This Policy Brief examines the evolving relationship between food and nutrition security (FNS) and development finance against a backdrop of worsening global FNS trends and the fast-approaching 2030 Agenda deadline. It focuses on key sources of development finance, namely remittances, foreign direct investment, official development assistance, and food aid, and brings together insights from the existing empirical literature. A central message of the Brief is that not all financial flows affect FNS in the same way. The composition of development finance matters, as different types of flows generate different outcomes depending on context. At the same time, governance quality plays a critical role in shaping these outcomes. Recent empirical evidence shows that institutional factors influence both the direction and the strength of the relationship between development finance and FNS, highlighting the importance of considering governance alongside the heterogeneity of financial flows in both research and policy discussions.
