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.     

Refocusing Children's Services Towards Prevention: Lessons from the Literature

Increasingly, western developed countries are committed to improving prevention and early intervention strategies that address risks in all areas of children's lives. This article considers the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of such refocusing activity. Five sets of strategies for refocusing are described: developing and using local evidence; designing, implementing and evaluating new services (alongside de‐commissioning); fiscal control; mainstreaming reforms and ensuring sustainability; and structural reorganisation. Five benefits of such reforms are outlined: improved outcomes; better inter‐agency working; greater efficiency; improved practice and outputs; and enhanced user and staff satisfaction. The article notes ways of mitigating the risks of refocusing and the need for practical methods that connect strategies and overcome obstacles in order to achieve the identified benefits.     

Adolescents’ Perceptions and Standards of Their Relationships with Their Parents as a Function of Sociometric Status

This study examined adolescents' cognitions of their relationships with their parents as a function of sociometric status. The adolescents' subjective views of their relationships with their mothers and fathers were assessed with respect to seven relationship qualities (general warmth, displays of warmth, intimate self‐disclosure, parental monitoring, conflict, instrumental aid, and provisions of autonomy) across two cognition types: perceptions (beliefs about “how things are”) and standards (beliefs about “how things should be”). The participants were sixth‐, eighth‐, tenth‐, and twelfth‐grade students. Peer sociometric status was determined based on unlimited peer nominations completed by 462 participants. The 190 adolescents classified as average, popular, or rejected were included in the analyses. Perceptions and standards were shown to be distinct but related cognitions. Rejected adolescents differed from their more accepted peers in their perceptions of relationships with both mothers and fathers, specifically with regard to warmth from both parents and autonomy from mothers. Rejected adolescents also reported lower standards for parental monitoring and a range of support qualities from both parents. In addition, rejected adolescents' reports demonstrated greater perception‐standard discrepancies, indicating unmet standards. Overall, sociometric status group differences were more pronounced and consistent for standards than for perceptions, and most status group differences occurred primarily among older adolescents. Findings are discussed in terms of social cognitive patterns associated with peer rejection and developmental changes in family–peer linkages across adolescence.     

Stress and Performance Standards: A Dynamic Approach to Time Spent in Housework

Daily logs collected over a 10‐week period from a small, nonrepresentative sample of young, childless married couples were examined. Housework was conceptualized as a daily decision predicated upon personal standards, social rhythms, and stress variables that shape the perception of need for housework. Findings indicate that home‐based stress, stress from outside the home, and standards are independent, additive predictors of housework time. In addition, stress and standards interact in ways suggesting that stress modifies the meaning of performance. High home‐based stress and low imported stress lead to more critical evaluations of ones' own performance and more monitoring of one's spouse's contributions. Husbands do more when wives do more, but only when wives import little stress from outside the home or perceive high demand for housework. Results are interpreted in terms of patterns of meaning and obligation.     

Multistakeholder initiatives in global production networks: naturalizing specific understandings of sustainability through the Better Cotton Initiative

In recent years, various academics, consultants, companies and NGOs have advocated a move towards more cooperative approaches to private sustainability standards to address the widely identified shortcomings of the compliance paradigm. However, is it possible to address these limitations by moving towards stakeholder inclusion and capacity building while at the same time catering to the demands of lead firms supplying the mainstream market? In this article, we analyse how the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) seeks to do just that, in the process identifying three key tensions and competing policy concerns with which standard‐setters have had to grapple – (a) stakeholder inclusion vs process‐control/efficiency; (b) stringency of the standard vs scale of production; and (c) capacity building vs auditing. Combining theoretical considerations about governance in global production networks (GPNs) with a convention theory perspective, we explore these inherent tensions and show that due to pre‐existing power relations in the cotton GPN, it is hard to develop more cooperative approaches because market and industrial values tend to win out despite efforts to follow current best practice on sustainability standard‐setting.     

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.     

Produire l'objectivité médicale : un système expérimental réplicatif de standardisation

As seen through studies in medical sociology and though the concerns expressed by health-care professionals, standardizing medical practices is the key to the theoretical and practical thought devoted to the production of scientific objectivity. Till present, analyses have given a special place to the conditions for establishing innovative systems of medical coordination on a large scale. Recent studies have focused on constructing standards and concretely applying them to the coordination of medical practices. Under this paradigm however, maintaining standardized practices over time is taken for granted. Attention has mainly turned toward the visible aspects of standardization in a narrowly defined medical setting with, as a result, models that are based on the degree of standardization obtained instead of on the process of attaining it. Two empirical studies are used to raise questions about how to make the nascent medical/administrative objectivity last. This presentation of a “style of standardization” pleads for a pragmatic approach to the producing of standards so as to describe the various innovative forms of standardized practices without necessarily making presuppositions about the context of discovery or the properties inherent in what is to be standardized.     

Dichotomy of development aid’s ambition and neoliberal imperatives: A case‐study of private‐sector development in Bangladesh

Development in the twenty‐first century (“neo‐liberalism”) is a tool and its success and sustainability depend on how this tool is applied on a specific grounded reality. This article investigates how this modernization process continually co‐creates globalized Bangladesh through private sector development. While this field report highlights the challenges development aid donors can face in Bangladesh’s post‐colonial culture, it also unveils the dichotomous traction between globalization and inequality as well as the friction poverty reduction, through private sector development, can generate in impoverished countries. Finally, this report attempts to reconsider the ways in which the aid development ambitions of equality and liberty can find a workable balance with the neo‐liberal Imperative for private sector development. This article calls for improving quality control to generate greater impact of development aid resources in developing private sectors.     

Making Sense of Sustainability: Nine Answers to ‘What Should Be Sustained?’1

Abstract The concept of sustainability is central to many current natural resource debates. While the concept has substantial appeal, consensus on its meaning is lacking, especially concerning what combinations of resources or practices should be sustained. The many meanings of sustainability are addressed by first presenting four defining questions: what is sustained, why sustain it, how is sustainability measured, and what are the politics? These questions are used to identify what we see as nine distinct types of sustainability, each reflecting a different vision of which resources should be sustained. Illustrations are drawn from three major renewable natural resource areas—agriculture, forestry, and marine fisheries.     

Environmental Harm and “the Good Farmer”: Conceptualizing Discourses of Environmental Sustainability in the Beef Industry

Maintaining sustainability discourses in the face of evidence to the contrary is a topic of considerable interest in sociology. We approach this topic with a focus on the beef industry in Alberta, Canada. By studying the discourses of cow and calf producers this article addresses the following questions: (1) What are the discourses that producers draw on to support their self‐perceptions as stewards of the land, (2) how are these discourses used by producers to negotiate and reconcile their involvement in a system that contributes to environmental degradation, and (3) what are key elements to interpreting these discourses of sustainability? Methods include semistructured interviews with attention to the potential of genomics for enhanced cattle breeding to ameliorate harmful methane emissions. Our findings indicate that producers draw on narratives of balance between economic and environmental concerns, focus on epistemic nearness, and fragment their understanding of the beef industry to maintain discourses of sustainability. These findings offer insights into the impacts that embodied, material forms of knowledge have on farmers’ perceptions of the land, and demonstrate that these narratives and ways of knowing predicate farmers’ understandings of sustainable development.     

Multi‐stakeholder Groups for Better Sector Performance: A Key to Fighting Corruption in Natural‐Resource Governance?

Multi‐stakeholder groups – involving representatives from civil society, government and the private sector — are increasingly seen as a means of promoting improved service delivery and operational performance in natural‐resource sectors. Although the intention is to promote dialogue, learning and collaboration towards agreed goals and the implementation of standards for better sector governance and performance, the impact of these initiatives will be shaped by members' incentives and external constraints. This article describes how incentive incompatibilities will prevent the group from effectively addressing fundamental problems in the sectors, such as corruption. Multi‐stakeholder groups can be a viable forum for debate, but should not be expected to perform a role in fighting corruption in natural‐resource management.     

Soil as Social‐Ecological Feedback: Examining the “Ethic” of Soil Stewardship among Corn Belt Farmers

In this article we examine in‐depth interviews with farmers (n = 159) from nine Corn Belt states. Using a grounded theory approach, we identified a “soil stewardship ethic,” which exemplifies how farmers are talking about building the long‐term sustainability of their farm operation in light of more variable and extreme weather events. Findings suggest that farmers' shifting relationship with their soil resources may act as a kind of social‐ecological feedback that enables farmers to implement adaptive strategies (e.g., no‐till farming, cover crops) that build resilience in the face of increasingly variable and extreme weather, in contrast to emphasizing short‐term adjustments to production that may lead to greater vulnerability over time. The development of a soil stewardship ethic may help farmers to resolve the problem of an apparent trade‐off between short‐term productivist goals and long‐term conservation goals and in doing so may point toward an emergent aspect of a conservationist identity. Focusing on the message of managing soil health to mitigate weather‐related risks and preserving soil resources for future generations may provide a pragmatic solution for helping farmers to reorient farm production practices, which would have soil building and soil saving at their center.     

The Logic of A Co‐Operative Economy and Democracy 2.0: Recovering the Possibilities for Autonomy,Creativity, Solidarity,and Common Purpose

Over the past 30 years, the collectivist‐democratic form of organization has presented a growing alternative to the bureaucratic form, and it has proliferated, here and around the world. This form is manifest, for example, within micro‐credit groups, workers’ co‐operatives, nongovernmental organizations, advocacy groups, self‐help groups, community and municipal initiatives, social movement organizations, and in many nonprofit groups in general. It is most visible in the civil society sector, but demands for deeper participation are also evident in communities and cities, and the search for more involving and less bureaucratic structures has spread into many for‐profit firms as well. Building on research on this form of organization, this article develops a model of the decisional processes utilized in such organizations and contrasts these “Democracy 2.0” standards for decision making from the Democracy 1.0 (representative and formal) standards that previously prevailed. Drawing on a new generation of research on these sorts of organizations, this article and this special section discuss: (a) how consensus decisional processes are being made more efficient; (b) how such organizations are now able to scale to fairly large size while still retaining their local and participatory basis; (c) how such organizations are cultivating a more diverse membership and using such diversity to build more democratic forms of governance; (d) how such organizations are combatting ethnoracial and gender inequalities that prevail in the surrounding society; and (e) how emotions are getting infused into the public conversations within these organizations and communities.     

Linking Social Development with the Capacity to Carry Debt: Towards an MDG‐Consistent Debt‐Sustainability Concept

Owing to concerns among low‐income countries that the new debt sustainability framework of the Bretton Woods institutions may lock them into a so‐called ‘low debt‐low growth’ scenario, the United Nations has called for a more MDG‐consistent debt‐sustainability concept. This article shows that there is a robust relationship between achieving the Millennium Development Goals and having a higher capacity to carry debt. It then discusses options for modifying the current debt‐sustainability framework, and suggests that including progress made in achieving the MDGs in determining borrowing limits would be a first step towards adopting such a concept.     

Creative Destruction and Globalization: The Rise of Massive Standardized Education Platforms

This paper describes how massive standardized education platforms have emerged as a result of globalization and the process of creative destruction. In education, creative destruction involves the initial development of a large number of educational standards, followed by cycles of the destruction of old standards and the creation of new ones. This leads to the narrowing and refinement of the standards until the key element of interoperability is achieved, thus allowing individuals or organizations to interact on a large scale. Examples are presented of standardized education platforms in the United States and globally.

While the objective and subjective knowledge systems are represented in the field of education, one danger is that standardized platforms may become homogenized around only the objective knowledge system, which seeks perfect efficiency. This may result in the exclusion of the subjective knowledge system, which argues that diversity and heterogeneity are needed to produce educational creativity and innovation. On the other hand, the platforms may be able to deliver much needed financial efficiency for K-12 public education systems, as well as providing a connection between the research data, which remains isolated in universities, and the practitioners in K-12 settings who need it.

Este artículo describe cómo las plataformas masivas de la estandarización de la educación ha surgido como resultado de la globalización y del proceso de una destrucción creativa. En la educación, la destrucción creativa implica el desarrollo inicial de un gran número de estándares educacionales seguido por ciclos de destrucción de estándares pasados y de la creación de los nuevos. Esto induce al estrechamiento y refinamiento de los estándares hasta que se alcanza el elemento clave de la interoperabilidad, y por lo tanto, permitiéndoles a los individuos u organizaciones que interactúen a una gran escala. Los ejemplos de plataformas de educación estandarizadas se presentan en los Estados Unidos y globalmente.

Mientras que los sistemas del conocimiento objetivo y subjetivo se presentan en el campo de la educación, uno de los peligros es que las plataformas estandarizadas puedan llegar a homogenizarse solamente alrededor del sistema de conocimiento objetivo, lo que busca una eficiencia perfecta. Esto puede resultar en una exclusión del sistema del conocimiento subjetivo, lo que sostiene que la diversidad y la heterogeneidad se necesitan para producir creatividad e innovación educacional. Por el otro lado, las plataformas pueden quizás proveer la eficiencia financiera necesaria para los sistemas de educación pública K-12, como también una conexión entre los datos de investigación que permanecen aislados en las universidades, y para los practicantes en los entornos de K-12 que la necesitan.

本文描述了作为全球化的结果和创造性毁灭过程的大规模的标准化的教育平台是怎样出现的。在教育领域,创造性毁灭涉及大量的教育标准的最初开发,然后伴随着旧的标准的毁灭和新的标准的建立的周期。这引致了标准的狭隘和精细,直到获取了互运性（interoperability）的关键元素为止,然后使个体或者组织大规模地互动。本文提供了一些美国和世界其它地方的标准化教育平台的案例。 在主观与客观两种知识系统在教育领域获得代表的同时,一个危险是,标准化的平台可能仅仅围绕着客观知识系统进行同质化,客观知识系统寻求完全的效率。这可能导致排除主观的知识系统。主观知识系统认为,为产生教育的创造性和创新,多样性和异质性是需要的。另一方面,平台可能为K-12公共教育系统提供十分需要的金融效率,以及提供仍然封闭在大学里的研究数据与需要这些数据的在K-12情景下的实干家之间的链接。

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Эта статья описывает появление массивных стандартизированных образовательных платформ в результате глобализации и процесса творческого разрушения. В сфере образования творческое разрушение предполагает инициацию разработки большого количества образовательных стандартов, с последующими циклами разрушения старых и создания новых. Пока ключевой элемент взаимодействия не будет достигнут, это приводит к сужению и уточнению стандартов, что позволяет отдельным лицам или организациям взаимодействовать в крупных масштабах. Приведены примеры стандартизированных образовательных платформ в Соединенных Штатах и ??во всем мире. В то время как в области образования представлены объективные и субъективные системы знаний, первейшей опасностью является то, что стандартизированные платформы могут гомогенизироваться только вокруг объективной системы знаний, которая стремится к идеальной эффективности. Это может привести к исключению субъективной системы знаний, которая утверждает, что разнообразие и неоднородность необходимы для создания творческого образовательного потенциала и инноваций. С другой стороны, платформы могут быть в состоянии обеспечить столь необходимую для системы общественного образования К-12 финансовую эффективность, а также связи между данным исследований, которые остаются изолированным в университетах, и практиками в настройках K-12, нуждающихся в этом.     

Reforming Land‐Tenure Systems in South Africa: Routes to Socio‐Economic and Agricultural Sustainability

Given the historical development of land tenure in South Africa, the aim of this article is to examine the best routes to alleviate poverty and retain sustainable agriculture in the country. First, a theoretical framework is presented that relates land tenure to sustainability, and three historical periods (pre‐colonial, colonial, and apartheid) are then considered to explain the changes in land tenure and their consequences. The progress and main limitations of post‐apartheid land reform to approach agricultural sustainability and alleviate poverty are discussed. Based on the analysis, different possibilities for future land reform are elaborated, followed by some recommendations for future land‐reform policies in South Africa.     

China's development loans and the threat of debt crisis in Kenya

The increased access of African countries to external capital markets has rekindled interest in growing external borrowing and placed debt sustainability at the forefront of the continent's policy agenda. In this article, we discuss the conceptual link between external loans and debt challenges. In this article, the analysis is cast in the context of new sources of loans triggered by Sino–African co‐operation. The article examines the main sectors targeted for financing in Kenya, how the Chinese‐funded projects have been structured, the financial models adopted to deliver on the projects, and the overall gains from such projects. Ultimately, the article examines the external debt situation in Kenya and how Chinese loans are likely to precipitate a crisis of sustainability. The analysis shows that, although the external financial support plays a critical role in addressing the gap in Kenya's infrastructure development, the loans also pose risks of debt sustainability in the longer term, Chinese loans particularly are tied and lack transparency. The emerging debt challenges point to the need for policy reforms in favour of enhancing loans transparency and the beneficial impacts. This would enhance the repayment capacity of borrowing countries.