ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the widely promoted approach of food security programmes in post-conflict situations, based on public works where people provide labour for the construction of a road or another public asset in exchange for seeds and services. It analyses the ways in which policy paradigms about food security shaped the form and content of the food security intervention. The chapter highlights author's theoretical perspective, bringing together paradigms on food security with parallel approaches to social aid. It presents the details of the programme and how it was implemented, focusing on the dynamics that revolved around it. The chapter reviews this assumption, that Public Works are the availability of labour, in the case of post-conflict northern Uganda. It brings out how the different paradigms of food security play out in the region, and zooms in on one of the food security programmes to understand people's – often negative – responses to these programmes.
