save one in five lives lost annually. Micronutrients and dietary fibre are essential for health; micronutrients from fruit and...

Project

Development and piloting of an FAO political economy analysis (PEA) tool for agri-food systems, food security and nutrition policies and programmes

This project aims to support the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s strategic priority to improve nutrition for the most vulnerable through development and piloting of a political economy analysis (PEA) tool to improve agri-food systems, food security and nutrition policy formation...

Centre

Food Equity Centre

The Food Equity Centre brings together researchers, policy makers, practitioners and activists to collaborate in developing solutions to inequities in food systems. It addresses the urgent need for research and action towards fairness, justice, and inclusion at a time when the Covid-19...

Project

Remembering and acting on ‘Malnutrition’: A Latin American Network to Foster Deep Learning on Nutrition Interventions Past and Present

This is a multi-disciplinary research partnership, led by IDS, which brings together a diverse group of anthropologists, historians, public health and nutrition specialists, and epidemiologists in Peru, Colombia and Nicaragua to create a network to tackle the challenge of malnutrition in Latin...

Opinion

The UK’s Global Food Security Summit – what about social protection?

On 20 November the UK government, alongside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Foundation, will host a Global Food Security Summit to “explore how innovation, partnerships and the latest technological advances can ensure long term food security and improved...

Nicholas Nisbett & 2 others

20 November 2023

Opinion

Healthy diets depend on equity and justice

This week it emerged that during 10 years of austerity, the height of UK children has fallen well behind global peers, with the average British boy and girl up to 5cm shorter than their European neighbours. Children’s height is used globally as a measure of health and wellbeing, and Britain...

Nicholas Nisbett & 7 others

30 June 2023

Opinion

Royal campaign won’t work unless early years funding is viewed as critical infrastructure

Last month in the UK, the Princess of Wales launched a campaign labelled ‘Shaping Us’ to focus on the importance of early childhood. She is right to focus on the early years. It’s a critical period in which we lay down the foundations for the rest of our lives. Good nutrition in this...

Nicholas Nisbett

1 March 2023

Opinion

To leave no one behind we must focus on food equity

The theme for this year’s World Food Day (16 October) is ‘leave no one behind’. However, the leave no one behind agenda as part of the Sustainable Development Goals focuses largely on addressing deprivation and not the broader inequities - injustices and power imbalances – that drive...

Lídia Cabral & 5 others

10 October 2022

Journal Article

Bringing Together Urban Systems and Food Systems Theory and Research is Overdue

Urban dwellers’ food and nutritional wellbeing are both dependent on infrastructure and can be indicative of wider wellbeing in urban contexts and societal health. This paper focuses on the multiple relationships that exist between food and infrastructure to provide a thorough theoretical and...

Jane Battersby & 13 others

19 October 2023

Report

Pathways to Equitable Food Systems

IDS Report

Globally, our food systems are highly inequitable. In a world with enough food, hunger is becoming normalised for large numbers of people, while diets are worsening and obesity is rising. Racialised minorities are more at risk from obesity than other groups; indigenous communities have...

Lídia Cabral & 4 others

26 June 2023

Working Paper

Healthy Diets Depend on Equity and Justice: Understanding the Context in Brazil, South Africa, the UK, and Vietnam

IDS Working Paper 591

The purpose of this paper is to outline a new intellectual and research agenda for future work taken forward by the Food Equity Centre on the theme of Healthy Diets. We outline our initial conceptual approach and summarise current thinking and action on dietary equity through four country case...

Jane Battersby & 7 others

19 June 2023

Working Paper

Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Collaboration: Concepts and Assumptions

Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Collaboration Working Paper 1

This working paper is the product of the Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Collaboration. It is designed to bring together our thinking on how infrastructure can shape the food and nutritional security of urban marginalised populations. Infrastructure assemblages include the material...

Jane Battersby & 13 others

23 May 2023

News

New IDS Bulletin on the political economy of food

This new issue of the IDS Bulletin, edited by Jody Harris, Molly Anderson, Chantal Clément and Nicholas Nisbett examines a range of perspectives on power in food systems, and the various active players, relationships, activities, and institutions that play a major role in shaping them. It...

6 August 2019

Cluster

Health and Nutrition

Our health and nutrition work brings new understanding and action on health tackling epidemics, antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic diseases. We generate new evidence and analysis on nutrition issues including dietary transition, globalisation of food systems, and responding to the ways that...

Latest work

How does national law and legal activism progress human rights for equitable food systems?