Standards, Law, and Governance

The last several centuries have been marked first by a tendency toward the use of standards to standardize, and then by the use of standards to differentiate. Both have been built on the legal edifice of the state. More recently, in response to the rapid rise of neoliberalism, standardized differentiation has increased in scope and has become part of a larger Tripartite Standards Regime (TSR) consisting of standards, certifications, and accreditations. Over the last half century, the TSR has grown to cover nearly every aspect of social life. In many ways this new form of governance replaces and transmutes positive law, which is a product of the state, with its market equivalent. Yet, the TSR leaves much to be desired as a form of governance. The recent financial collapse should give us pause to ask whether the path we have constructed for ourselves can lead us to the desired destination

The private governance of food: equitable exchange or bizarre bazaar?

"In recent years, we have witnessed three parallel and intertwined trends: First, food retail and processing firms have embraced private standards, usually with some form of third party certification employed to verify adherence to those standards. Second, firms have aligned themselves increasingly aligned themselves with, as opposed to fighting off, environmental, fair trade, and other NGOs. Third, firms have embraced supply chain management as a strategy for increasing profits and market share. Together, these trends are part and parcel of the neoliberal blurring of the older liberal distinction between state and civil society. In this paper I ask what the implications of these changes are from the vantage point of the three major approaches to ethics: consequentalism, virtue theory, and rights theory. What are the consequences of these changes for food safety, for suppliers, for consumers? What virtues (e.g., trust, fairness) are these changes likely to embrace and what vices may accompany them? Whose rights will be furthered or curtailed by these changes?" (author's abstract

Chapitre 12 - La nouvelle autocratie agroalimentaire

Il y a soixante ans, la mise en application de presque tous les standards agroalimentaires reposait sur certaines formes de régulation gouvernementale ; l’entrée sur un marché donné était soumise à des standards de jure. Dès la fin des années 1920, les industries de transformation adhéraient à des standards d’entreprise de facto, nécessaires à la production en masse de produits alimentaires (National Industrial Conference Board, 1929). Cependant, ces ..

Chapitre 1 - Normes gouvernant l’innovation agricole

Dans nos recherches, nous accordons encore trop d’importance à l’objectif de croissance de la productivité comme mission première. Nous avons encore une foi trop grande en la toute-puissance de la connaissance des faits et des principes physiques et biologiques. Nous devrions revenir avec un oeil critique sur nos politiques et nos programmes. Ces derniers sont-ils adaptés aux besoins de la nouvelle ère ?Kenyon Butterfield (..

A Note on the Economy of Qualities: Attributing Production Practices to Agricultural Practices

Agricultural products are valued for many attributes including those that describe production practices. These production attributes are established through public and private efforts to promulgate standards and labels that differentiate products based on labor treatment, environmental impact, animal welfare, and other practices that occur during production. Organizations, like third-party certifiers, coordinate information and give credence to products in a way that enables consumers to differentiate products by production practices. Libertarian and utilitarian arguments may be used in the normative debate surrounding the appropriate role of government in sponsoring standards and labels that inform consumers about the modes of production

Problem Formulation and Fairness

Formulating data science problems is an uncertain and difficult process. It requires various forms of discretionary work to translate high-level objectives or strategic goals into tractable problems, necessitating, among other things, the identification of appropriate target variables and proxies. While these choices are rarely self-evident, normative assessments of data science projects often take them for granted, even though different translations can raise profoundly different ethical concerns. Whether we consider a data science project fair often has as much to do with the formulation of the problem as any property of the resulting model. Building on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team---and channeling ideas from sociology and history of science, critical data studies, and early writing on knowledge discovery in databases---we describe the complex set of actors and activities involved in problem formulation. Our research demonstrates that the specification and operationalization of the problem are always negotiated and elastic, and rarely worked out with explicit normative considerations in mind. In so doing, we show that careful accounts of everyday data science work can help us better understand how and why data science problems are posed in certain ways---and why specific formulations prevail in practice, even in the face of what might seem like normatively preferable alternatives. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, arguing that effective normative interventions will require attending to the practical work of problem formulation.Comment: Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT* '19), January 29-31, 2019, Atlanta, GA, US

Composition of Near-Earth Asteroid 2008 EV5: Potential target for Robotic and Human Exploration

We observed potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) 2008 EV5 in the visible (0.30-0.92 microns) and near-IR (0.75-2.5 microns) wavelengths to determine its surface composition. This asteroid is especially interesting because it is a potential target for two sample return mission proposals (Marco Polo-R and Hayabusa-2) and human exploration due to its low delta-v for rendezvous. The spectrum of 2008 EV5 is essentially featureless with exception of a weak 0.48-microns spin-forbidden Fe3+ absorption band. The spectrum also has an overall blue slope. The albedo of 2008 EV5 remains uncertain with a lower limit at 0.05 and a higher end at 0.20 based on thermal modeling. The Busch et al. (2011) albedo estimate of 0.12 is consistent with our thermal modeling results. The albedo and composition of 2008 EV5 are also consistent with a C-type taxonomic classification (Somers et al. 2008). The best spectral match is with CI carbonaceous chondrites similar to Orgueil, which also have a weak 0.48-microns feature and an overall blue slope. This 0.48-microns feature is also seen in the spectrum of magnetite. The albedo of CI chondrites is at the lower limit of our estimated range for the albedo of 2008 EV5.Comment: Pages: 19 Figures: 6 Tables:

Revisiting a Water Conflict in Southeastern Oklahoma 6 Years Later: A New Valuation of the Willingness to Pay for Ecosystem Services

In recent years, researchers have begun to adopt a perspective evaluating “winners and losers” regarding the consumption and value of ecosystem services. “Winners” tend to benefit from the ecosystem service and “losers” absorb most associated costs. Our study focuses on water use in Oklahoma (USA) and a plan to divert water from the Kiamichi River in southeastern Oklahoma for consumption at residences in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. Our study is, in part, a follow-up from an initial 2013 survey of Oklahoma City residents and residents of the Kiamichi. For this paper, a survey was distributed within the state of Oklahoma to evaluate changes to ecosystem service willingness to pay and valuation. This survey also included an experimental element assessing if exposure to additional information about ecosystem services influenced respondents on ecosystem service valuation, or willingness to pay. Our results generally aligned with those found in the 2013 survey. Oklahoma City residents are not aware of where their water is coming from and are not willing to pay to protect ecosystem services, despite an overall increase in activism. Our results indicate that a smaller number of significant factors determining willingness to pay for ecosystem service maintenance were identified than the study in 2013. Exposure to additional information had no effect on peoples’ preferences. We found that public opinion surrounding environmental support is context-specific, political conservatism may not always impede valuation of environmental protections. We conclude that cultural, moral, and political values interact in their influence on expressions of valuation and willingness to pay for ecosystem services.This manuscript was supported by funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF DGE-1545261). Open Access fees paid for in whole or in part by the University of Oklahoma Libraries.Ye