Farmworker movements have often been at the forefront of efforts to use the law to achieve social justice. While past generations of farmworker movements in the United States won gains by... Show moreFarmworker movements have often been at the forefront of efforts to use the law to achieve social justice. While past generations of farmworker movements in the United States won gains by innovatively using state law and economic tactics to improve their working conditions, farmworkers today face a shifting landscape of law and governance stemming from the development of global value chains. This Article analyzes how contemporary farmworker movements are exploiting both “legal opportunities” and what we term “governance opportunities”— strategic openings for action arising from the contingent industry structures and private governance of global value chains. We analyze two cases of recent farmworker mobilization: Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida and Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) in Washington State. By comparing the strategic decisionmaking and processes through which these movements ultimately found success, we show how legal and governance opportunities are interdependent and interactive. Our analysis suggests that the governance opportunities that social movements pursue are highly dependent on the contingent legal contexts in which they operate. Legal opportunities provide important symbolic and constitutive effects for farmworker movements, but as we show, governance opportunities can provide movements with greater leverage and allow them to expand beyond the limited legal protections provided to farm labor. Examining the tactics of farmworker movements—workers that face multiple forms of marginalization— therefore offers significant insights into the strategic opportunities for social change amidst the changing relationship between public and private governance. Show less
The converging crises of growing food insecurity and climate change have produced a global struggle to govern food systems. While a range of actors promote innovation as a solution to transform... Show moreThe converging crises of growing food insecurity and climate change have produced a global struggle to govern food systems. While a range of actors promote innovation as a solution to transform food systems, Bill Gates has leveraged his vast philanthropic funding to advocate for a particular vision of technology-driven innovation led by the private sector. This article elaborates Gates' ‘ideology of innovation' and analyzes its continuities with an earlier ideology developed to legitimize racial capitalism-improvement. In doing so, it reveals how Gates’ ideology serves to reproduce racialized regimes of ownership and relations of dependence in the information economy. Show less
Recent scholarship on transnational law has emphasised how the proliferation and fragmentation of normative orders, legal forms, and transnational actors are transforming the nature and authority... Show moreRecent scholarship on transnational law has emphasised how the proliferation and fragmentation of normative orders, legal forms, and transnational actors are transforming the nature and authority of law in the contemporary global context. This Introduction presents what we term translocal legalities— emergent forms of normativity that are constituted through grounded encounters with local and transnational legal practices, discourses, subjectivities, and forms of resistance. By coining this new term, we seek to shift the gaze of transnational legal scholarship away from a top-down mapping of the structures of global law. Centring our analysis on the phenomenology of the encounter, we develop an analytical and empirical approach to understanding these encounters by focusing on how law is constituted not solely within traditional legal organisations and institutions, but through the everyday practices, discourses, and subjectivities of those mediating local, national and transnational norms. Show less
Montenegro de Wit, M.; Canfield, M.C.; Iles, A.; Anderson, M.; McKeon, N.; Guttal, S.; ... ; Prato, S. 2021
The UN Food Systems Summit was an ambitious and hotly contested event that brought competing approaches to global food governance into relief. In this article, we unpack the rival visions that... Show moreThe UN Food Systems Summit was an ambitious and hotly contested event that brought competing approaches to global food governance into relief. In this article, we unpack the rival visions that circulate around how food systems should be governed, focusing on two issues that we feel are at the heart of these divergences: authority and legitimacy. We illustrate how both corporate-philanthropic and food sovereignty networks are struggling to establish epistemic authority of food systems as well as produce legitimacy through very different approaches to participation and accountability. Show less
Canfield, M.C.; Anderson, M.D.; McMichael, P. 2021
This article analyzes the development and organization of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), which is being convened by UN Secretary General António Guterres in late 2021. Although few... Show moreThis article analyzes the development and organization of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), which is being convened by UN Secretary General António Guterres in late 2021. Although few people will dispute that global food systems need transformation, it has become clear that the Summit is instead an effort by a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies, and export-oriented countries to subvert multilateral institutions of food governance and capture the global narrative of “food systems transformation.” This article places the upcoming Summit in the context of previous world food summits and analyzes concerns that have been voiced by many within civil society. It elaborates how the current structure and forms of participant recruitment and public engagement lack basic transparency and accountability, fail to address significant conflicts of interest, and ignore human rights. As the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates the structural vulnerabilities of the neoliberal model of food systems and the consequences of climate change for food production, a high-level commitment to equitable and sustainable food systems is needed now more than ever. However, the authors suggest that the UNFSS instead seems to follow a trajectory in which efforts to govern global food systems in the public interest has been subverted to maintain colonial and corporate forms of control. Show less
As social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal... Show moreAs social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal mobilization in response to global governance through a case study of the “right to food sovereignty.” The claim of food sovereignty has been mobilized transnationally by small-scale food producers, food-chain workers, and the food insecure to oppose the liberalization of food and agriculture. The author analyzes the formation of this claim in relation to the rise of a “network imaginary” of global governance. By drawing on ethnographic research, the author shows how activists have internalized this imaginary within their claims and practices of legal mobilization. In doing so, the author argues, transnational food sovereignty activists co-constitute global food governance from below. Ultimately, the development of these practices in response to shifting forms of transnational legality reflects the enduring, mutually constitutive relationship between law and social movements on a global scale. Show less
Property regimes refer to the political, legal, and economic systems through which soci eties order their relationships between people with respect to valued things. Anthropolo gists and legal... Show moreProperty regimes refer to the political, legal, and economic systems through which soci eties order their relationships between people with respect to valued things. Anthropolo gists and legal scholars have long been engaged in a dynamic dialogue about the organi zation and practice of property regimes. However, whereas legal theory has been unique ly concerned with ownership and private property as a system for allocating scarce goods and resources, anthropologists have investigated how property is constructed and shaped by everyday practice, illuminating how the distinctions between law and practice mutual ly constitute power relations. This chapter reviews how anthropologists have attended to aporias of property theory by ethnographically analysing conflicts and transformations between property regimes. It surveys anthropological insights into three continuingprocesses of property regime transformation: decolonization, privatization, and enclo sure. In addition, it analyses two emergent processes around which property claims are being reconfigured: dematerialization and rematerialization. The dematerialization ofproperty through informational and financial capitalism is occurring at a time when in dustrial modes of carbon-dependent accumulation are facing ecological limits brought on by climate change. However, technologies of informationalization and financialization are also rematerializing property regimes by constructing new calculative devices and global markets for increasingly limited natural resources. How these emerging regimes shape social relations between people, the distribution of social entitlements, and the bound aries between persons and things offers an important field of ethnographic enquiry. Show less
This essay analyses how the relation between food and fuel shapes the practice of collaborative food governance. Dominant explanations for the persistence of global hunger often point to the... Show moreThis essay analyses how the relation between food and fuel shapes the practice of collaborative food governance. Dominant explanations for the persistence of global hunger often point to the influence of political-economic inequalities on the production, distribution, and governance of global food. The causes of the 2007–2008 global food crisis, however, suggest the need to examine the entanglements between food and other forms of ecological extraction. I draw on the concept of ‘energopolitics’ to demonstrate how changing material processes of energy extraction condition the calculative logics through which transnational food governance is constituted. An energopolitical analysis, I argue, illuminates how collaborative food governance supresses the conflict between food and fuel that it was developed to mediate. In an era of climate change, such an approach reveals the links between food and broader struggles over carbon-fuelled inequalities. Show less
