scholarly journals Introduction to the symposium: seed as a commons—exploring innovative concepts and practices of governing seed and varieties

Author(s):  
Stefanie Sievers-Glotzbach ◽  
Anja Christinck

Abstract This Symposium explores how the theory of commons can be used to study, conceptualize and transform governance models for seed and plant varieties to counter ongoing trends towards agrobiodiversity loss and concentration of economic and political power in farming and food systems. Contributions to the Symposium present case studies from a range of geographical and socio-cultural contexts from the Global North and South. They show how seed and varieties relate to various known commons categories, including natural resource commons, knowledge and cultural commons, and global commons. Elements of these categories need to be integrated to gain a deeper understanding of Seed Commons, including the specific challenges that arise from the fact that seed, although a biological asset, is at least partly shaped by human selection driven by values, knowledge and needs of users. Collective responsibility, sharing of knowledge and seed, protection from private enclosure, and distributed, polycentric governance are key features of Seed Commons. The notion of ‘commoning’ focuses on the social practices and processes that create and sustain commons. Conceptualizing Seed Commons in their complexity offers initial starting points for policies and legal frameworks conducive to releasing the transformative power of Seed Commons for advancing sustainable farming and food systems.

While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.


Author(s):  
Ted Schrecker

This chapter begins with a conception of political economy that foregrounds unequal distributions of power and resources and the role of transnational actors and processes. Two specific case examples are described in some detail: (1) the structural adjustment conditionalities demanded by the international financial institutions roughly post-1980 and their impacts on health systems and social determinants of health and (2) the connections between trade and investment liberalization and health outcomes, with a focus on harmonization of intellectual property protection regimes, on food systems, and generically of the incorporation of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in many bilateral and regional agreements. The chapter concludes by identifying two directions for future inquiry: the erosion of familiar distinctions between global North and South and the normative implications of the proliferation of cross border influences on health.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Malin Tillmar ◽  
Helene Ahl ◽  
Karin Berglund ◽  
Katarina Pettersson

Purpose Contrasting Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to explore the experiences of women entrepreneurs affected by entrepreneurialism. This study discusses the impact on their position in society and on their ability to take feminist action. Design/methodology/approach This paper analysed interviews conducted in the two countries over 15 years, using a holistic perspective on context, including its gendered dimensions. Findings The results amount to a critique of entrepreneurialism. Women in Sweden did not experience much gain from entrepreneurship, while in Tanzania results were mixed. Entrepreneurialism seems unable to improve the situation for women in the relatively well-functioning economies in the global north, where it was designed. Research limitations/implications In mainstream entrepreneurship studies, there is a focus on the institutional context. From the analysis, it is apparent that equal attention must be given to the social and spatial contexts, as they may have severe material and economic consequences for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. The paper raises questions for further studies on the gendering of markets in different contexts, as well as questions on the urban-rural dimension. Practical implications In Sweden, marketisation of welfare services led to more women-owned businesses, but the position of women did not improve. The results strongly convey the need for a careful analysis of the pre-existing context, before initiating reforms. Originality/value The paper adds to the understanding of context in entrepreneurship studies: Africa is largely an underexplored continent and contrasting North and South is an underexplored methodological approach. This paper further extends and develops the model of gendered contexts developed by Welter et al. (2014).


2022 ◽  
pp. 472-492
Author(s):  
Stephen McCloskey

Development education (DE) is a radical learning pedagogy that combines analysis, discussion, and action to engage the learner in active citizenship toward positive social change. This chapter discusses the contribution that DE and other related ‘educations' can make to mitigating the climate crisis and addressing the growing levels of poverty and inequality in the global North and South. Central to this discussion is the neoliberal economic model that has driven ‘development' since the 1970s and placed the needs of the market above the social needs of citizens. This has become particularly apparent during the coronavirus pandemic which has overwhelmed the health services of countries across the world. The chapter argues for a more sustainable form of development based on de-growth and a Green New Deal.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102452942110443
Author(s):  
Alexis Moraitis

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.


Author(s):  
Peter North ◽  
Molly Scott Cato

This chapter sets the scene for the edited collection which follows it, recounting the findings of an international conversation on the social and solidarity economies between participants from Europe and Latin America. It discusses problems and possibilities for learning and policy transference between different places, acknowledging the power relations involved between global north and south, centre and periphery. It introduces a four part conceptualisation of the social and solidarity economy sector between Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship; the inclusive Social Economy; the Solidarity Economy, working on conceptions of how we want to live in a climate constrained world, and the Antagonistic Economy, challenging pathological aspects of contemporary neoliberalism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 142-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magnus Mfoafo-M’Carthy

In this conversation with Mama, I use my mother’s voice as a reflexive mirror to explore the social work silences that the COVID-19 pandemic expresses so eloquently in my own life and work. I seek to highlight the intimate link between Mama’s silence and social work silence.


2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riitta Högbacka

Although the objective of intercountry adoption is to provide parentless children with families, it also has other unintended consequences. Postcolonial theorists have shown that the intercountry adoption system is shaped by unequal power relations between the Global North and South. Drawing on interviews with South African adoption social workers and birth mothers, this article shifts attention from Global North perspectives to those of the Global South. By focusing on the circumstances of how children become available for adoption, some of the ways in which the adoption system participates in creating the pool of ‘abandoned’ children are explicated.


Author(s):  
Stephen McCloskey

Development education (DE) is a radical learning pedagogy that combines analysis, discussion, and action to engage the learner in active citizenship toward positive social change. This chapter discusses the contribution that DE and other related ‘educations' can make to mitigating the climate crisis and addressing the growing levels of poverty and inequality in the global North and South. Central to this discussion is the neoliberal economic model that has driven ‘development' since the 1970s and placed the needs of the market above the social needs of citizens. This has become particularly apparent during the coronavirus pandemic which has overwhelmed the health services of countries across the world. The chapter argues for a more sustainable form of development based on de-growth and a Green New Deal.


2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Mirian Rejowski ◽  
Roberta Leme Sogayar ◽  
Jaqueline Silva dos Santos ◽  
Aristides Faria Lopes dos Santos

This bibliometric study investigated the state of hospitality research in a sample of documents published in the periodical Hospitality & Society (H&S) from 2011 to 2018. It presents an analysis of authorship, co-authorship, co-authorship networks, leading authors and institutions, words, co-words and themes, in an initial view of the social and conceptual structure of the hospitality study. The inquiry is complemented by the classification of sample articles in thematic categories according to the research agenda published in the editorial of the first edition of H&S. This analysis proved to be fruitful because of new perspectives on hospitality research beyond services related to accommodation, food and drink. The findings support researchers with a partial understanding of the hospitality field, and it suggests applying other bibliometric techniques and expanding the sample in future studies. Towards an update on the initial research agenda, representatives of different hospitality currents of thought should draw together to stimulate greater integration among researchers from the global North and South.


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