- Citation/Abstract
- Dissertation or Thesis
Abstract (summary)
Since the 1970s, multiple food crises have catalyzed global conflicts over the production, provisioning, and consumption of food. As both a commodity and public good, food serves as a powerful site of symbolic and material social struggle in which activists have contested the liberalization of global markets. In doing so, food activists have embraced the concept of “the network” to reimagine new forms of social and economic organization. Yet the features of the network that have attracted activists—its non-hierarchical, unbounded, and collaborative structure—have also appealed to businesses and legal reformers as a form of governance in a volatile global economy. Today, as new arenas of “collaborative governance” proliferate from local to global institutions, how does the network mediate competing social values? What forms of power does the network produce?
This ethnographic and historical study tracks the emergence, development, and practice of the network as a form of governance and horizon of social justice through successive generations of food activism and governance in both the Pacific Northwest of the United States and transnational regulatory arenas. It argues that the network’s egalitarian and horizontal representation of society and economy is alluring to social movements even as it undermines them. By concealing conflicting values and disparities of power, the network often reproduces existing hierarchies in misrecognized forms. Moreover, as competing visions of the network are institutionalized, a new transnational legal ideology of collaboration has emerged that suppresses these conflicts and entrenches existing relations of power. Ultimately, this study reveals the contested process by which the network and collaboration have become hegemonic symbols of an emerging global political-economic order.