La Vía Campesina and the UN Committee on World Food Security: Affected publics and institutional dynamics in the nascent transnational public sphere

AbstractThe emergence of the transnational as a site and object of governance has triggered concern amongst both affected publics subject to these effects, and scholars keen to locate the democratic potentials therein. Increasingly, public sphere theory is being promoted as a lens for interrogating the democratic potential of the transnational. However the project of transposing public sphere theory from its Westphalian origins to the transnational has been frustrated by a lack of empirical examples in which the properties of a transnational public sphere can be easily identified. In this article, examining the encounter between La Vía Campesina and the UN Committee on World Food Security, I argue for the existence of a nascent transnational public sphere in the specific domain of transnational food and agricultural policymaking. The existence of this concrete example, I argue, defends public sphere theory’s transnational turn against either the charge of utopianism, or the need to suspend some of the framework’s core conditions in order to accommodate the ‘actually possible’. It also allows us to advance public sphere theory’s empirical research agenda, and in this article I introduce an analytical framework to take this further.</jats:p

From ‘Here’ to ‘There’: Social Movements, the Academy and Solidarity Research

Increasing numbers of social movement scholars now advocate participatory and collaborative research approaches. These are often premised upon the assertion of a convergence between movement and researcher that implicates the latter in the struggles of the former. Naming this approach &ldquo;solidarity research&rdquo;, in this article I identify the components that provide the rationale for its pursuit. As well as affirming movement-researcher solidarity, this rationale also comprises a situated epistemology that asks academics to think reflexively about their research practice, the roles they play, and the interests they serve. This reveals the diverging positionality, of knowledge and interests, that often exists between movements and academics. Such concerns give rise to specific methodological and ethical principles that indicate the importance of negotiating this positionality to successful collaboration. Reflecting on my own experiences trying and sometimes failing to conduct participatory research with transnational agrarian movements, I identify dynamics that enable and constrain the pursuit of such collaborative research within commitments to broader methodological and ethical principles of solidarity

Do we need to categorize it? Reflections on constituencies and quotas as tools for negotiating difference in the global food sovereignty convergence space

Convergence–as an objective and as a process–designates the coming together of different social actors across strategic, political, ideological, sectoral and geographic divides. In this paper, we analyze the global food sovereignty movement (GFSM) as a convergence space, with a focus on constituencies and quotas as tools to maintain diversity while facilitating convergence. We show how the use of constituencies and quotas has supported two objectives of the GFSM: alliances building and effective direct representation in global policy-making spaces. We conclude by pointing to some convergence challenges the GFSM faces as it expands beyond its agrarian origins.</p