What role do science and scientists play in the transition between food regimes? Scientific communities are integral to understanding political struggle during food regime transitions in part due to the broader scientization of politics since the late 1800s. While social movements contest the rules of the game in explicitly value-laden terms, scientific communities make claims to the truth based on boundary work, or efforts to mark some science and scientists as legitimate while marking others as illegitimate. In doing so, scientific (...) communities attempt to establish and maintain the privileged position of science in contests over policy. In this paper, we situate scientific boundary work within its world historical context in order to ask two key questions: (1) how does scientific boundary work vary across food regimes; and, in turn, (2) what role does scientific boundary work play in the political contestation that drives transitions between food regimes? We explore these questions through the case of one scientific community—the AOAC (Association of Official Analytical Communities)—involved in food safety regulation across the British, US, and corporate food regimes. We argue that scientific boundary work is shaped by historically specific patterns of social conflict within food regimes and, in particular, the double-movement dynamics that Polanyi (The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon, 1957[1944]) theorizes. Moreover, as scientific communities reconstruct their internal rules, norms, and procedures to claim their own legitimacy in relation to prevailing forms of social conflict, they also reshape who sets scientific agendas and thus the knowledge available for making new rules within periods of food regime transition. To elaborate this argument in theoretical terms, we build on recent efforts to integrate a neo-Polanyian perspective into food regime analysis and link this to research on scientific boundary work by scholars in science and technology studies. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has focused on the tensions, contradictions, and limits of place-based branding through labels of origin, place-named agricultural products, and geographical indications. Existing literature demonstrates that even well-intentioned efforts to use place-based branding to protect the livelihoods and cultural and ecological practices of small producers are often undermined by transnational firms, states, and local elites who attempt to capture the benefits of these marketing strategies. Yet, little attention has been given to the implications of place-based branding for competition among (...) geographically dispersed agricultural producers. While place-based branding can be used for emancipatory ends, it can also be used strategically by agricultural producers to expand their market share at the expense of others. To explore these dynamics, I trace an alternative history of place-based branding that begins not in the potentially emancipatory politics of protecting terroir but rather in the tensions and contradictions characterizing the rise and decline of the US food regime. Drawing on a cross-time comparison of branding strategies within the global cotton trade, I make two key arguments. First, I argue that US producers and the US state forged the use of different types of branding strategies in response to the distinct tensions and contradictions characterized by the rise and decline of the US food regime. Second, these distinct branding strategies organized competition among geographically dispersed cotton producers in different ways. (shrink)

How do “international” epistemic communities shape regulatory contests between transnational firms and civil society organizations in the Global South? With the establishment of the World Trade Organization, member states committed to basing trade-restrictive national regulations on science-based “international” standards set by “international” standard-setting bodies. Yet we know little about how the WTO regime has shaped the operation of epistemic communities within standard-setting bodies and, in turn, how standard-setting bodies articulate with national policy-making processes in the Global South. Building on work (...) in the new political sociology of science, I argue that neoliberal globalization and the establishment of the WTO have created incentives for Western epistemic communities to at once cast themselves as “international” under the WTO regime and orient their scientific agendas toward the priorities of transnational firms. Moreover, this transformation of epistemic communities has created opportunities for transnational firms facing contentious policy environments in the Global South to effectively outsource regulatory decision-making to “international” epistemic communities that can claim legal status under the WTO regime. Empirically, I focus on the case of one Western epistemic community—the Association of Analytical Communities International—and its claim to epistemic jurisdiction over pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India. (shrink)

We are in an era of uncertainty over whose rules will govern global economic integration. With the growing market share of Chinese firms and the power of the Chinese state it is unclear if Western firms will continue to dominate transnational governance. Exploring these dynamics through a study of contract rules in the global cotton trade, this article conceptualizes commodity chain governance as a contested process of institution-building. To this end, the global commodity chain/global value chain framework must be revised (...) to better account for the broader institutional context of commodity chain governance, institutional variation across space, and strategic action in the construction of legitimate governance arrangements. I provide a more dynamic model of GCC governance that stresses how strategic action, existing institutions, and dominant discourses intersect as firms and states compete for institutional power within a commodity chain. This advances our understandings of how commodity chain governance emerges and changes over time. (shrink)