共查询到20条相似文献，搜索用时 15 毫秒
1.
Over the past several decades, consumers in the global North have increasingly looked to fair or alternative trading systems
as a means to promote ecologically and socially sustainable agricultural production. While fair trade has historically been
limited to international commodity networks, US-based agro-food activists have recently turned their attentions towards building
a domestic movement, to bring fair trade principles and standards ‘home.’ Through an exploration of this growing movement,
we consider the potential for third party certification and labeling to incorporate social justice into US-based agricultural
production, with a particular focus on the implications for farm workers. We view current efforts to bring the principles
of fair trade to the domestic arena as a reflection of several interrelated developments: a growing need on the part of small
and mid-sized farmers to garner price premiums due to the erosion of the organic price premium; a recognition of the failure
of organic certification to advance a holistic vision of sustainability; and the strategic embrace of voluntary regulatory
mechanisms as an alternative to public regulation and collective bargaining. Initial research suggests that this has led to
particular framings of the domestic fair trade concept, which may undermine the movement’s ability to address the social relations
of agro-food production. Specifically, prioritization of the ‘family-scale’ farm and an undercurrent of food localism may
obscure farm workers’ role in valorizing the US agricultural landscape.
相似文献
| Christy GetzEmail: |
2.
Dan Klooster 《Geoforum》2010,41(1):117-129
Trans-nationally-scaled, multi-stakeholder, non-governmental product certification systems are emerging as important elements of neoliberal environmental governance. However, analysts question the extent to which they represent effective alternatives to the damaging impacts of neoliberalized, global production. They call for work examining the environmental politics arising in these new arenas of regulation, where social movements advocating environmental conservation and social justice interact with business interests in debates over how to use neoliberal tools to govern global commodity chains. This article examines The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) process to revise tree plantation certification standards. First, it considers the political process surrounding standard-setting and argues that tensions between rigor, legitimacy, and acceptability restrain the political struggles over standards within voluntary, multi-stakeholder environmental governance organizations. It proffers findings at odds with the expectation that mainstreaming diminishes the rigor of social and environmental standards. Second, it speculates on the implications of this form of neoliberal environmental governance for promoting more sustainable productions of nature. The review process failed to adequately consider the role of plantation certification in strategies for natural forest conservation. Neither did it adequately consider vital questions of the appropriate scale and location of production, the community actors best suited to deliver both forest conservation and poverty alleviation, or the need to encourage reduced consumption. The reliance on a neoliberal framework and values limits the scope of action. These contradictions suggest that FSC certification is an important part of what needs to be a broader movement questioning current practices of environmentally damaging production and complicit, complacent, consumption. 相似文献
3.
The liberalisation of agricultural markets is one of the most contested issues in international politics. Debates surrounding it counter-pose the moral imperative to dismantle protectionist agricultural subsidies in order to combat rural poverty in the South with fears for the livelihoods of marginal farmers and the environmental integrity of the countryside in the developed North. A largely European concern with defending the ‘multifunctionality’ of agriculture is dismissed by critics as a protectionist excuse for continued farm support. In this paper we seek to assess how far support for multifunctionality can be construed as a form of resistance to the neoliberal project for agriculture. The paper begins with an analysis of the European negotiating stance in the Doha round and the subsequent evolution of debates surrounding multifunctionality in an international setting. Having identified the European Union as one of the key sites of articulation concerning the implications of trade liberalisation for a multifunctional agriculture, the paper goes on to argue that multifunctionality within the framework of European rural policy emerges as a much more elusive and susceptible concept, informed by radically different interpretations of the vulnerability of family farmers to greater market exposure and the extent to which agricultural restructuring should be regarded as an issue of wider public concern. This maps onto a technically complex debate about how best to procure environmental public goods in a period of rapid agricultural change. The paper concludes that with these differences still very much in play, questions concerning the compatibility of multifunctionality with market liberalisation remain deeply unresolved at an important moment in the internationalisation of rural policy governance. 相似文献
4.
Neoliberalism and natural resource management: Agri-environmental standards and the governing of farming practices 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Private standards and certification schemes are widely acknowledged as playing an increasingly important role in agri-environmental governance. While much of the existing research concludes that these mechanisms consolidate the global extension of neoliberalism – enhancing the power of corporate actors to the detriment of smaller producers – we argue that this overlooks the complex ways in which standards are used by governments and farmers in the governing of farming practices. Focusing specifically on a process standard – Environmental Management Systems (EMS) – promoted by the Australian government as a way of verifying the ‘clean and green’ status of agricultural exports, we examine how one regional group of producers has sought to use EMS standards in practice. Our analysis of a case study in the state of Victoria appears to confirm that EMS was a successful instrument for the extension of neoliberal governance, reinforcing the production of neoliberal subjectivities and practices amongst farmer participants and enabling the government to compensate for gaps in environmental provision. However, it would be a mistake to interpret the development of this EMS scheme as an example of naïve farmers manipulated by the state. In practice, farmers used the opportunities provided by government funding to undertake actions which expressed their own agri-environmental values and practices. Establishment of an EMS and associated eco-label enabled producers to demonstrate and extend their capacity to act as good environmental stewards. Our research highlights how the local application of environmental standards negotiates and shapes, rather than simply contributes to, neoliberal rule. 相似文献
5.
Critiques of the neoliberal governance of agricultural systems have led to a number of political responses which attempt to address the socio-environmental consequences of the dominant regime. In this paper two case study regions (South Australia and England) have been chosen to represent variations in agricultural policy and to highlight subsequent outcomes on the sustainability of agriculture. Interviewed governance stakeholders highlighted issues in regard to the agricultural governance of each area, from social and environmental consequences of minimal policy intervention in South Australia, to issues created by greater economic support in England. As such, the distinct variations in agricultural regimes will continue to demand scholarly attention, in order for the value of diversity within the sector to be more widely understood. The study concludes that it is likely agricultural support will continue to decline in both case study regions. Importantly, however, innovative policy mechanisms that aim to reduce local risks and value local agricultural priorities, without requiring significant financial support, might be the most promising way forward in regard to agricultural system sustainability. 相似文献
6.
Recent research suggests that many key strands of California’s agrofood activism appear to accommodate, rather than confront, the neoliberalization of environmental governance, and that such accommodations might problematically constrain the transformative potential of activists’ work. In this paper, I examine the case of pesticide drift activism in California, which, as an exception to this trend, provides a provocative and useful case study for interrogating the influence of neoliberalization on social/environmental activism. I argue that California’s pesticide drift activism can be understood as a reaction to the spaces of sacrifice created and exacerbated by the failure of unionization-based pesticide reform efforts, a promising but compromised regulatory apparatus, longstanding farmworker powerlessness, neoliberal regulatory rollback, and neoliberalized pesticide politics – a mosaic of factors that have worked together to produce a regulatory structure that has always been better at registering pesticides than at reducing pollution. I show that pesticide drift activists’ reliance on confrontational practice, collective action, and strategic alliances have been crucial to the movement’s success with bringing visibility to this issue and with gaining traction in the political arena. Thus, at the same time that neoliberalization can exacerbate physical spaces of sacrifice, this case study illustrates that it can also, unexpectedly perhaps, generate new, non-neoliberal political spaces for social change. 相似文献
7.
Despite questions currently raised about the future of neoliberalism, it remains embedded within Australian agricultural policy and practice. This paper explores the strengths and limitations of mechanisms contributing to neoliberalism’s survival through a close examination of the restructuring of Australian agricultural production and governance processes under the influence of both globalising impulses and adherence to neoliberal strategies. We trace the changes in governance flowing from the dismantling of regulatory structures in the Australian dairy industry, and the creation of new forms of governance that have both facilitated this transition and dealt with its adverse, often unintended, consequences. The changing governance of Australian dairying is analysed through the lens of three arenas of governance: state, industry and place. Drought has played an important part in re-spacialising dairying and re-shaping the balance between farmers and industry, demonstrating the contingency at play in emerging governance structures. This study of processes of change within the highly export-oriented dairy sector of Australia focuses attention on resistance and on some of the messy actualities of the interplay between state, place and industry - and nature - in neoliberal agri-food governance. 相似文献
8.
Agricultural trade liberalization, multifunctionality, and sugar in the south Florida landscape 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Gail M. Hollander 《Geoforum》2004,35(3):299-312
This paper explores the applicability of the concept of “multifunctionality” to the south Florida sugar-producing region. Multifunctionality is being promoted in the European Union in response to neoliberal trade pressures in agriculture. It is seen as a way to address social and ecological concerns such as farm abandonment and biodiversity loss through domestic agricultural policies that conform to the GATT/World Trade Organization. I have two objectives in this paper. First, I seek to investigate multifunctionality as one response to neoliberal pressures for agricultural reform. In doing this, I identify two types of multifunctionality, a “weak” and a “strong” version. Second, I want to explore the possibility for multifunctionality to serve as a vehicle for resistance to GATT/WTO in other regions. I do this through a study of arguably the most maligned agricultural zone in the world, the sugar-producing region of south Florida. The specific geographic focus is the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), the federally designated, 700,000-acre zone south of Lake Okeechobee that is home to the Florida “Sugar Bowl.” 相似文献
9.
《Geoforum》2014
The EU biofuels market is stimulating expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Little research has yet examined the impacts on water resources arising from this large-scale land use conversion to cultivation of biofuel feedstock or positioned contextual water resource governance in Indonesian locales in a wider political ecology of European climate politics. Through the concept of ‘hybrid accountability’, we examine primary evidence from an extensive action research process in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesian Borneo, to assess whether the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive and existing certification schemes offer a way to improve the accountability of market actors and promote sustainable water resource management. We conclude that these initiatives have had no bearing on safeguarding local livelihoods and the water resources they depend on, with governance mechanisms largely failing to address people’s grievances. Rather, the EU’s policies on biofuels have supported a de-politicisation of what needs to be seen as ‘distributional water politics’. Furthermore, certification schemes such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil offer, at present, only cosmetic tools and are insufficient to address deep structural governance issues. We argue that further hybridisation of market-based certification and governmental regulation should be designed with the purpose of providing new transnational recourse mechanisms and remedies for affected communities. 相似文献
10.
Under neoliberal schemes like audit systems, consumer demands born of concerns about food safety, the environment and animal welfare are theoretically poised to influence agricultural production systems (Campbell and Le Heron, 2007). Whether such influences might reverse or redirect the trend toward environmentally-damaging rampant productivism of the 20th century hinges in part on the subjective positions of farmers and the ways in which they inform how farmers respond to policy and market signals.In this paper we argue the need for a genuine engagement with both the complexities of farmer subjectivity and the interactions amongst farmer subjectivity and agro-ecologies, and animal bodies in particular. This paper presents a case study of sheep farmers on the South Island that reveals contestation and transitions in traditional markers of “good farming”, particularly animal health. We observe how such transitions arise from reconfigurations of the relationships between agro-ecological, political and social histories. In this paper’s formulation, neither state subsidies nor neoliberalism in agriculture is primary cause or ultimate effect of the transformation of agricultural practice. Rather, changes in the political economy expose contradictions in farmer subjectivities, the resolution of which may block or reinforce trends suggested by the political economy. We suggest that contested ideas about animal health within the social field of pastoral farming in New Zealand makes it possible that New Zealand’s sheep growers may take the high road of best environmental practice via highly audited environmental standards of production demanded by elite consumer markets, or that they may remain in the intensifying trajectory of continuing to drive the sheep’s body to its maximum possible intensity of production. The mixed legacy of neoliberal reform is that it has simultaneously enabled both of these contradictory trajectories in New Zealand pastoralism. 相似文献
11.
Scott Prudham 《Geoforum》2004,35(3):343-359
In May of 2000, thousands of residents of the town of Walkerton, Ontario became ill from drinking municipal water contaminated by Escherichia coli and Campylobacter jejuni bacteria. Seven people died, while many suffered debilitating injuries. A highly unusual and risk prone local hydrological regime, coupled with manure spreading on farms near municipal wells, and lax oversight by municipal water utility officials, were quickly blamed by Ontario government figures, including then premier Mike Harris. However, the scandal surrounding Walkerton's tragedy and a subsequent public inquiry into the incident also implicated neoliberal reforms of environmental governance introduced by Harris's government subsequent to its election in 1995. This paper examines the Walkerton incident as an important example of a “normal accident” of neoliberalism, one that can be expected from neoliberal environmental regulatory reforms arising from systematic irresponsibility in environmental governance. This irresponsibility is promulgated by an overarching hostility to any regulatory interference with free markets, as well as specific regulatory gaps that produce environmental risks. The paper also serves as a case study of the extent to which neoliberalism is constituted by environmental governance reform, and conversely, how environmental governance reform is reconfigured as part of the emergent neoliberal mode of social regulation. 相似文献
12.
Metropolitan growth and labor markets in Mexico 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Adrian Guillermo Aguilar 《GeoJournal》1997,43(4):371-383
The objective of this paper is to examine the main changes in the metropolitan labor markets associated with economic restructuring in Mexico during the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. The analysis refers particularly to the four largest metropoles of the country, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey and Puebla, looking for common characteristics in their emergent employment structures now strongly differentiated in terms of rewards, stability in employment relations and conditions of access to jobs. The analysis reveals that largest metropolitan areas have been the most profoundly affected by the economic restructuring resulting from globalization, through a rapid de-industrialization and the expansion of the tertiary sector. Metropolitan labor markets in Mexico, at the time that show signs of social polarization in the formal sector, put in evidence a general process of precarization – less labor stability, replacement of permanent by part-time jobs, and increasing subcontracting –, segmentation of the labor force, and an increasing informal conditions of economic activities with small businesses and unskilled, temporarly and poorly paid jobs. The labor force segmentation and its more precarious and casual conditions are mostly explained by the impact of recent neoliberal policies, and recurrent economic crisis during the 1980s and 1990s which highly contributes to social inequality. 相似文献
13.
Catherine S. Dolan 《Geoforum》2010,41(1):33-43
Fairtrade was founded to alleviate poverty and economic injustice through a market-based form of solidarity exchange. Yet with the increasing participation of transnational food corporations in Fairtrade sourcing, new questions are emerging on the extent to which the model offers an alternative to the inimical tendencies of neoliberalism. Drawing on a qualitative research project of Kenyan Fairtrade tea, this paper examines how the process of corporate mainstreaming influences the structure and outcomes of Fairtrade, and specifically the challenges it poses for the realization of Fairtrade’s development aspirations. It argues firstly that whilst tea producers have experienced tangible benefits from Fairtrade’s social premium, these development ‘gifts’ have been conferred through processes marked less by collaboration and consent than by patronage and exclusion. These contradictions are often glossed by the symbolic force of Fairtrade’s key tenets - empowerment, participation, and justice - which simultaneously serve to neutralize critique and mystify the functions that Fairtrade performs for the political economy of development and neoliberalism. Second, building on recent critiques of corporate social responsibility, the paper explores how certain neoliberal rationalities are emboldened through Fairtrade, as a process of mainstreaming installs new metrics of governance (standards, certification, participation) that are at once moral and technocratic, voluntary and coercive, and inclusionary and marginalizing. The paper concludes that these technologies have divested exchange of mutuality, as the totemic features of neoliberal regulation - standards, procedures and protocols - increasingly render north south partnerships ever more virtual and depoliticized. 相似文献
14.
On August 31th, 2006 the California Senate shelved SB1056, a bill which would have granted the State jurisdiction over the regulation of seed and nursery stock. Ostensibly proposed to ensure “a level playing field” for agricultural and food producers, SB1056 is one of a host of legislation drafted across the United States to preempt county and municipal bans on genetically engineered crops. In California, the heated struggle around “preemption” exemplifies the interweaving of neoliberal ideology with industry attempts to prevent an unfavorable regulatory environment, but more importantly the contingencies and vulnerabilities of this strategy. After reviewing SB1056’s history, this paper examines how a diverse opposition movement capitalized on the friction between the neoliberal arguments mobilized by supporters and dominant Californian political philosophies. The paper then highlights the ultimate effect of SB1056 through a critical exploration of current state and federal regulation and the entrenched interests of the California government. I argue that more than simply opening new spaces for accumulation, SB1056 would have muted opposition voices and transferred power to institutions financially committed to the technology’s commercialization. 相似文献
15.
For nearly a decade the La Paz-El Alto concession in Bolivia was heralded by donor organizations, the state and the commercial water industry alike as an emblematic ‘pro-poor’ water concession under the private sector model. Managed by one of the largest water multinationals in the world (the French company Suez), the network was extended beyond the new connections required by the original ‘pro-poor’ contract, acclaimed as a pioneer of new pro-poor technologies and frequently disseminated internationally as an example of best practice. This paper analyses the La Paz-El Alto concession’s pro-poor image focusing on issues of social exclusion and network extension, contract negotiation, participation and transparency. It documents the rise of social protest about the concession and critiques the failure of neoliberal regulatory systems to promote accountability to the poor. In the context of the continued transnationalisation of the water industry the paper highlights the need for new mechanisms and delivery models to ensure greater national control over private companies and the development of a framework for international water governance. 相似文献
16.
Population pressure, agricultural intensification and changes in rural systems in Bangladesh 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Abu Muhammad Shajaat Ali 《Geoforum》2007,38(4):720-738
Sustainable agricultural growth is the key to rural system changes that include changes in rural bio-physical environment, economic infrastructure and social conditions. The present study has examined the temporal changes in 18 selected indicators of rural systems in Bangladesh during the period 1975-2000, and explored the influences of demographic, market forces, environmental, institutional and technological factors inducing and mediating such changes. An analysis of 64 district level published census data showed significant increase in agricultural intensity, cropping patterns, land productivity and farm income; decline in labor and technological productivities; and major improvement in rural housing, economic and social conditions during this period. Spatially, major agricultural growth and rural development were observed in districts with high population density, less constrained environments, and better access to markets, irrigation canals, and capital loans. 相似文献
17.
《Geoforum》2017
With the emergence of more collaborative, watershed governance arrangements and the engagement of various actors in decision-making processes, new questions emerge about the potential roles for these organizations and agencies in both upholding accountability, and in being held accountable. Therefore, this study explores the intersection between alternative collaborative watershed governance approaches, and the simultaneous emergence of the concept of social license as an accountability instrument in relation to water governance. Based on an empirical analysis of a case study in southeast British Columbia, where water quality contamination is primarily the result of coal mining, this study seeks to: (1) examine how social license is understood by a range of watershed actors; (2) better understand whether social license may be useful as a watershed-based or community accountability instrument as new collaborative modes of watershed governance emerge; and, (3) explore how social license may be enforced or enabled. Findings show how industry efforts to earn social license have created benefits, such as enabling community-based water monitoring, thereby building capacity for deeper community engagement in governance processes and a greater ability for the community to uphold accountability. However, we confirm that social license is not a proxy or silver bullet for enhancing accountability in collaborative watershed governance. Our findings reveal four specific limitations regarding the use of social license as a principle for accountability in collaborative watershed governance. 相似文献
18.
Natural resource investment in the mining sector is often mediated through conflicts over rent distribution between corporate capital and landowner states. Recent rounds of neoliberal policy promoted by the World Bank have highlighted the need for landowner states to offer incentives in order to attract “high risk” capital investment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, countries have been pushed to offer attractive fiscal terms to capital, thereby lowering the proportion traditionally called rent. This paper examines how the concept of “risk” has been mobilized to legitimate such skewed distributional arrangements. While certain conceptions of social and ecological “risk” have been prevalent in political and social theoretic discourse on mining, such focus elides the overwhelming contemporary power of our notion of “neoliberal risk” – or the financial/market risks – in actually setting the distributional terms of mineral investment. We illustrate our argument by examining the nexus of World Bank mining policy promotion and Tanzanian policy in the late 1990s meant to attract foreign direct investment in gold production. In closing, we suggest that just as “risk” is used to legitimate attractive fiscal terms for investment, recent events highlight how skewed distribution of benefits may set into motion risks that corporate capital had not bargained for. 相似文献
19.
David Turnock 《GeoJournal》1996,38(2):137-149
The paper summarises the East European experience with socialist agriculture and notes that while production often failed to meet plan targets (thereby giving the impression of a sector in crisis), there was steady growth based on substantial investments in buildings, machinery, fertilisers and irrigation systems which provided food for the population at affordable prices. The increased spending power of higher salaries during the 1970s and 1980s also drew a positive response from agriculture in the context of significant reforms which, unintentionally, contributed to the demise of the communist system in 1988–1990. Transition to a market economy has cast agriculture into a state of great uncertainty through restitution and the end of price controls, combined with the disruption of trade contacts with the Former Soviet Union. Falling real wages have reduced demand while the overtures being made to the European Union (with its substantial food surpluses) suggest that reduced agricultural output may be a permanent reality. In this case the thrust of rural development will have to give more attention to the quality of the environment and the provision of alternative employments for country dwellers. It remains to be seen how far small family holdings can be maintained in the context of farm diversification and pluriactivity. 相似文献
20.
Bethany Haalboom 《Geoforum》2012,43(5):969-979
With neoliberal reforms and the growth of multinational mining investment in developing countries, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become notable (and debatable) for its potential to fill a social and environmental governance gap. As yet, there has been limited analytical attention paid to the political struggles and power dynamics that get reflected through specific CSR guidelines and their implementation in local contexts; this is particularly apparent with respect to the human rights dimension of CSR, and more specifically, indigenous rights. This study documents the debates, issues of accountability, and different interpretations of CSR between NGOs representing indigenous rights and a mining corporation. These debates focus on environmental impact assessments; indigenous rights to land; and the indigenous right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. These exchanges illustrate the socio-political, as well as economic, positioning of these actors, and the different agendas associated with their positions that determine issues of accountability and shape alternate interpretations of CSR guidelines. The outcomes of these debates also reflect the different degrees of power that these actors hold in such contexts, irrespective of the strength or validity of their arguments about CSR. This dialogue is thereby a lens into the more complex and contentious entanglements that emerge with CSR as a mode of governance, as it plays out ‘on the ground.’ These findings also reinforce questions regarding what we can expect of CSR as a mode of governance for addressing human rights issues with resource extraction projects, particularly within the constraints of overriding political and social structures. 相似文献