Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Executive Summary -- Why Strengthening Commitment Is Important -- What Commitment Building Involves -- What We Know and What We Don't -- Missed Opportunities -- Action Required -- What the Development Assistance Community Can Do -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Why Is Commitment a Special Problem in Nutrition? -- 3. Thinking about Commitment -- Useful Terms -- Some Relevant Concepts -- 4. Assessing Commitment to Policies and Programs -- Who Should Assess Commitment and How? -- Identifying Key Players -- Assessing Perspectives -- Assessing Behavior -- Putting It Together -- 5. Commitment and Strategic Choices -- Broad or Narrow? -- Program or Project? -- Trial or Scale? -- Investment or Analysis and Partnership Building? -- 6. Strengthening Commitment to Investment -- Champions, Policy Entrepreneurs, and Supporters -- Building Partnerships for Nutrition -- Using the MDGs to Make Nutrition Everybody's Business -- Repositioning Nutrition in PRSPs, PRSCs, and CDD -- Using NGO-Civil Society Partnerships to Lobby Governments -- 7. Sustaining Commitment through Implementation -- Lessons from Success: Keeping Stakeholders Motivated -- When Things Go Wrong: Lessons from Faltering Commitment in Tamil Nadu and Tanzania -- A Final Lesson -- 8. Capacity Building for Commitment Building -- Strengthening Country Capacity for Commitment Building -- Deploying and Strengthening the International Nutrition Community's Capacity for Country Commitment Building -- 9. Conclusions and Recommendations -- Appendixes -- A Forms of Rationality Underlying Public Policy -- B Potential Stakeholders in Nutrition Programs -- C A Client-Centered Formative Research Approach: Trials of Impr oved Practices (TIPS) -- D Using PROFILES Simulations as an Advocacy Tool to Promote Investment in Nutrition.

How Has PROFILES Been Used? -- Opportunities and Issues -- What Does PROFILES Cost? -- E Contribution of Improved Nutrition to the MDGs -- F Sustaining Commitment to Program Implementation through Extrinsic Motivation -- G Keeping Communities Informed about Progress in Meeting Basic Needs: Thailand's Village Information System -- H Using Monitoring Information as a Motivator: The Tamil Nadu Integrated Nutrition Project -- Notes -- References -- Index -- Boxes -- 4.1 A Dozen Behaviors That Signal Commitment to Nutrition -- 4.2 The Philippines in the Early 1990s: Signs of Low Commitment to PEM Reduction -- 5.1 What Costa Rica and Thailand Had in Common -- 5.2 The Tamil Nadu Integrated Nutrition Program: A Focused Intervention -- 5.3 Vitamin A as a Useful Early Intervention -- 6.1 Helping Political Champions: The Uganda Child Development Project -- 6.2 Matching the Type and Channel of Information to the Consumer in Advocacy for Bangladesh's Integrated Nutrition Project (BINP) -- 6.3 Making Nutrition Everybody's Business: Sequenced Partnership Building in Thailand -- 6.4 How Investing in Nutrition Helps Government Departments to Achieve Their Own Goals -- 6.5 Advocacy NGOs in the United States: A Major Force in Nutrition -- 7.1 Nutrition Programs Can Build on Traditional or Universal Values and Promote Empowering New Ones -- 7.2 TINP: Signs and Consequences of Faltering Commitment -- 7.3 Tanzania's PEM Program: When Push Came to Shove -- 7.4 Some Ideas for Keeping Politicians Interested in Nutrition Programs -- Tables -- 8.1 Cost of Commitment-Building Activities -- A.1 Rationality, Key Focus, and Key Concepts of Public Policy -- B.1 Stakeholder Groups and Their Members -- E.1 Contribution of Improved Nutrition to the Millennium Development Goals -- G.1 BMN Indicators in Thailand's Village Information System, by Group.

H.1 Trigger Points for Intervention by the TINP Coordination Office.