Caring for dignity in food assistance : Navigating norms and moralities

This dissertation examines how practices of charitable food assistance in wealthy countries shape recipients' dignity. Although food insecurity affects millions of people in affluent societies, responses have increasingly relied on charity-based and privatised food aid rather than rights-based welfare solutions. Scholars have criticised such approaches for depoliticising food insecurity, individualising responsibility, and undermining recipients’ dignity through inadequate food provision and stigma. At the same time, charitable food assistance has evolved, with food banks adapting their formats and new third-sector initiatives emerging that seek to provide food in non-stigmatising and more dignified ways. Despite these developments, limited research has examined how dignity is enacted within contemporary food assistance practices. Addressing this gap, this dissertation asks how evolving practices of charitable food assistance in affluent countries shape recipients’ dignity.The research combines a social dignity lens with an empirical ethics approach. Dignity is understood as socially enacted and relational, linked to the ability to meet normative standards that confer belonging and social value. Because such norms can themselves be exclusionary, the study critically examines how they are shaped by institutional, ideological, and structural forces, including consumer culture, neoliberal welfare arrangements, and charitable moralities. Ethnography forms the core methodology. Fieldwork was conducted in three food assistance initiatives in Belgium and the Netherlands, using participant observation, semi-structured and walk-along interviews, and a focus group. Embedded within this ethnographic design, the empirical ethics approach illuminates how moral judgments and normative expectations are enacted and negotiated in practice.The findings consist of one scoping review and three ethnographic case studies. The scoping review synthesises 37 studies from twelve high-income countries and identifies five dimensions through which dignity is shaped: access to food assistance, social interactions, the food provided, physical spaces, and needs beyond food. Across these dimensions, dignity emerges as relational and continually negotiated within specific institutional and cultural contexts. The three case studies focus on consumer-oriented food assistance initiatives characterised by food choice, (symbolic) pricing, and market-like exchanges. Together, they demonstrate that aligning food assistance with consumer norms can support dignity by enabling recipients to perform socially valued roles and reducing the visibility of charity. However, these models also embed neoliberal moralities of responsibility and self-management, which may reproduce moral judgment and exclusion. Using a relational autonomy perspective, the dissertation shows that autonomy in food assistance is not a matter of independence but of supported self-determination embedded in relations of care, institutional safeguards, and managed dependencies. While money-based assistance enhanced choice and social inclusion, it also introduced new vulnerabilities related to surveillance and welfare governance.The dissertation concludes that dignity in food assistance is not inherent to any specific aid model but is enacted through situated practices, moral negotiations, and relationships. It advances the concept of relational dignity to capture how dignity is co-produced through interpersonal interactions, institutional arrangements, and socio-political structures. By combining ethnography with empirical ethics, the research offers both empirical insights and a conceptual approach for developing more just, care-oriented, and dignified responses to food insecurity in affluent societies.