Community Governance, Contingent Valuation, and Food Policy Councils: The Case of the Alabama Food Policy Council

Abstract

This thesis seeks to explore an alternative method for valuing the units of community governance keeping in mind that it is similar to a public good. The example we use for this study is that of a hypothetical statewide Alabama Food Policy Council, Surveys from listening sessions around the state coordinated by working partners and online responses are used as data. We find that attitudes about food insecurity, as well as demographic variables, and survey method are significant when determining willingness to pay for this organization to exist using the zero-inflated Poisson regression estimation technique.