In 2014, the Chair of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) announced the completion of the “Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems” (RAI). For the Chair, the RAI was a major success; through a two-year long, multistakeholder process, it had engaged international institutions, multinational corporations, states, and transnational activists to produce a set of global standards to govern large-scale land transfers. Indeed, the collaborative approach of the CFS has been hailed by some activists and scholars as a new model of democratic food governance. Yet, despite the inclusion of social movements, in the concluding plenary of the CFS in 2014, a Spanish activist from the International Peasant Movement, La Via Campesina, soberly explained to the assembled parties his disappointment with the final Principles. The document “paid lip service to human rights,” he said, but undermined those commitments by subordinating them to trade agreements. Ultimately, he protested, “The Principles do not prioritize public policy at all. They prioritize an enabling environment for market-based solutions without any recognition of power imbalances.”
After the final concluding gavel of the 2014 CFS, an exhausted group of 30 activists who had participated in the negotiations huddled in a large and lavish conference room at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. The mood was sour. The activists were worried that they had helped to construct a framework that legitimized the very “land grabs” they had initially sought to contest. This was of particularly concerning because it had taken almost six years of on-going activism to develop a set of global standards to regulate the growing problem of large-scale land transfers. Indeed, activists had been working intensively since 2009, when the World Bank launched the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI) without civil society consultation. After years of pressure to develop a more participatory regulatory process, however, activists now found themselves facing an outcome that did not substantively address their original critiques. Just as La Via Campesina had derided the PRAI for its “market-driven ‘global governance’ of food and agriculture” (2010: 8), now it was criticizing the RAI for enabling an “environment for market-based solutions.” Given the participation of civil society organizations and transnational agrarian movements, what explains the failure of this collaborative process to address activists’ claims and demands?
This article analyses how power operates within collaborative governance. Over the past decade, new arenas of collaborative, multistakeholder governance have proliferated to manage conflicts over food, natural resources, as well as other contentious global issues. While processes of collaborative governance vary in their institutional arrangements, they are defined by the inclusion of state and nonstate “stakeholders” in inclusive and participatory processes that aim to cultivate voluntary compliance (Reference Ansell and GashAnsell and Gash 2008). Activists and sociolegal scholars have raised concerns that these processes often do not account for unequal resources and relations of power of stakeholders (Reference Bryson, Crosby and StoneBryson et al. 2006; Reference Fung and WrightGray 2004; Fung and Wright 2003; Purdy 2016). While this remains an enduring challenge, these analyses of power often overlook how power is exercised indirectly, across the competing arenas of transnational legal pluralism (Reference BermanBerman 2009; Reference MichaelsMichaels 2009). By adapting the sociolegal disputing approach to the context of transnational disputes, this study reveals how collaborative processes are shaped by the competition to frame disputes across competing arenas of global governance.
I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in the CFS to develop an extended case analysis of “the global land grab,” which was articulated after the global food crisis of 2007–2008 and negotiated within the CFS between 2012 and 2014. By analyzing a single dispute—through construction, transformation, and negotiation within a collaborative process—I argue that the frames through which collaborative processes are deployed serve to reconstitute conflict, subordinating competing claims to the values of the dominant frame. In disputes over socioeconomic organization, the values embedded in dominant frames of collaborative governance can thus be socially and economically constitutive—producing the norms and standards that guide the construction of global markets. I conclude that if the frame through which collaborative governance is deployed reflects the interests of those in dominant positions of power, then activists face the possibility of constituting the very markets they contest.
The field of food governance, and the case of the global land grab, offers fertile terrain to examine how collaborative forms of governance shape disputes and affect global inequalities. Food security is an emerging field of governance that has spawned a multitude of competing actors, norms, and overlapping legal processes (Reference Barling and DuncanBarling and Duncan 2015; Reference Havinga, vanWaarden and CaseyHavinga et al. 2015; Reference McKeonMcKeon 2015). Since many of the most vulnerable to food insecurity are small-scale producers, conflicts over food security have mobilized massive transnational agrarian and social movements (Reference DesmaraisDesmarais 2002, Reference BorrasBorras et. al. 2008). Yet though these movements have long struggled for a greater voice within global policymaking processes, they are becoming increasingly skeptical of collaborative and multi-stakeholder forms of governance (McKeon 2017). Analyzing these arenas through the disputing approach may thus offer insight into the indirect forms of power that shape collaborative and global governance.
The first part of this article situates the rise of collaborative governance within the context of expanding transnational legal pluralism (Reference ZumbansenZumbansen 2010) and adapts the sociolegal disputing approach to this multiactor and multiscalar legal context. To do so, it draws on Mather and Reference Mather and YngvessonYngvesson's (1981) classic model of dispute transformation to elaborate the role of disputing frames as a key mechanism through which transnational actors seek to exercise power. Frames serve as interpretive schemas not only for situating social conflict in competing legal arenas, but also for culturally constructing economic markets by representing social relationships through specific social values (Reference MalloyMalloy 2003). The frames affirmed through legal processes can thus profoundly shape socioeconomic organization by authorizing specific representations of relationships and networks of exchange. I enumerate several factors that shape the construction and transformation of disputing frames.
The second part turns to an extended case analysis of the dispute over the “global land grab,” tracing the process through which this dispute was constructed and framed across a range of transnational arenas. I describe how transnational agrarian movements and allied international NGOs articulated the dispute within a human rights frame, drawing on the moral economy of small-scale producers (Reference ScottScott 1977) to claim the rights to food, land, and access to territorial markets for small-scale producers and workers. In contrast, the World Bank rephrased this dispute within an investment frame, one that emphasized the rights of foreign capital to invest and integrate global markets and value chains (Reference McMichaelMcMichael 2014). In contesting this frame, activists successfully shifted the dispute into a collaborative process, but in doing so were incorporated within the investment frame; the consensus-based process of collaboration thus reconstituted the conflict over land with the terms of global markets. As a result, activists found themselves in a challenging new political terrain. While social movements once embraced the possibility of participating in global policy making, they also risk the hazard of producing the markets they protest.
Finally, I conclude by considering the implications of collaborative governance for social movements. For activists, collaborative governance is double edged; while it offers the possibility of participation in global legal processes, these arenas of governance are shaped by struggles that take place across the overlapping, competing, and plural normative orders of global governance. As a result, activists are reevaluating the practice of participation and struggling over the very meaning of “collaboration.”
The Rise of Collaborative Governance and Transnational Legal Pluralism
Economic globalization has produced a range of new regulatory arenas, political institutions, and forms of legality across multiple geographical scales (Halliday and Osinsky 2006). Central to this legal transformation has been a reconfiguration of state-based sovereignty into novel assemblages of territory, authority, and rights (Reference SassenSassen 2008), the recombination of “public” and “private” law into new hybrid legal formations, and the expansion of competing transnational normative orders (Reference ZumbansenZumbansen 2012). Hence, in contrast to the assumption that neoliberalism has led to a withdrawal of state authority (Reference StrangeStrange 1996) or a global laissez-faire system, sociolegal scholars have observed that, as global markets expand, so too do new regulatory regimes (Reference BraithwaiteBraithwaite 2008; Reference Levi-FaurLevi-Faur 2006).
The rise of “collaborative governance” has emerged as a key feature of contemporary global governance. New arenas of collaborative governance have developed at local, national, and supranational scales in response to the failures of free-market policies, as well as demands for civil society inclusion (Reference Donahue and ZeckhauserDonahue and Zeckhauser 2011; Reference Emerson and NabatchiEmerson and Nabatchi 2015; Reference UttingUtting 2001). Starting from the assumption that global political and economic volatility has created new interdependencies, architects of collaborative governance envision collaboration as a transformational process in which “stakeholders” solve problems and build trust. Reference Ansell and GashAnsell and Gash (2008: 544) define collaborative governance as:
A governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets.
This definition describes a range of new regulatory forms including, “multistakeholder governance,” “new governance,” and “joined-up governance.” It emphasizes key features of collaboration: a turn from “command and control” forms of state regulation, participatory processes that aim to facilitate consensus among competing actors, and the development of voluntary, nonbinding standards or norms. Advocates of collaborative governance celebrate the virtues of collaboration as holistic, democratic, efficient, flexible, and responsive (Reference Cohen and SabelCohen and Sabel 2004; Reference GunninghamGunningham 2009; Reference Innes and BooherInnes and Booher 2003). Moreover, in the context of global legal fragmentation (Reference Benvenisti and DownsBenvenisti and Downs 2007), collaborative governance offers an inclusive space that incorporates a variety of actors who might otherwise be engaged in competing legal arenas and processes.
While there is widespread agreement that collaborative processes transform the form, exercise, and operation of power, scholars have taken different approaches in empirically assessing these changes. Some analysts have sought to address power imbalances among stakeholders through procedural remedies (Reference BooherBooher 2004; Reference InnesHuxham and Vangen 2005; Innes 2004; Reference GrayPurdy 2016; Gray 1989). Other analysts, however, have been more critical of collaborative governance, describing it as a form of “roll-out neoliberalism,” a process that consists of “extending and bolstering market logics, socializing individualized subjects, and disciplining the noncompliant” (Peck and Tickell 2002: 389–90). Critics of the participatory turn in global governance, argue that these arrangements dissolve the epistemological distinction between “society” and “economy,” subordinating socio-moral concerns to the market (Reference ShamirShamir 2008; Reference Swyngedouw, MacCallum, Moulaert, Hillier and HaddockSwyngedouw 2009). Both approaches, however, often overlook the larger legal landscape in which collaborative governance operates—a world of global legal pluralism comprised of competing and overlapping actors, norms, and processes (Reference BermanBerman 2009; Reference MichaelsMichaels 2009; Zumbansen 2012).
Understanding how collaborative governance contributes to or mitigates inequality thus requires attending to the ways that power operates across plural fields of global governance. To do so, I adapt the socio-legal disputing approach to the transnational context. This “bottom-up” method was developed to analyze how power operates within contexts of legal pluralism by investigating the construction, transformation, and management of disputes from the perspective of activists engaged in conflict. By deploying this method, this study asks: How is power exercised across transnational arenas of governance? How does collaboration serve to transform social conflict? What ideologies of law and power does collaboration culturally constitute?
Adapting the Disputing Approach: The Power of Framing
The disputing approach was initially developed by legal anthropologists in the colonial context. Focusing on the dispute as a unit of analysis, scholars sought to excavate the implicit norms and forms of power embedded within overlapping normative orders (Reference CollierCollier 1976, Comaroff and Reference Comaroff and RobertsRoberts 1986, Reference GluckmanGluckman 1965). Such an approach eschewed formal definitions of law, instead emphasizing law as a process in which actors negotiate contradictory principles of social integration (Reference MooreMoore 1978; Reference Nader and ToddNader and Todd 1978, Reference SnyderSnyder 1981). In the 1980s–1990s, socio-legal scholars adopted the disputing approach to evaluate how legal reform through alternative dispute resolution shaped power relations among litigants in the U.S. context (Reference Merry and MilnerMerry and Milner 1995).
While the disputing approach remains a key socio-legal method, one challenge of applying it to the transnational legal context is the way that disputes have typically been conceptualized. Disputes are often defined as dyadic conflicts, publicly asserted in the context of a third party (Reference GulliverGulliver 1973). This definition has limited the utility of this method for the multiactor and multiscalar conflicts disputed in global arenas. When the disputing approach has been deployed in the transnational context, scholars have focused on more formalized processes of adjudication.Footnote 1 Mather and Yngvesson, however, offer an innovative approach to dispute analysis that is more suited to the transnational context. They define disputes as “a particular stage of a social relationship in which conflict between two parties (individuals or groups) is asserted publicly––that is, before a third party” (1981: 786), wherein “third parties” are construed broadly as supporters or the general public. Rather than adhering to a strictly dyadic model of disputing, Mather and Yngvesson reconceptualize disputes as a dynamic process in which actors compete to define conflict and target (or even constitute) specific “third parties.” As Yngvesson explains, “Attention to who defines the categories in which a particular dispute is framed, and consideration of competing efforts to define the same events, can provide us with important, but often neglected, insights into the social control of disputing, as well as the continuities between this process and fundamental aspects of social order” (1984: 238).
Mather and Yngvesson's (1981) approach thus trains analysts’ attention on dispute framing—a competitive, interpretive process through which actors struggle to control disputes and steer them into particular arenas. Focusing on the process of framing is particularly productive in the context of global disputes because social movements are often key actors in the transnational legal context. For social movements, frames are key resources used to mobilize supporters by cohering around a shared set of meanings (Reference Benford and SnowBenford and Snow 2000; Reference Gamson and ModiglianiGamson and Modigliani 1989). Social movement frames serve to define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies (Reference EntmanEntman 1993: 52). Social movement frames are thus often the catalysts in the prototypical process of the emergence of disputes: naming, blaming, and claiming (Reference Felstiner, Abel and SaratFelstiner et al 1980).
Framing is also an essential social process through which meanings related to exchange, value, and the economy are culturally constructed. Economic sociologists use the concept of frames to describe how markets socially represent relationships in terms of specific social values. Reference MalloyRobin Malloy (2003) describes “value frames” as key cultural building blocks in the political and legal construction of markets. Value frames encompass different ways of conceptualizing property, personhood, profit, and the role of political institutions in mediating exchange relationships. Drawing together scholarship on social movements and economic sociology, analysts have shown how frames that are mobilized by social movements or multinational firms may thus serve to legitimate market institutions and rent-seeking behavior or, in turn, to articulate alternative forms of socioeconomic organization (Reference Avent-HoltAvent-Holt 2012; Reference Lounsbury, Ventresca and HirschLounsbury et al. 2003).
While actors may seek to construct frames that reflect their values, framing is a process that is shaped and constrained by larger cultural and institutional contexts of meaning. Dominant discourses, existing legal interpretations, and hegemonic norms offer the cultural background and political opportunities against which actors must strategically frame their claims and visions of social change (Paris 2010; Leachman 2013). In her comparative analysis of feminist movements in Germany and the United States, Reference FerreeFerree (2003) argues that social movements often face strategic choices about whether to articulate their claims within frames that are more “culturally resonant,” or, alternatively more radical. More resonant frames, she argues, are those that are more affirming of dominant discursive opportunities—“institutionally anchored ways of thinking that provide a gradient of relative political acceptability to specific packages of ideas” (309).Footnote 2 Articulating claims within more culturally resonant frames, she explains, maybe “expedient for the purposes of influencing policy, gaining support, and forestalling countermovement attacks” (306), but it may also exclude interests and needs that may be more radical in content. Similarly, Reference MerryMerry (2006) shows how these strategic considerations also shape the choices made by global human rights activists; if they frame conflicts in ways that are institutionally resonant with dominant understandings of human rights, they may fail to achieve the more transformational social change they had originally sought. Both Ferree and Merry argue that social movements must often choose whether to accept dominant frames and less radical outcomes or frames that may be more transgressive and radical.
Institutionally anchored discourses are often less set in the context of global governance. In fact, framing can serve to generate new fields and forms of governance. For example, Reference SendingSending (2015) describes how actors engage in “classificatory struggles” to define problems and construct their own authority in establishing new fields of governance. Thus, in transnational legal context, disputing frames are not only essential tools for contesting different social and economic relationships, prevailing frames may also culturally and legally constitute new fields and arenas of governance. Hence, whereas the “resonance” in domestic legal contexts is often determined by constitutional discourses or existing legal culture, the resonance of frames in the transnational legal context is dynamically produced by a variety of factors of the disputing process. Hence, in analyzing the construction, transformation, and management of dispute frames in the global context, I identify four factors: (1) actors' symbolic and material resources; (2) actors' strategy of frame transformation; (3) the temporality of the disputing process; (4) the forms and arena of dispute management.
Actors’ Symbolic and Material Resources
Reference Mather and YngvessonMather and Yngvesson (1981) describe how diverse agents of transformation—direct disputants, third parties to a dispute, supporters, or audience members—construct and transform frames. Each of these agents, or actors, draw on different material and symbolic resources in constructing and transforming disputing frames. Well-funded global institutions, for example, may have greater resources to study and frame an issue or fund “pilot projects” within a specific frame. Likewise, social movements may draw on their symbolic power—their claims to grassroots, self-representation, or the moral weight of their message—to frame disputes. This “agenda setting” power then shapes the way that other institutions respond (Gray 2004; Reference LukesLukes 2005; Reference Scheufele and TewksburyScheufele and Tewksbury 2007). In doing so, these actors struggle to shape the construction, path, and cultural resonance of a dispute.
One way that actors may attempt to control a dispute is by reframing it in ways that privilege their authority and expertise. For example, institutions might frame issues in the discourse of public health or market efficiency based on their professional knowledge. Reference SarfatySarfaty (2012) shows how the World Bank's organizational culture and professional hierarchies, which are dominated by economists, led the Bank to reframe issues of human rights into an economic frame that is more generalizable across the Bank's portfolio. As actors such as the World Bank rephrase disputes, they often attempt to exert epistemological authority. In analyzing processes of dispute framing and transformation in the global context, it is thus important to ask: Who constructed the dispute? On what symbolic and material resources did they draw to construct the dispute?
Strategies of Frame Transformation: Expansion and Narrowing
After the initial articulation of the dispute, Reference Mather and YngvessonMather and Yngvesson (1981) describe how agents attempt to rephrase or reframe disputes in their attempt to exert control over the disputing process. In doing so, agents make strategic choices about whether to “expand” or “narrow” the dispute frame. Narrowing is the process whereby “established categories for classifying events and relationships are imposed on an event or series of events” (778). This often entails using specialized discourse that limits the scope of a conflict and popular participation to contest to established norms. In contrast, expansion challenges specific ways of thinking about a conflict and is often linked to public participation and broader collective efforts for social change. As they note, expansion “challenges established categories for classifying events and relationship. . . or changing accepted frameworks for organizing reality” (778–79). Through expansion, actors often challenge the normative framework applied to a dispute. It is through expansion, Mather and Yngvesson argue that social change is linked to legal change.
The concepts of narrowing and expansion, which were developed to describe how dispute framings are constructed in dialectical tension, assume that disputing is a path dependent process. In the transnational context, however, there are often many actors at multiple sociopolitical scales that attempt to frame conflict. In these cases, disputing is path dependent when frames are relationally articulated and constructed in a temporal sequence across a stable set of core actors and meanings. Analysts of dispute transformation must therefore ask: Which agents were involved in transforming the disputing frame? What strategic considerations factor in agents’ decision to expand or narrow a dispute frame? On what resources did they draw to transform the dispute?
Temporality of the Disputing Process
The disputing approach is premised on analyzing the transformation of social conflict over time. The temporality of the disputing process can therefore shape the resonance of particular frames and the outcome of disputes. Studies of disputes have demonstrated how the meanings and subjects of disputes can change over time. For example, in her analysis of the case of the “Atlantic Fisherman” Yngvesson (1978) demonstrates how the passing of time could allow for the “cooling out” of disputes. In disputes that shift across multiple arenas, certain meanings may become a dominant frame if they are reproduced in multiple spaces. As Coutin notes, “legal artifacts produced in one forum can also reshape the claims being staked in another, thus enabling legal actors to put forward creative reinterpretations but also potentially foreclosing possibilities or limiting reinterpretation" (2011: 571). Put another way, frames may become culturally or institutionally resonant simply because of their repetition over time.
In the context of global governance, Reference MerryMerry (2014) emphasizes how temporality plays a key role in naturalizing particular theories, forms of expertise, and assumptions underlying new technologies of governance, such as standards and indicators. In this way, time can play an important role in institutionalizing particular frames. By attending to transformation of disputing frames across time, analysts might ask: How did the framing of the conflict change from its original articulation? How was the timing of dispute management influenced? At what point in a dispute was the conflict submitted to a disputing arena?
Forms and Arenas of Dispute Settlement
Finally, the forms and arenas of dispute settlement play an important role in shaping the disputing process in two important ways. First, actors may attempt to rephrase disputes in ways that shift them into the arenas in which they have greater voice and power. This work may be done by lawyers (Reference Menkel-MeadowMenkel-Meadow 1985; Reference Suchman and CahillSuchman and Cahill 1996) or by social movements. Reference BartleyBartley (2007) describes how social movements and other actors strategically assess their opportunities across the range of overlapping arenas of governance and institutions of transnational law. He explains, “What is politically possible in different arenas will not always align, leading strategic actors to shift arenas and translate projects from one setting to another. The configuration of political opportunities in particular arenas is therefore crucial in shaping what kinds of arrangements emerge” (Reference BartleyBartley 2007: 311).
Second, the forms of dispute management can play a constitutive role in shaping disputes. As disputes are fundamentally socially constructed and shaped by participants’ moral views of rights and entitlements (Merry 1987), they respond to the institutional forms through which they are managed. During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, sociolegal scholars deployed the disputing approach to analyze how the consensus-based processes of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) reshaped conflicts and participants’ understandings of law and justice. Empirical analyses of disputes managed through ADR suggested that transferring disputes from the adversarial context of court adjudication to informal mediation processes reconstituted disputes within a therapeutic frame, thereby individualizing conflict and limiting the possibility for disputants to challenge entrenched relations of power (Reference HarringtonHarrington 1984; Silbey and Sarat 1988). These studies raise important questions about how different forms of dispute management, and particularly consensus-based disputing processes, reconstitute conflicts in ways that structure power relations and suppress resistance. By applying the disputing approach to collaborative governance, we can ask: How does collaboration shape competing frames? What ideologies of law and power does it promote?
Study Design and Methods
This study draws on the “extended case method” using ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the CFS between 2012 and 2015. The extended case method was pioneered by legal anthropologists and sociolegal scholars as a way to look beyond the institutionally or legally defined “case” (Reference GluckmanGluckman 1973; Reference Van Velsen and EpsteinVan Velsen 1979; Reference YngvessonYngvesson 1990). Instead, it takes an “extended” approach to analyze the development and transformation of a dispute from its first articulation, to its transformation across different legal fields, and to its final resolution. This processual approach is concerned less with the final outcome than with the ways in which individuals or social groups make strategic choices based on competing factors (Reference Nader and ToddNader and Todd 1978: 16); for these factors reveal the different mechanisms of social control as well as the implicit norms and forms of power that may only be seen from the vantage of actors engaged in the disputing process. This method is not instrumentally concerned with the lessons for legal reform, but rather in excavating the ways in which power is constructed and exercised, as well as how the conflicting values and principles of social integration are negotiated (Reference SnyderSnyder 1981).
The CFS has been a contentious arena of conflict related to global food policy since its founding in 1974. However, it became a major site of mobilization for transnational agrarian movements in the 1990s, when food and agriculture were liberalized through the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture. It was then that activists developed the term “food sovereignty” to claim, “the right of peoples. . . to define their own food and agriculture systems.”Footnote 3 In 2007–2008, a global food crisis triggered a struggle over institutional dominance in global food policy. In response to pressure by social movements, the CFS engaged in a process of reform that shifted its structure from an intergovernmental body to a multi-stakeholder arena in which actors engage in collaborative processes to negotiate policy recommendations to strengthen global food security. Today, the CFS claims to be “the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform dealing with food security and nutrition.” However, recently, there have been important debates about how to characterize this arena. For though powerful actors describe it as a multi-stakeholder process, activists have increasingly sought to describe it as a “multi-actor” process to highlight the ultimate responsibility of states for food security. As I describe, in the conclusion, this struggle over naming reflects the growing politicization of collaborative governance by activists and social movements.
This article examines one case that I observed in the CFS over large-scale land acquisitions. While “land grabs” have long been a feature of colonization, the most recent conflict over global land has its root in the 2007–2008 food crisis. Volatile food prices triggered a rush for land by states to ensure their food security, as well as multinational corporations who saw a new opportunity amidst volatile food markets (Reference Headey and FanHeadey and Fan 2008). Both actors quickly expanded efforts to invest in land to grow food, feed, and fuel crops, as well as for financial gain (Reference ZoomersZoomers 2010). The rapid pace of this investment led to serious concern among civil society activists and eventually to global efforts to regulate large-scale land transfers.
To examine this dispute, I participated in the 2013 and 2014 CFS meetings when the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems (RAI) were negotiated. By the time I began my fieldwork, the framing of the dispute was already set. Hence, in addition to observing the ways in which actors engaged in struggles over framing within the process of negotiation, my research entailed reconstructing the framing of the dispute by speaking with activists and analyzing the public statements published by social movements. These included research reports by international NGOs, such as GRAIN, internal report-backs, communications generated by activists participating within the Civil Society Mechanism, as well as the analyses by other researcher–activists engaged in the RAI process.
As an ethnographer, I was not a “neutral” observer. Rather, I actively participated by serving as a communications coordinator for North American civil society groups participating in the CFS and Civil Society Mechanism (CSM). In this capacity, I coordinated the online listserv, participated in monthly phone-calls, disseminated notes, and attended occasional in-person meetings. This form of “insurgent ethnography” as Juris and Khasnabish describe, "provide[s] engaged ethnographers with critical purchase on key tensions and issues underlying processes and events" (2013: 4). By working alongside activists, I was able to observe the way that activists labored to identify and make visible the operation and exercise of power within collaborative processes.
In the next section, I draw on this ethnographic and documentary data to chart the transformation of the dispute over “the global land grab.” By tracing this dispute, I demonstrate how the process of collaboration was shaped by broader struggles to frame the dispute at multiple transnational scales.
The Case of the Global Land Grab
In 2008, the food sovereignty movement-affiliated, Barcelona-based NGO, GRAIN, published a report that documented over 100 cases of land grabs for offshore food production across the world. In the midst of the global food crisis, when staple cereal prices were rising sharply without a single, clear culprit, GRAIN described a global phenomenon that had, until then, been recognized primarily at the local level: the transfer of large tracts of land to foreign states and multinational corporations. It dubbed this process, the “global land grab.” While the report explained that land grabbing had been going on for centuries, it noted that “Something more peculiar is going on now, though. The two big global crises that have erupted over the last 15 months – the world food crisis and the broader financial crisis that the food crisis has been part of – are together spawning a new and disturbing trend toward buying up land for outsourced food production” (GRAIN 2008: 2). The report went on to detail how China, the Gulf States, Japan, and Korea were each seeking to “offshore” food production in Mongolia, Burma, Sudan, Pakistan, Brazil, Uganda, and many other countries. While these states were eager to have the investment, the report suggested that there were serious threats to small-scale producers and workers. “Behind the rhetoric of win–win deals the real aim of these contracts is not agricultural development, much less rural development, but simply agribusiness development,” the report stated (2008: 8). The report detailed the rush by banks and hedge funds—such as Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sacks, BlackRock Inc., and others—to set up agricultural investment funds and take over huge swaths of farmland. The report concluded that “workers, farmers and local communities will inevitably lose access to land for local food production. The very basis on which to build food sovereignty is simply being bartered away” (2008: 9).
While civil society organizations had begun to refer to a “new enclosure movement” earlier in 2008, GRAIN's use of the phrase “global land grab” quickly spread because it saliently articulated this complex and multifaceted issue within a global scope. Drawing on the framework for the emergence of disputes described by Reference Felstiner, Abel and SaratFelstiner et al. (1980) illustrates how, by deploying the frame of the “global land grab,” the Seized report simultaneously named a world-wide phenomenon that was diverse in scope, blamed a new set of actors responsible for this harm, and claimed a regulatory response through a frame that was both global in scope and demanded their inclusion.
First, naming the global land grab encapsulated a complex set of transactions that were not simply occurring from the North to the South but also across the South. It included both state-to-state transactions, as well as private investment by large multinational firms. Second, the global land grab blamed a new set of global actors. Previously, mobilizations over land had been framed within the context of land and agrarian reform in the context of state-based regulation. Although there were several global processes focused on land reform—such as the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in 1979, and the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in 2006—these processes were largely focused at the national level (Reference McKeonMcKeon 2013). The global land grab identified a range of new actors including multinational corporations and international finance institutions, in addition to states, that were responsible for land grabs. As the Seized report explained, “Given the tenacity of the drive by the World Bank and others to make farmland control by hungry foreign investors much easier, as some twisted solution to the food crisis, this could end in explosive conflict” (GRAIN 2008: 10).Footnote 4 The “global land grab” thus articulated the global process that facilitated these land transfers.
Finally, through the frame of the “global land grab,” social movements articulated a claim that demanded an inclusively developed solution to address this worldwide phenomenon. The Seized report explicitly articulated land grabs within the context of “food sovereignty.” This social justice claim, developed a decade earlier by transnational agrarian movements, emphasizes communal control over decision making related to food production and consumption (Reference Desmarais, Wiebe and WittmanDesmarais et al. 2011; Reference EdelmanEdelman 2014). Peasant and agrarian activists articulate food sovereignty through a specific interpretation of the right to food and a counter-hegemonic set of meanings that resonate with agrarian activists “to fight neoliberalism and capitalism in agriculture” (Reference ClaeysClaeys 2012: 644). Hence, the frame of the “global land grab” was thus embedded within a larger, human rights “master-frame” (Reference Carroll and RatnerCarroll and Ratner 1996) that drew on small-scale producers’ rights to self-determination, development, and food.Footnote 5
By successfully naming, blaming, and claiming the global land grab within a human rights frame, activists sought to control the disputing process by interpreting the conflict through a value frame that emphasized small-scale producers and workers’ cultural understandings of land, labor, and capital. Moreover, in the context of debates over global hunger and malnutrition, the human rights frame sought to shift the debate away from the dominant framework of global market integration, which had become aligned with the discourse of “food security” (Reference JaroszJarosz 2014). In doing so, activists sought both to steer this conflict away from neoliberal institutions, such as the World Bank, and toward more inclusive forms of regulation.
Transforming “Land Acquisition” Into an Investment Frame
Once social movements articulated this dispute, investor states and multilateral organizations were quick to respond. The International Food Policy Research Institute, an international research center, published an early report that recognized both the threats and opportunities of large-scale land transfers and proposed a “code of conduct” that could provide “win-win” solutions for both small-scale producers and foreign investors (Reference Von Braun and Meinzen-DickVon Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009). Shortly thereafter, the World Bank sought to intervene in this conflict by undertaking a study entitled “Large-Scale Acquisition of Land Rights for Agricultural or Natural Resource-Based Use.” Using the more neutral term “large-scale land acquisition,” the World Bank explored the impact of land transfers in several countries. One year later, before the study was complete, the World Bank—with the help of the FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development—published a set of seven “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment that Respects Rights, Livelihoods and Resources” (PRAI).Footnote 6
In framing their response to mobilization over “the global land grab,” the World Bank narrowed the language of this dispute, shifting from the frame of “land grabs,” to the market-based language of “land acquisition” and then to “responsible agricultural investment.” Not only did this frame drop the symbolic language of “land” altogether but it also depoliticized the dispute into a technocratic question of global market integration. Hence, the World Bank narrowed the original articulation of the dispute by social movements from a complex problem human rights to one of market efficiency. Reference Mather and YngvessonMather and Yngvesson (1981) explain how narrowing often serves to control the disputing process through specialized discourse, by limiting the influence of broader communities or social movements. Where the discourse is specialized, they note, “those who know the language will tend to control the disputing process; this control may be further reinforced by varying degrees of the physical separation of the disputing forum from society at large” (796).
Through this process of rephrasing, the World Bank narrowed the dispute into an investment frame from the more expansive Reference McMichaelhuman rights frame. McMichael (2014): 35) sums up the difference between the two approaches as,
The former, concerned with governing the rights of capital, projects a new concern with food security based on restructuring ‘underutilized’ land in the global South to expand yields via global value chains organized by agribusiness. The latter, concerned with protecting the material rights of rural inhabitants, expresses an ontology centered on the sustainability of agroecological methods used by farmers who know and value their landscapes. . . they project competing modes of governance of the phenomenon of land grabbing.
As McMichael notes, both frames were concerned with the allocation of rights and the organization of markets. However, each articulates different visions of socioeconomic organization.Footnote 7
Social movements’ human rights frame draws on what Reference ScottScott (1977) first termed the “moral economy of the peasant.” As he describes it, these moral economies are based on the everyday needs of small-scale producers and particular mores about just prices, rents, and taxes (Reference EdelmanEdelman 2008). Today, the concept of the moral economy is reflected in La Via Campesina's claims to food sovereignty, the right to food, subsistence security, as well as a broader right to social reproduction of the “peasant way” (Reference ClaeysClaeys 2015; Reference McMichaelMcMichael 2009). The human rights frame thus prioritized social values of subsistence and autonomy and advocated for the support of “local” or “territorial” markets that could provide livelihoods for small-scale producers and workers. In contrast, the investment frame privileged the rights of states and multinational corporations to invest in foreign land. It assumed that production, distribution, and consumption always take place in a context of global integration and profit-maximizing market behavior. Though it acknowledged potential risks for vulnerable communities, it ultimately sought to promote a market logic based on neoclassical economic values of production, profit, and efficiency, on the logic that the benefits of investment significantly outweigh the costs (Reference NarulaNarula 2013: 133).
In response to the World Bank's investment frame, a coalition of activists and academics quickly denounced the PRAI. They charged that it exacerbated problems of land expropriation and human rights only to frame land terms of secure investment and issues of “risk” (Reference Borras and FrancoBorras and Franco 2010; Margulis and Porter 2013). In a statement released in April 2010, The Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform Land Research Network—which included La Via Campesina and international NGOs such as FIAN International, GRAIN, and Focus on the Global South—charged that the PRAI sought to facilitate the long-term takeover of rural people's lands by commercial growers, multinational corporations, and foreign states. They premised their critique on three key elements of the PRAI. First and foremost, they protested the use of voluntary regulation. Instead, they argued “states are duty bound by international law” to respect the right to food and other human rights agreements (2010: 2). Indeed, for these groups, the major problem with the PRAI was that it was “not conceived as public policy on agricultural investment nor as state regulation of private agricultural investment, but as self-regulatory policy advice to mitigate the negative impacts of large-scale land acquisition” (2010: 7). The PRAI contained no reference to binding human rights agreements; it was instead based solely on corporate responsibility frameworks.
Second, and closely related, the coalition of social movements and NGOs challenged the investment frame or the market orientation of the PRAI. As they explained, the PRAI “is a product of market-driven ‘global governance’ of food and agriculture in which technocrats with close ties to the private sector, and following a business agenda and certain ideological dogmas decide how the world's and peoples’ resources should be used” (2010: 8). The emphasis on corporate social responsibility and economic viability as well as the use of “economic/monetary” calculations situated agricultural production within a value frame that promoted industrial agriculture and a market-driven approach to the global food system. Finally, the coalition denounced the PRAI for being an “agency-led initiative without participations of the governments of poor countries and of the people affected by such investments” (2010: 8). Indeed, they challenged the PRAI's legitimacy because of it and demanded a more inclusive form of regulation. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, ironically summed up the coalition's critique, when he said that the PRAI would “responsibly destroy the world's peasantry.”Footnote 8 (Reference De SchutterDe Schutter 2011).
From Conflict to Collaboration
The World Bank's failure to employ an inclusive regulatory approach motivated social movements to demand that the RAI be rejected and reformulated in the newly reformed CFS. The CFS was founded, after a global food crisis in 1974, as an intergovernmental body to prevent future food crises.Footnote 9 However, after its failure to prevent the 2007–2008 global food crisis, multiple parties sought to reform its structure to make it more effective. Through the reform process, the CFS shifted to a multistakeholder, collaborative forum that incorporated five key stakeholders: (1) UN agencies and other UN bodies; (2) civil society and nongovernmental organizations, particularly organizations representing smallholder family farmers, fisher folk, herders, landless, urban poor, agricultural and food workers, women, youth, consumers, and indigenous people coordinated through an autonomous platform called the “civil society mechanism”; (3) international agricultural research institutions; (4) international and regional financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, regional development banks and the World Trade Organization; and (5) private sector associations and philanthropic foundations organized through an autonomous platform called the “private sector mechanism”.
As a result of the 2008 reform, the CFS has grown from a relatively obscure international body to one of growing global prominence and contention. Stakeholders of the CFS have poured increasing human and financial resources into the process. It is notable, however, that the construction of this multistakeholder forum was highly contested (Reference Brem-WilsonBrem-Wilson 2015; Reference DuncanDuncan 2015; Reference McKeonMcKeon 2009, Reference McKeon2015). The United States, for example, was worried about the inclusion of social movements critical of U.S. policies and therefore demanded the inclusion of the private sector.Footnote 10 Similarly, although social movements were eager to be included in decision making, they sought to protect their autonomy while also maintaining the accountability of states. Ultimately, through the reform process, the CFS developed a complex structure. All standards and guidelines are negotiated through collaborative processes, but final voting rights are reserved for states. Since consensus remains central to the CFS’ attempt to cultivate voluntary compliance, however, the CFS provides an important case through which to assess the democratic possibilities of collaborative governance.
During its first meeting, the newly reformed CFS was scheduled to endorse the PRAI. However, civil society and member states from the Global South successfully lobbied the CFS to develop its own standards that included the voices of those most affected by “agricultural investment” (Reference DuncanDuncan 2015: 112). In the CFS's first sessions, two processes were initiated simultaneously with regard to global land governance. First, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT), which were negotiated between 2010 and 2012. While the VGGT were developed with the global land grab in mind, the process for developing them began before the CFS reform, during the 2006 UN ICARRD (Margulis and Porter 2013). Because of its origins in discussions over land reform, members of civil society were pleased with the outcome of the Tenure Guidelines. Proponents of the PRAI argued that the VGGT were applicable to only one of the PRAI principles, thereby maneuvering to subsume the issue of tenure rights under its own instrument of governance. Facing the threat of an expanded investment frame and the reality that they could not reject the PRAI altogether, activists accepted the narrowed frame of investment and sought to address it through a collaborative process. With support from several state governments, the CFS therefore agreed to develop the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment in the Context of Food Security and Nutrition (RAI) from 2012 to 2014.
Though the World Bank's effort to introduce the PRAI as an instrument of global governance failed, it was nevertheless successful in transforming and controlling the disputing frame from the “global land grab” to “responsible agricultural investment”. To do so, the World Bank drew on its immense material resources and expertise to develop the PRAI and complementary pilot projects. It also drew on its symbolic resources of partnerships with other international institutions to further develop land grabs as a problem of investment. Through this inertia and its power in promoting its own governance instrument, the World Bank effectively generated what Ferree terms an “institutionally anchored way of thinking” (2003: 309). Responding to this pressure, civil society accepted the investment frame, but did so in order to submit it to a collaborative process. As one participant explained to me, this was a difficult decision.
Our argument was that, sure, investment is fine and important, but investment cannot trump rights. The role of the CFS is to protect and uphold the right to food, not to create apologies for rights in the name of food security or economic imperatives. Small scale food producers make the most important investments in addressing hunger, but how are their investments and rights protected? We knew fully well as we got into it, that engaging in the negotiations on the RAI was very risky. We were not likely to get an outcome that we would all want. But still, we had to have that fight within the CFS, we had to bring our concerns and priorities to the attention of governments.
Ultimately by bringing the PRAI into the CFS through the RAI process, activists sought to reexpand the frame of this conflict back to the issue of human rights and prioritize social over economic objectives. Doing so, though, was “risky” because it required dramatically transforming the human rights frame of land grabs to acknowledge and articulate rights in relation to investment, rather than against it.
The decision to acquiesce and rearticulate the human rights frame in relation to investment represented a difficult strategic choice. Adversarial frames such as the human rights frame not only play a key role in constituting conflicts, but they also help to mobilize supporters and constitute movements around a shared set of political meanings and cognitive sources of solidarity. As Reference Fung and WrightFung and Wright (2003: 282) note, however, these frames can also inhibit the flexibility necessary to engage in collaborative problem-solving. They argue,
To provide countervailing power for collaborative governance, many adversarial organizations would be required to dramatically transform the cognitive frames through which they understand the political world, articulate solutions to the urgent problems in it, and mobilize support for themselves and for social change more broadly. Unsurprisingly many adversarial organizations resist such revolutionary transformations.
The choice made by members of the Civil Society Mechanism to engage in collaboration through the investment frame thus reflects the dilemma between radical framing and institutional anchored frames that Reference FerreeFerree (2003) and Reference MerryMerry (2006) describe. By accepting the narrowed frame of “responsible agricultural investment,” members of the civil society mechanism chose the frame that was more institutionally resonant to influence policy. With this reframing, they began to negotiate The Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment in the Context of Food Security and Nutrition (RAI).Footnote 11
To address the RAI, the CFS planned a robust, two-year process that not only included multistakeholder negotiations in the Rome-based CFS, but also regional in-situ consultations across the FAO's regions. Typically, CFS documents are negotiated during the annual, week-long meetings of the CFS. While all participants of the CFS usually discuss each “decision box” (the term used to describe the standards produced by the CFS) for a short time in the General Plenary, most negotiations take place in smaller “Friends of the Chair” sessions. For this process, the Chair of the CFS selects a moderator or “rapporteur” from among the member state delegations to lead negotiations between a small subgroup of representatives from all stakeholder groups. These more informal negotiation sessions can include anywhere from 15 to 50 participants. The RAI was negotiated across two annual meetings of the CFS, consultations within each of the FAO-defined global regions, an online forum, and additional smaller meetings in Rome.
When the negotiations began, civil society organizations made an interesting strategic choice, although they had accepted the frame of the “responsible agricultural investment,” they chose to try to expand the very notion of “investment.” In their comments during the first meeting of the “Open-Ended Working Group,” civil society explained, “When we speak about investment, it must be understood in a broader context than just capital investment. Other forms of investment include labour, knowledge and ecosystem regeneration and community development” (CSM 2012: 2). Civil society members strenuously argued that the concept of investment should not only include foreign direct investment, but also the contributions made by small-scale producers. In fact, they argued, small-scale producers and workers were the main investors in agriculture as not all investment is financial.
In attempting to challenge the investment frame of the RAI, small-scale producers drew on their own vision of markets that had been articulated through the human rights frame. Several times during the plenary sessions, they repeated that small-scale producers produce primarily for their own use and only secondarily for local markets. Hence, in their efforts to transform the meaning of the term “investment,” civil society members sought to privilege the rights of small-scale producers and challenge what they saw as an excessive focus on “increasing productivity, market mechanisms (such as incentives) and integrating small-scale producers into externally controlled value chains.”Footnote 12
In accepting the investment frame and seeking to expand the concept of investment to include small-scale producers, however, civil society members found the dispute reconstituted in terms of the market. As a result, they found themselves in a double-bind. If small-scale producers were investing in their own enterprises like other businesses, what, asked members of the private sector, separated small-scale producers from other commercial interests? Did this not violate the purpose of creating distinct stakeholder slots for “civil society” and the “private sector” wherein the former was the “moral” voice of human rights and the latter voiced the interest of global markets? Once civil society members accepted the investment frame and insisted that they too were investors, the sharp distinction that civil society organizations sought to draw between commercial and social interests began to blur.
Indeed, this was the strategy adopted by participants from the Private Sector Mechanism. During the Plenary, one representative of the private sector, Cindy Brown, an American kidney bean farmer from Wisconsin, suggested that the distinction was much more slippery than social movement activists were willing to admit. In the Plenary Session, Brown argued,
This process has highlighted some core issues with the way farmers are being characterized, not only in the RAI outcomes but also often in other work streams under CFS. Farmers – in all their sizes – are a vital part of our agricultural system. The RAI outcome suggests being a farmer is not a valid self-identity. It posits an unhelpful and unrealistic dichotomy between being a smallholder and being a business. Farmers farm for a living. Their farms are a business, even when small. Large-scale farmers are no less farmers than small-scale farmers, even if they run a larger business operation. And in between smallholder and large-scale farmers, there are a multiplicity of farms of varying sizes and with different set ups. But all farm to support their livelihoods.Footnote 13
Brown, speaking on behalf of commercial farmers and multinational agribusiness corporations, drew on the investment frame to flatten distinctions between large-scale export-oriented production and peasant agriculture. She was joined by other state delegates and representatives of the private sector, who also insisted that small-scale producers’ admission that they too were investors affirmed the values and calculative logics inherent in the investment frame.
As Brown mobilized the investment frame, she demonstrated not only how dominant, institutionally anchored frames may serve to redefine disputes, but also the productive role that frames can play in culturally constructing markets. Her claim that all farmers, no matter what size, are driven by the same calculative rationalities drew on the investment frame of the RAI as what Michel Callon would call a “tool” that might be deployed by commercial farmers and large-scale investors to flatten the very distinctions that small-scale producers claim as central to their survival. Callon describes this function of framing.
Framing is an operation used to define agents (an individual or a group of persons) who are clearly distinct and dissociated from one another. It also allows for the definition of objects, goods, and merchandise which are perfectly identifiable and can be separated not only from other goods, but also from the actors involved, for example in their conception, production, circulation or use. It is owing to this framing that the market can exist and that distinct agents and distinct goods can be brought into play. (Reference CallonCallon 1998: 17)
For Callon, frames are not simply discursive artifacts. They are tools that draw on sociotechnical instruments such as law to promote and authorize the particular values and forms of calculation that constitute the “economy” (Reference Çalışkan and CallonÇalışkan and Callon 2009). Frames thus not only serve the interpretive schemas for disputing, their institutionalization within standards and other legal documents play a constitutive role in the production of markets.
Over the course of the 2014 CFS plenary sessions, civil society activists were engaged in an active defense of their position vis-à-vis global markets. While the private sector sought to challenge their claim that “scale” made any difference in shaping the values of producers, social movements attempted to continually reaffirm their food sovereignty-based vision of small-scale moral economies. At one point, a long-time Canadian activist from an international NGO intervened, “If farmers are the private sector then we need to create another sector called the predatory or monopoly sector!” His comment reflected activists’ profound anxiety that small-scale producers were being construed as “market actors,” without distinguishing between the very different conditions, rationalities, and forms of power that distinguished local from global markets.
When I spoke to one long-time social movement leader who had been fundamental in the reform of the CFS as well as the negotiation of the RAI, he acknowledged the challenge that the investment frame posed to social movements. He explained,
Investment is still a fight. We have to do a lot of work to define what type of capitalization in peasant agriculture and small-scale food producer systems we need. What is the role of investment? This discussion is not done. . . What is the value of labor? Peasant labor, how would we deal with it? How does he produce and add value? What will be accumulated?
His questions reflect the challenge of articulating and framing what Callon would call the distinct calculative rationalities and agencies of small-scale production.
The power of the investment frame was thus two-fold. First, it overtook the original articulation of the dispute as a conflict over human rights. As the Spanish peasant movement leader said to the Plenary, “the issues of land, water and resource grabbing was [sic] the driving impetus behind the Principles, but the Principles refuse to name these, and offer no protection for struggles on the ground.” By transforming the investment frame of the global land grab, the document thus failed to reflect the original construction of the dispute articulated by social movements. However, more significantly, the investment frame offered a tool for powerful actors to constitute a singular calculative logic for food and agricultural production and investment. Though civil society participants were successful in inserting language that recognized the role of smallholder farmers as investors as well as orienting the Principles around food security, activist participants remain concerned that the types of investments, values, and territorial markets that differentiate small-scale producers’ moral economies and livelihoods are inadequately defined and protected. Thus, the strategic decision by civil society participants to expand the investment frame by incorporating themselves within it risks legitimating the very markets they contest.
The case of the global land grab therefore illustrates the power of disputing frames within collaborative process of global governance. Once a particular frame becomes dominant or institutionally resonant—a process that is shaped by actors’ symbolic and material resources, their strategic disputing decisions, and the passage of time—the consensus-driven process of collaboration may limit the possibility for contestation. Indeed, once negotiations begin within collaborative processes, the framing of a dispute serves as the primary representation of conflict and the source of meaning making. Hence, when activists attempted to expand the meaning of investment to reflect their own practices, they did so within a frame that had already been narrowed to technical questions of the market.
For social movements and activists who invest both time and resources into arenas of collaborative governance, this challenge of framing thus presents them with a paradox; while collaboration may offer activists access to participation in global regulation of food security and agricultural policies, these processes remain embedded within a transnational legal landscape of immense inequalities of power that often constrain the possibilities of collaboration.
Conclusions: The Struggle Over Collaboration
Collaborative governance is ultimately a contested terrain of sociolegal struggle. For activists and social movements that have long sought inclusion in decision making, it offers a seat at the table. However, as struggles to frame disputes occur within the vast and legally plural landscape of global governance, engaging in these processes can also be “risky,” as the activist I quoted earlier explained. In this multiactor and multiscalar context, actors compete to control conflict by constructing and transforming disputing frames through a dialectical process of narrowing and expansion. This is a process shaped by unequal material and symbolic resources, but also by temporal dynamics that can shape meanings and define fields of conflict. The frame through which collaborative governance is deployed ultimately reconstitutes conflict in terms of the meanings and values of the dominant frame. If movements disagree with the logics and assumptions inherent in that frame they may not only face difficulty in challenging it, they may find themselves situated within it.
The frames through which collaborative processes are deployed are thus critical in shaping the meanings produced through collaboration. In conflicts over food and agriculture, disputing frames represent relationships and networks of exchange through particular social values and calculative logics. The frame through which collaborative governance is deployed thus authorizes a specific set of social and economic values through which competing values are then interpreted. The case of the global land grab illustrates how collaborative governance reconstitutes disputes, reshaping them in way that activists may have initially contested. For in this case, civil society was unable to challenge the values of the investment frame. As a result, the investment frame represented both small- and large-scale producers, indeed the entire global food system, through the calculative logics and social values of the global market. Articulating and protecting the distinct calculative logics, values, and markets of small-scale producers remains a challenging task for activists.
Thus, as collaboration is increasingly deployed to manage disputes related to food, agriculture, and the environment—conflicts which are at the heart of questions over global socioeconomic organization and distribution—movements have turned to struggle over the normative values embedded within the practice of collaboration. For activists engaging in the CFS, this has meant consistently grounding the process of collaboration within the moral imperative of food security and the right to food. They resist the “neutral” conception of collaboration, in which formally equal actors engage in problem solving. Rather, they seek to ground collaboration in values that support the most vulnerable and food insecure. Yet, they face strong opposition from other powerful actors—multinational corporations, commercial farmer organizations, and philanthropies—who deploy the term multistakeholder without such meaning. Indeed, in the wrap-up session to the RAI, one of the leaders of the negotiation made this grievance clear when she exasperatedly explained, “This is my problem with multi-stakeholderism, it conceals asymmetries of power.” For this reason, activists have begun to use the term “multiactor,” rather than “multistakeholder” (McKeon 2017). The normative logics of collaboration can thus determine whether collaborative governance serves simply to reconstitute conflict within dominant frames, which are often market oriented in their meaning, or whether it can serve as a democratic arena that reflects the needs of people and not only the powerful.
Critical scholars of global governance have been pessimistic about the democratic prospects of global governance, raising concerns that collaborative processes ultimately serve to embed opposition within neoliberal market logics. Ronen Shamir argues that new forms of governance collapse the distinction between “society” and “economy,” thereby “extending a model of economic conduct beyond the economy itself, generalizing it as a principle of action for areas of life hitherto seen as being either outside or even antagonistic to the market” (Reference ShamirShamir 2008: 6). These analyses would seem to suggest that collaborative governance coopts social movements into the projects of political elites by enrolling social movements in disputes whose very premise they contest.
Yet, activists who have been involved in the reform of the CFS resist this analysis. For they not only point to instances where they have been more successful in framing conflict, such as the VGGTs, but they also use and engage such platforms to develop their own visions of collaboration that they seek to instill into these processes. Their continuing struggles to democratize the global food system through collaboration thus demonstrates that collaborative governance is not a neoliberal technology, but rather a terrain of sociolegal struggle. Indeed, contests over the symbol of collaboration may ultimately become central in shaping the global regulation of social and economic life.
