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Introduction to the symposium

The exercise of power through multi-stakeholder initiatives for sustainable agriculture and its inclusion and exclusion outcomes

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Abstract

A number of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and commodity roundtables have been created since the 1990s to respond to the growing criticism of agriculture’s environmental and social impacts. Driven by private and global-scale actors, these initiatives are setting global standards for sustainable agricultural practices. They claim to follow the new standard-making virtues of inclusiveness and consensus and base their legitimacy on their claim of balanced representation of, and participation by, all categories of stakeholders. This principle of representing a wide range of interests with a balance of power is at the heart of a new type of action that forms part of a broader political liberal model for building coalitions of interest groups. The intention of this symposium is to assess the nature of processes and outcomes of this model while paying particular attention to the forms of inclusion and exclusion they generate. In this introduction, we highlight the differences in theoretical approaches to analyzing MSIs and the manifestation of power through them. We distinguish between more traditional political–economy approaches and approaches concerned with ideational and normative power, such as convention theory. We discuss some of the main paradoxes of MSIs related to their willingness to be “inclusive” and at the same time their exclusionary or “closure” effects due in part to interactions with existing political economic contexts and embedded power inequalities, as well as more subtle manifestations of power linked to the favoring of some forms of knowledge and engagement over others.

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Notes

  1. For example, the Flower Label Programme (FLP) created in 1996, the Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association (WIETA) in 2002, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2003, the 4C Association in 2003, the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) Aquaculture dialogs (consisting of eight roundtables) in 2004, the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) in 2005, the Fair Flowers Fair Plants (FFP) standard in 2005, the Better Sugar Cane Initiative (BSCI Bonsucro), Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) in 2006, the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB) in 2012. The first global multi-stakeholder initiative appeared as far back as 1993 with the creation of the Forest Stewardships Council (FSC) to deal with forestry issues.

  2. These voluntary sustainability standards are increasingly becoming part of mainstream markets. The result is that for producers in developing countries, particularly smallholders, compliance with sustainability standards is no longer a question of being able to access more lucrative niche markets but, for some products and some end markets (e.g., the EU) at least, is becoming a minimum requirement for obtaining market access (Hatanaka et al. 2005).

  3. Vertical dimension of global governance refers to relations between actors directly involved in commodity exchange, such as between buyers and suppliers (see also Tallontire et al. 2011).

  4. In the institutionalist literature on private standards, based mainly on management and organization studies, the focus has primarily been on identifying and analyzing the sources of private authority and specifically on how legitimacy is achieved by standards and standard-setting initiatives (Tamm Hallstrom 2004; Fransen and Kolk 2007; Ponte et al. 2011). Existing literature on private standards has been less concerned with the actual manifestations of power and more with how legitimacy is secured, and what knowledge (expert knowledge) is used to do so (Ponte et al. 2011).

  5. In classical liberalism, the reproduction of the polity results from the balancing of interests. “This model which has become a common locus in American political sciences has been part of the classical liberal doctrine from the time of the American founding fathers (see Lowi 1987), as a defense against what Madison (1987) and De Tocqueville (1981) defined as the risk of ‘tyranny of the majority’” (Thévenot and Lamont 2000).

  6. Criteria under the “social principle” in most MSIs include the right to a minimum wage and outlawing of discrimination based, for example, on race or gender, the freedom of association, etc. While recognized by family producers and workers, this vision is far removed from dealing with social and economic inequality—that is, access to and sharing of resources (Cheyns 2011).

  7. For Fraser (1990), the liberal political model even assumes that it is possible to organize a democratic form of political life based on socio-economic structures that generate systemic inequalities. This model supposes that social equality is not a condition for participatory parity. In addition, Fraser critically underlines that the model supposes to insulate political processes from what are considered to be non-political.

  8. According to Edmunds and Wollenberg (2001), the influence of liberal pluralist ideas on the practice of MSIs has meant that the qualifications of a deliberative model (and especially of a Habermassian’s communicative rationality model) are not taken as seriously as they should be.

  9. They criticized a dependence on paternalist contract farming, on fluctuating prices and an over-emphasis on high productivity. At the same time they argued for “civic” requirements on the basis of solidarity and the reduction of inequalities.

  10. Even though this approach was acknowledged by the communities concerned, smallholders and community participants demanded a more general approach involving the possibility of discussing “justice” in the plenary session when the rules of the RSPO and sustainability were being defined.

  11. Local communities and family farmers report violations of their rights and damage to their proximate surroundings, in and around their living and working areas, all in connection with the expansion of industrial agriculture affecting their livelihoods and attachments to places (pollution, loss of resources, especially the dispossession of customary lands, indebtedness, subordination to companies, criminalization of their political actions).

  12. Based on their analysis of the World Social Forum, Conway and Singh (2009:75) suggests that “the imperative to arrive at universally binding outcomes may in fact impede social solidarity and hinder collective action by raising the stakes of deliberation in a way that necessarily suppresses diversity, emphasizes division among interlocutors, and turns participants into competitors fighting to define the ‘general’ will and to determine the final outcomes that will be binding on all.”

Abbreviations

GAP:

Good agricultural practice

MSI:

Multi-stakeholder initiative

NGO:

Non-governmental organization

RSPO:

Roundtable on sustainable palm oil

RTRS:

Roundtables on responsible soy

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Carmen Bain, Lawrence Busch, Benoit Daviron, Harvey James, Michiel Khöne, Stefano Ponte, Laura Raynolds, Anne Tallontire, and Laurent Thevenot for their insightful and helpful comments on earlier versions of this introduction. We would also like to thank the participants of the international workshop ‘Governing Sustainable Agriculture through Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives: Participation, knowledge and networks in action’ (Montpellier, 12–14 December) where the first drafts of the papers included in this symposium were first presented. The workshop was funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR-11-CEPL-0009, project PRIGOUE), The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark (development research project 10-107 DIIS), CIRAD and the research unit MOISA.

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  1. CIRAD, UMR Moisa, TA C-99/15, 73 rue Jean-François Breton, 34398, Montpellier Cedex 5, France

    Emmanuelle Cheyns

  2. Roskilde Universitet, Hus 23,1, Universitetsvej 1, Postboks 260, 4000, Roskilde, Denmark

    Lone Riisgaard

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Cheyns, E., Riisgaard, L. Introduction to the symposium. Agric Hum Values 31, 409–423 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9508-4

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