Governing the Global Land Grab: What role for Gender in the Voluntary Guidelines and the Principles for Responsible Investment?

The heightened interest in large-scale foreign agricultural investment in regions with ‘unused’ arable land has triggered a great deal of international attention. Concerns about ‘land grabbing’ have initiated efforts at the global level to establish standards for ‘responsible investment’ and good governance. These initiatives warrant critical examination given the social, political, and economic inequalities to which they are designed to respond, yet the scholarship on these initiatives frequently fails to incorporate gendered analyses. This article argues that gendered analysis of the governance of land grabs not only belongs at the local level—where it continues to yield important insights into how gender inequality is manifested in various forms of local governance—but that it is sorely needed at the global level as well. As such, this article begins an assessment of these governance frameworks and how they consider local realities, with particular attention to gender-based inequalities.     

Alternative Regionalism from Below: Democratizing ASEAN's Migration Governance

Most literature on migration governance has addressed the global level, and it has done so primarily from a state‐centric and top‐down perspective, with little regard to the role of civil society organizations in shaping its direction. Moreover, in an institutional sense, except for the EU, the regional level has only received scant attention, which is surprising given the significance of intra‐regional migration flows elsewhere. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a case in point. Although there are few direct channels of engagement for civil society, the vibrant migrant rights community in Asia has been capitalizing on, and creating, opportunities at multiple levels including the regional. Our argument is that this creative use of channels of engagement in combined form at multiple levels can have democratizing potential.     

Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime

Over the past two decades multinational corporations have been expanding ‘ethical’ audit programs with the stated aim of reducing the risk of sourcing from suppliers with poor practices. A wave of government regulation—such as the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act (2012) and the UK Modern Slavery Act (2015)—has enhanced the legitimacy of auditing as a tool to govern labor and environmental standards in global supply chains, backed by a broad range of civil society actors championing audits as a way of promoting corporate accountability. The growing adoption of auditing as a governance tool is a puzzling trend, given two decades of evidence that audit programs generally fail to detect or correct labor and environmental problems in global supply chains. Drawing on original field research, this article shows that in spite of its growing legitimacy and traction among government and civil society actors, the audit regime continues to respond to and protect industry commercial interests. Conceptually, the article challenges prevailing characterizations of the audit regime as a technical, neutral, and benign tool of supply chain governance, and highlights its embeddedness in struggles over the legitimacy and effectiveness of the industry-led privatization of global governance.     

Standards for Development: Food Safety and Sustainability in Wal‐Mart's Honduran Produce Supply Chains

Public‐private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small‐scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal‐Mart‐owned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal‐Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and third‐party certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public‐private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.     

The Politics of Migrants' Transnational Political Practices

This article critically examines transnational political engagement of migrants and refugees in local, national and global political processes. Based on inductive reading of existing scholarship and in particular the author's own research on Turks and Kurds in Europe, the article discusses key concepts and trends in our understanding of why, how and with what consequences migrants engage in transnational political practices. These practices, this article suggests, are influenced by the particular multilevel institutional environment, which migrant political actors negotiate their way through. This environment includes not only political institutions in the sending and receiving country, but also global norms and institutions and networks of other nonstate actors. Finally, the article argues for critical examination of the democratic transparency and accountability of migrants' transnational networks in any analysis of their long and short‐term impact on domestic and global politics.     

Organizational Commitment over the Gendered Life Course at a Mexican Company

Mexican workplaces have changed significantly in response to the global marketplace by restructuring, downsizing, and implementing new production and administrative processes. This case study analyzes organizational commitment at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation within the context of workplace transformation. Based on in‐depth interviews with 83 women and men, I identify two sources of commitment—family‐friendly and career‐friendly employment practices. Using the framework of the gendered life course, I show commitment fluctuated given the employees' stage in the life course. This study builds on the gender and work research by exploring how individual attributes of gender and parental status contribute to organizational commitment, but are underscored by the complexity of workplace context.     

“That's not Grassfed!” Identity Formation,Maintenance, and Co‐Optation in Oklahoma's Grassfed Livestock Movement

Using interview data from thirty‐one grassfed ranchers across Oklahoma, we adapt a culturally focused social movement framework to explore a regional grassfed livestock movement. Drawing on social movement and agrifood literature, we examine how grassfed actors forge a cohesive grassfed collective identity and how collective identity processes inspire engagement in forms of individualized, cultural protest. We address how collective identity politicizes movement actors, moving them to prioritize cultural issues of the grassfed movement and development of a grassfed activist identity, sometimes above other tangible, economic rewards. We also consider how grassfed ranchers are restricting the boundaries of movement membership in response to increased interest in alternative agricultural practices by new producers and by agrifood elites, and how they use market‐oriented tactics to enforce those boundaries. In doing so we draw parallels to conventionalization processes in the organic sector. By emphasizing the identity work of grassfed producer‐activists, we provide new perspectives on an emerging agricultural movement gaining traction in the US and abroad.     

Young people as global citizens: negotiation of youth civic participation in adult-managed online spaces

With the proliferation of new media technologies, online spaces for civic engagement are being used as new sites by the young people for enacting global citizenship. Some of these online civic spaces are managed by parent organizations and guide the participants towards accomplishing goals that align with the institutional policies. We use Stuart Hall’s theoretical framework to ground the two methods we used for empirical research- textual analysis of the selected online spaces and in-depth interviews with young bloggers. Our analysis shows how negotiated reading of the encoded messages on the online platforms for youth civic engagement marks a political moment of signification in which there lies a possibility of challenging the dominance of the adult centered notions of civic engagement. Shelat’s online civic culture framework [2014. “Citizens, Global Civic Engagement on Online Platforms: Women as Transcultural Citizens.” Dissertation] helped us examine how these managed platforms encode global citizenship with pre-designed participatory practices that reinforce the hegemonic definition of youth political participation. Interviews of young bloggers on two online global spaces foreground the process of negotiation with the dominant definitions and the use of decoding strategies to create scope for subjective, more local definitions, as well as practices of civic engagement and global citizenship. Though literature suggests that adult-management of online youth spaces perpetuate a gap between the adult-centric notions of participation and the youth oriented ideas of civic engagement, our study reveals that the young participants find ways of articulating their ideas and enter these spaces with plans on how to fulfill their civic goals.     

Whose Knowledge Counts? Developing Fair Trade Skills in South Africa

Fair trade scholars and professionals have recognized the importance of capacity building to producers, but few studies have examined the provision of services. This article asks whether support networks provide certified producers with the capacity needed to thrive in markets. Drawing from ethnographic action research conducted with South African rooibos tea farmers, I highlight the power dimensions involved in producer support and discuss strategies to improve outcomes. I begin by theorizing a political economy of knowledge and skills within the context of neoliberal globalization and post-apartheid development. Next, I provide an overview of fair trade, clarifying differing approaches to governance and practice. I then share case-study findings, including coverage of a farmer leadership training program that sought to build a more collaborative foundation for learning and engagement. I conclude by arguing that training represents a primary site for the reproduction of inequality as well as a pivotal point for achieving social transformation. Whereas top-down transfers of packaged skills subordinate producers and underestimate the expertise needed to navigate certified markets, solidarity-based approaches build collective capacity by redefining whose knowledge counts.     

(Re)politicizing global financial governance: what's ‘new’ about the ‘New International Financial Architecture’?

Abstract This article is a contribution to the (re)politicization of global financial governance currently underway in the interdisciplinary field of international political economy (IPE). Particular reference is made to the economistic and technicist discourse prevalent in the so‐called ‘New International Financial Architecture’ (NIFA) process. It is argued that a (re)politicized reading of global financial governance is enabled by a conceptualization of governance networks that combines the institutional focus of existing IPE research with a concern with the discursive dynamics of authority relations and that situates governance networks in the power relations, contestation, contradictions and reproduction of global finance. Claims to ‘newness’ regarding the NIFA process, made by both the ‘architects’ themselves and left unchallenged by the majority of IPE scholars, are also disputed. The NIFA process is shown to have continued the contested development of an exclusionary transnational neo‐liberal network of governance that first began to emerge in the mid‐1970s.     

Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: the case of transnational law firms in Italy

In this article we highlight the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively poorly studied issue. Specifically, we provide empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between a variety of capitalism, place specific workplace cultures and practices, and the institution‐related challenges transnational professional service firms and all transnational corporations (TNCs) face. We also reveal the way institutionally generated differences at the level of work practices are managed in transnational law firms through worldwide training programmes designed to ‘govern’ the practices of workers in different parts of the TNC's network. This emphasizes the importance of studying attempts to manage institutional heterogeneity at the level of workplace practices, something often missed in existing mesoscale studies of TNC governance structures. Consequently, we highlight detailed empirical archaeologies that explore the direct links between institutions and practices as an important component of future research on the effects of institutions on TNCs.     

Antagonistic governance in South African fruit global production networks: a neo‐Gramscian perspective

Governance is a core focus of the global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) literatures. Recent research claims ‘complementary’ or ‘synergistic’ governance, achieved through the confluence of private, public and civil society actors, is required for sustainable social gains. While moving beyond a narrow focus on economic coordination, such analysis lacks a sufficiently nuanced examination of power relations. In this article, I draw on neo‐Gramscian perspectives to account for ongoing contestation, positing that governance needs to be understood in the context of a broader hegemonic project. ‘Antagonistic governance’ is proposed to conceptualize contestation within and across diverse initiatives, which forge, challenge and transform hegemonic stability in GVC/GPNs. I explore this through the South African fruit sector, in particular, a labour crisis in 2012/13. I argue that we need to move beyond apolitical readings of governance to account for the material and discursive practices through which contestation gets played out, compromises are forged, and hegemonic order is maintained.     

Fair Trade: Social regulation in global food markets

This article analyzes the theoretical and empirical parameters of social regulation in contemporary global food markets, focusing on the rapidly expanding Fair Trade initiative. Fair Trade seeks to transform North/South relations by fostering ethical consumption, producer empowerment, and certified commodity sales. This initiative joins an array of labor and environmental standard and certification systems which are often conceptualized as “private regulations” since they depend on the voluntary participation of firms. I argue that these new institutional arrangements are better understood as “social regulations” since they operate beyond the traditional bounds of private and public (corporate and state) domains and are animated by individual and collective actors. In the case of Fair Trade, I illuminate how relational and civic values are embedded in economic practices and institutions and how new quality assessments are promoted as much by social movement groups and loosely aligned consumers and producers as they are by market forces. This initiative's recent commercial success has deepened price competition and buyer control and eroded its traditional peasant base, yet it has simultaneously created new openings for progressive politics. The study reveals the complex and contested nature of social regulation in the global food market as movement efforts move beyond critique to institution building.     

THE TRANSNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF IMMIGRANT POLITICS: Insights from a Comparative Study of Migrant Grassroots Organizing1

Greater global interconnectedness produces a transformation in the ways in which groups constitute and interpret the boundaries of community formation and political practice. This article considers the ways in which a group engages (or not) with the possibilities for transnational identity formation and border‐crossing politics granted by the changing structures of the global order. A comparative analysis identifies similarities and differences in the patterns of community formation and political engagement of Salvadoran migrants settled across different urban centers of North America. Variations in the territorial orientation and scales of immigrant political practice are explained by the national and city‐level contexts of immigrant reception, the institutional opportunity structure in which migrant groups are embedded, and the nature of relations between migrants and their migrant and nonmigrant institutional interlocutors in places of settlement and their country of origin.     

Botswana’s beef global commodity chain: Explaining the resistance to change

In an era of increasing global agricultural trade, many firms and farms seek to upgrade their agricultural commodity chains to become better integrated into global markets. Utilizing a global commodity chain (GCC) approach, this analysis unravels the challenges to and the potential consequences of upgrading Botswana’s beef commodity chain. Specifically, the argument is made that political, economic, and cultural influences in the GCC contribute to distinctive driving factors that have prevented upgrading or niche marketing of Botswana’s beef. In comparison to two other countries in the region (South Africa and Namibia) that have upgraded their beef GCCs, Botswana’s producer driven GCC has not upgraded due in large part to the existence of three disparate producer groups: commercial feedlot, commercial extensive grazing, and communal producers. The diverse expectations, norms, daily practices and identities of the various actors in Botswana’s beef GCC contribute to contradictory policies and practices. This study reveals that cultural differences in a GCC can affect the capacity of the actors to upgrade the chain. Although culture does not drive or determine the action of actors in a commodity chain, it does shape the meanings associated with particular commodities and influences the ways in which actors think and behave. Moreover, if upgrading strategies are culturally alien or alienating to a significant segment of actors within the chain, upgrading efforts will be resisted by those alienated actors.     

IRENA as a glocal actor: pathways towards energy governmentality

For decades renewable energy has remained a “blind spot” within the sphere of international energy governance. The existing institutional network is highly fragmented, resulting in a myriad of international organizations, which all claim to deal with energy issues, yet do not focus on renewables on a global scale. Since 2009, IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, seeks to fill up this vacuum, thereby creating a new (and maybe more Southern-led) political arena for governing renewable energy issues. This article focuses on IRENA’s role as a changemaker in the sphere of global energy governance by investigating IRENA’s governance practices and contributions to knowledge production.     

From manstream measuring to multispecies sustainability? A gendered reading of bee‐ing sustainable

This article draws on an ethnography of bee‐work to explore how androcentrism is enacted and disrupted in environmental organizing practices. We first situate the study in recent debates surrounding sustainability, viewing this as one organizing project that informs the recent ‘Save the Bees’ discourse and initiatives proliferating the global North. Theoretically inspired by ideas from political ecology and feminist materialism, we suggest that dominant ‘bee‐saving’ practices are enacted through masculinist conceptions of ‘manstream’ measuring. Focusing on biosecurity inspections during one significant pollination event, we draw on three motifs to explore both the enactment and disruption of sanitized, linear and falsely bounded distinctions that often re/produce practices which have outcomes counter to their intended objectives. Reflecting on three field‐based moments — Pests, Protection and Pace — we consider the possibilities for an alternative modality of multispecies sustainability that is inspired by a new materialism agenda. This not only serves to dismantle inherent binaries through paying attention to the ontological muddling of species, but also helps to consider the productive relations that may emerge when we depart from masculinist modes of sustainable thinking in organizational and institutional settings.     

Bending but Not Breaking?: Foreign Investor Pressure and Dividend Payouts by Japanese Firms

This article examines the global diffusion of shareholder‐oriented governance practices, using the case of dividend payouts by Japanese firms. While Japanese firms previously retained profits for rainy days or new ventures, their dividend payouts began to increase in the 1990s, rapidly catching up with the levels prevailing in the United States. Following prior research, we focus on the role of foreign investors in this process but provide a more nuanced account of their influence, using panel data on 2,036 publicly traded Japanese firms from 1990 to 2005. First, we show that pressure from foreign investors increased dividends by Japanese firms not only directly but also indirectly, by extending the cognitive boundaries of organizational fields of Japanese firms beyond their local peers and toward their global competitors. Second, we show that although Japanese firms that remained deeply embedded in the traditional, stakeholder‐oriented governance system resisted shareholder‐oriented governance practices, even such firms yielded under pressure from both foreign and domestic investors. We conclude with theoretical implications of our findings for the literature on the global diffusion of shareholder value and its broader political and social consequences.     

The Rise of Supermarkets in Africa: Implications for Agrifood Systems and the Rural Poor

The rise of supermarkets in Africa since the mid‐1990s is transforming the food retail sector. Supermarkets have spread fast in Southern and Eastern Africa, already proliferating beyond middle‐class big‐city markets into smaller towns and poorer areas. Supplying supermarkets presents both potentially large opportunities and big challenges for producers. Supermarkets' procurement systems involve purchase consolidation, a shift to specialised wholesalers, and tough quality and safety standards. To meet these requirements, producers have to make investments and adopt new practices. This is hardest for small producers, who risk exclusion from dynamic urban markets increasingly dominated by supermarkets. There is thus an urgent need for development programmes and policies to assist them in adopting the new practices that these procurement systems demand.     

The Influence of Undergraduate Students' Engagement Practices and Their Institutional Environment on Academic Achievement

This study examines relationships between students' demographic characteristics, campus engagement practices, institutional support, and grade point average (GPA) utilizing a social-ecological analytic framework. The study sample consisted of 355 freshmen and 315 seniors attending a historically Black institution (HBI). Engagement practices and institutional support were assessed using the National Survey of Student Engagement. Findings revealed significant associations between class status, mother's education, and GPA, but demographic factors, institutional support, and engagement practices did not predict academic achievement at the selected HBI. Parents' education was positively associated with students' extracurricular involvement. Practice and policy implications are discussed for social work professionals working in college settings.