Research

The professorship studies the politics of nutrition, health and social policy, with a regional focus on the Global South, especially Africa and Latin America. We ask how governments, international organizations, donors, civil society and private corporations shape the policies that determine access to safe and healthy food, to health care, and to social protection. Our work is qualitative and comparative, combining in-depth case studies and process tracing with expert interviews, document analysis and descriptive policy data.

Our current research concentrates on the politics of school feeding in Africa. School meal programs are among the largest and most effective social protection instruments worldwide, yet their politics remain remarkably underresearched. We examine how such programs are adopted, financed and sustained, and how school feeding models travel between countries of the Global South. In November 2025, we co-convened the workshop "The Politics of School Feeding in Africa" at the University of Cape Town. Starting in October 2026, we are carrying out the research project "Translating Brazilian Development Ideas in Africa" (TRABRADIA).

A second strand of our research examines the regulation of food environments, including front-of-pack nutrition labelling, the marketing of breast-milk substitutes, and pesticide regulation. Here we analyse how public health objectives are negotiated against commercial interests and international trade rules, drawing on field research in, among others, Chile, Kenya, and Sri Lanka.

A third strand situates these cases within comparative social policy research on the Global South, addressing the causes of welfare state expansion in middle-income countries, social policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and forms of social protection delivered "by other means".

For an overview of Professor Dorlach's publications, you can consult his Google Scholar, ResearchGate and ORCID profiles.