Food subsidy policy and democracy: A comparative study of Sri Lanka and Zambia

This article compares the political processes involved in food subsidy policies in Sri Lanka and Zambia and relates these experiences to the concept of ‘good government’ that western nations have been promoting. The Sri Lankan case illustrates the workings of the policy process in a democratic political system, albeit one that centralized considerably in the 1980s. The Zambian case illustrates the policy process in a one‐party state that returned to multi‐party democracy in 1991. Despite their very different political systems the nature of food subsidy policies show striking similarities: decades of high levels of non‐targeted consumer subsidies that placed great demands on public expenditure until radical reductions in expenditure occurred following an electorally based change of government and multilateral agency pressure. Differences in the processes of policy formulation and public accountability are explored. They reveal that neither case study functioned as democratic theory would predict. The conclusion points to the inability of the concept of ‘good government’ to model the empirical experiences reported in the article.