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Realities of food insecurity are more pronounced with a specific focus on women in developing countries. The need to understand the varied food insecurity experiences among female-headed agricultural households in such contexts provided the rationale and motivation for this study.

The study employed a quantitative cross-sectional approach, drawing on the binary logistic regression to determine the influence of socioeconomic status on household coping mechanisms in response to food insecurity in a stratified random sample of 509 female-headed agricultural households in Liberia.

The results revealed that most respondents experienced food insecurity reflected in inadequate food availability, an inability to eat nutritious food and the necessity to skip meals. In response, they employed coping strategies such as borrowing money, selling assets, and reducing health expenses, which were influenced by socioeconomic characteristics such as gender, education, and marital status.

The study illustrates the multi-layered and complex context of food insecurity among women. From these findings, the study proposes the consideration of such dynamics to inform practical and relevant mitigatory policy approaches to the target demographic.

With food insecurity being a social problem, the study identifies its social impact by documenting the participants' lived experiences. Thus, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of food insecurity across different segments of society.

The study draws its originality from understanding how food insecurity impacts female-headed households, highlighting the often-ignored gender dynamics of food insecurity in developing nations and aggregating the coping strategies and food insecurity expenses.

This study investigates how the interrelated elements of organizational roles – activities, motives, resources and relationships – are mobilized to construct a code of conduct for the proxy advisory (PA) industry in Europe.

This qualitative study uses archival documents from three consecutive regulatory consultations and 16 interviews with key stakeholders. It analyzes how different stakeholder groups (i.e. PA firms, investors, issuers and the regulator) perceive and mobilize the elements of PA firms’ role to construct the accountability regime’s boundaries (accountability problem and action, and users and providers of accounts).

This study shows how PA firms, investors, issuers and the regulator refer to the perceived motives behind PA firms’ activities to construct an accountability problem. The regulator accepted the motives of an information intermediary for PA firms’ role and required PA firms to develop a corresponding accountability action: a code of conduct. PA firms involved in developing the code of conduct formalized who is accountable to whom by aligning this accepted motive with their activities, relationships, and resources into a common role.

The study highlights how aligning role elements to reflect PA firms’ common roles enables the construction of an accountability regime that stakeholders accept as a means of regulation. Analyzing the role elements offers insights into the development and functioning of accountability regimes that rely on self-regulation. We also highlight the role of smaller regional firms in helping shape transnational accountability regimes.