Jody Harris

Jody Harris is a co-Director of the Food Equity Centre at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and an Adjunct Professor of Food Equity at Mahidol University, Thailand. Her research focuses on the intersection of food and nutrition, rights and equity, and public policy, with a strong emphasis on equity and ethics in policy processes.

• Honorary Associate at IDS
• Adjunct Professor at Mahidol University

Her work explores the right to food, ethics in nutrition policy, and power dynamics in food systems governance. She has contributed to global initiatives like the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement and the UN Committee on World Food Security's High-Level Panel of Experts. Her research spans international, national, and local contexts, integrating theories of justice, equity, and human rights into food and nutrition policy.

Jody has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and edited volumes, cited over 6,000 times. Her recent work includes developing the Nutrition Equity Framework and analyzing pathways to healthy diets through equity lenses in Brazil, South Africa, the UK, and Vietnam. She supervises PhD students interested in rights-based approaches to food systems.

She has led multi-stakeholder engagement programs and co-edited the IDS Bulletin on the political economy of food. As a member of the SUN Movement, she investigates multi-sectoral platforms to reduce malnutrition in high-burden countries and examines how legal activism can advance equitable food systems in low-income contexts.