Negotiating from the margins: how the UN shapes the rules of the WTO

World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on agriculture are among the most contentious issues in the international political economy due to agriculture’s importance in the production of tradable commodities as well as economic development and food security in developing countries. In this article, I analyse a surprising and unexpected actor playing an important role in shaping WTO rules on agriculture – the United Nations (UN). While UN actors do not have a seat at the bargaining table, I argue that they invoke their delegated and moral authority and initiate actions to shape global trade rule-making. I demonstrate that UN actors have influenced the discourse, agenda and outcomes of trade negotiations by analysing three cases: 1) the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) orchestrating a Uruguay Round agreement in favour of food insecure developing countries; 2) the World Food Programme’s (WFP) blocking of trade rules on international food aid during the Doha Round negotiations; and 3) a proposal by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food for a legal waiver to protect public food stockholding that was taken up by WTO member states in 2013

Backdoor Bargaining: How the European Union Navigates the Food Aid Regime Complex

Scholars have long observed that states play off overlapping international institutions against one another in an effort to advance their policy objectives. This article identifies a strategy utilized by the EU in response to regime complexity that I term "backdoor bargaining." Unlike forum-shopping, regime-shifting, and competitive-regime creation strategies, which states use to move multilateral negotiations to an institution that they expect will produce a more favorable outcome, backdoor bargaining involves a state using negotiations within one institution to gain an advantage in negotiations taking place at another distinct institution in a regime complex. I demonstrate the plausibility of backdoor bargaining by showing that the EU used the renegotiation of the Food Aid Convention as a strategy to gain bargaining leverage in the agriculture negotiations at the World Trade Organization. The article also offers insights into the potential consequences of international regime complexity for the EU as a global actor and the coherence of its foreign policies

Governing the Global Land Grab: Multipolarity, Ideas and Complexity in Transnational Governance

Since 2008, a series of new regulatory initiatives have emerged to address large-scale land grabs. These initiatives are occurring simultaneously at multiple levels of social organization instead of a single, overarching institutional site. A significant portion of this activity is taking place at the transnational level. We suggest that transnational land governance is indicative of emerging shifts in the practice of governance of global affairs. We analyze such shifts by asking two related questions: what does land grabbing tell us about developments in transnational governance, particularly with regard to North-South relations, and what do these developments in transnational governance mean for regulating land grabbing?Desde 2008, ha surgido una serie de nuevas iniciativas regulatorias para tratar acaparamientos de tierra a gran escala. Estas iniciativas están sucediendo simultáneamente a niveles múltiples de la organización social en vez de un lugar institucional predominante. Una porción importante de esta actividad está tomando lugar al nivel transnacional. Sugerimos que la gobernanza de tierras trasnacionales es indicativa de los cambios que están surgiendo en la práctica de gobernanza de los asuntos globales. Analizamos tales cambios haciendo dos preguntas relacionadas: ¿qué nos dice el acaparamiento de tierras sobre los desarrollos en la gobernanza trasnacional, particularmente con las relaciones norte-sur?, y ¿qué significan estos desarrollos en gobernanza trasnacional para regular el acaparamiento de tierras

Food Sovereignty and Agricultural Land Use Planning: The Need To Integrate Public Priorities Across Jurisdictions

Recent calls for national food policies that promote greater food sovereignty represent an emerging concern of public policy. Such a shift in food policy toward greater citizen control over domestic food supplies would have significant implications for all aspects of the agri-food system. One area of concern is the conservation and use of agricultural land because, in the end, every act of producing and consuming food has direct or indirect impacts on the land base. Yet no research has considered the potential interactions and implications between food sovereignty and agricultural land use planning. This gap in research presents an opportunity to critically examine the effects of the changing roles and values on agricultural land use planning within and across jurisdictions. We believe that a better understanding of the dominant policy regimes within the agri-food system, including global competitiveness, farmland preservation, and food sovereignty, can lead to land use planning practices that are most beneficial for integrating not only multiple interests across jurisdictions, but also multiple perspectives

Global land governance:from territory to flow?

This article reviews recent research on contemporary transformations of global land governance. It shows how changes in global governance have facilitated and responded to radical revalorizations of land, together driving the intensified competition and struggles over land observed in many other contributions to this special issue. The rules in place to govern land use are shifting from ‘territorial' toward ‘flow-centered' arrangements, the latter referring to governance that targets particular flows of resources or goods, such as certification of agricultural or wood products. The intensifying competition over land coupled with shifts toward flow-centered governance has generated land uses involving new forms of social exclusion, inequity and ecological simplification

Changes in land-use governance in an urban era

Land use is being fundamentally transformed worldwide. G overnance mechanisms that manage land use are changing from territorial organizations to global institutions anchored to specific resource flows between urban and rural areas. This shift reflects an underlying change of v alues attached to land, from the creation of new monetary values to the assertion of social values. Such a r evalorization has, in turn, fueled global competition and led to governance arrangements that may appear fragmented from the vantage point of any particular land plot. In addition, rising urbanization impacts and reflects governance arrangements for land use. This chapter addresses the governance of land use in an urban era, with a focus on the emergence of global arrangements to address land competition and the t elecoupling effects that arise between coupled multiscalar systems