The multidimensional nature of food security often leads experts to recommend mobilising all public intervention sectors to ensure that food security policies are inter-sectoral, and not the sole responsibility of a single sector. However, in African contexts such as in Burkina Faso, food security policies are in most cases far from being inter-sectoral. They are instead focused on agricultural production. It is therefore critical to understand why food security policies are what they are, to identify the underlying sectoral logics and to seek for signals of policy changes. This paper aims at contributing methodologically to the literature focusing on institutional diagnostic of food security policies. Drawing on a combination of new institutional approaches and cognitive public policy analysis we explain food security policies in Burkina Faso by three major factors. First, the persistence of agricultural production-oriented policies points to path dependency arising from the way food insecurity has historically been framed around cereal deficits. Second, the instruments used to measure and assess food security are not neutral: they directly shape both policy debates and decision-making. Third, the institutional configuration of the policy debate is characterised by a fragmentation that influences power games between actors supporting different visions of food security. Finally we argue that new concepts such as “nutrition-sensitive agriculture” combined with more open forums may have the potential to lead to more inter-sectoral food security policies.