Irrigation barriers fragment aquatic habitats and although implemented mainly to support food production, sometimes trade-off against wild food systems like inland fisheries. Inland fisheries underpin human dietary health for millions of people globally, including people living rurally and remotely, indigenous groups, and subsistence fishers; however they've largely been lost in Australia and developed countries in part due to instream infrastructure preventing fish access to feeding, breeding and spawning grounds. In developing contexts, which tend to lie in tropical regions, highly productive inland fisheries maintain a central role in human dietary health and wellbeing. Motivated by the need to safeguard the contribution of productive fisheries to human diets, fish passage technology is being implemented to improve fish migration at instream infrastructure barriers, aided by strategic barrier prioritization frameworks. This study evaluated 93 barrier prioritisation frameworks critically to explore how they were developed and how they reflect different the habitats that support productive fisheries which contribute to nutrition security. It demonstrated for the first time that present frameworks are ill-equipped to prioritise barriers to support human nutrition, even where supporting nutrition security motivates fish passage remediation. Tropical regions, developing contexts, and floodplains were found to be underrepresented. These findings indicate that criteria used to prioritise barriers need to adapt to applications in tropical and developing regions to better serve fishery dependent communities. For developed contexts like Australia, these findings prompt deeper reflection of biases inherent in the prioritisation process and the need for a more holistic approach.