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Making “minority voices” heard in transnational roundtables: the role of local NGOs in reintroducing justice and attachments

Making “minority voices” heard in transnational roundtables: the role of local NGOs in... Since the beginning of the new millennium, initiatives known as roundtables have been developed to create voluntary sustainability standards for agricultural commodities. Intended to be private and voluntary in nature, these initiatives claim their legitimacy from their ability to ensure the participation of all categories of stakeholders in horizontal participatory and inclusive processes. This article characterizes the political and material instruments employed as the means of formulating agreement and taking a variety of voices into consideration in these arenas. Referring to the specific case of the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil”, I undertake a detailed analysis of the tensions relating to different forms of participation, which create a gap between “local minority voices” and international stakeholders—either non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or industries. Local communities and small-scale farmers face difficulties when making their voices heard in the form of debate proposed. Firstly, some participants attempt to re-impose a vertical hierarchical relationship between small-scale farmers or affected communities and company managers/directors in order to deprive the former of their powers of representation and of being able to transform reality. Secondly, the liberalism of interest groups in the roundtable accords value to experts, global knowledge, strategy, and detachment, at the expense of other capabilities of rooted or attached people who come to defend their real lives with a desire to raise critical issues of injustice. In this context, I highlight the capacity of local NGOs to relieve some of those tensions and to help locally affected communities and small-scale farmers introduce public stages for debates, by accommodating other forms of participation apart from the liberal one. By being close to and by restoring their dignity through a specific work of solicitude and care, local NGOs prepare affected people for public speaking. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Agriculture and Human Values Springer Journals

Making “minority voices” heard in transnational roundtables: the role of local NGOs in reintroducing justice and attachments

Agriculture and Human Values , Volume 31 (3) – May 16, 2014

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References (36)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Subject
Philosophy; Ethics; Agricultural Economics; Veterinary Medicine; History; Evolutionary Biology
ISSN
0889-048X
eISSN
1572-8366
DOI
10.1007/s10460-014-9505-7
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Since the beginning of the new millennium, initiatives known as roundtables have been developed to create voluntary sustainability standards for agricultural commodities. Intended to be private and voluntary in nature, these initiatives claim their legitimacy from their ability to ensure the participation of all categories of stakeholders in horizontal participatory and inclusive processes. This article characterizes the political and material instruments employed as the means of formulating agreement and taking a variety of voices into consideration in these arenas. Referring to the specific case of the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil”, I undertake a detailed analysis of the tensions relating to different forms of participation, which create a gap between “local minority voices” and international stakeholders—either non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or industries. Local communities and small-scale farmers face difficulties when making their voices heard in the form of debate proposed. Firstly, some participants attempt to re-impose a vertical hierarchical relationship between small-scale farmers or affected communities and company managers/directors in order to deprive the former of their powers of representation and of being able to transform reality. Secondly, the liberalism of interest groups in the roundtable accords value to experts, global knowledge, strategy, and detachment, at the expense of other capabilities of rooted or attached people who come to defend their real lives with a desire to raise critical issues of injustice. In this context, I highlight the capacity of local NGOs to relieve some of those tensions and to help locally affected communities and small-scale farmers introduce public stages for debates, by accommodating other forms of participation apart from the liberal one. By being close to and by restoring their dignity through a specific work of solicitude and care, local NGOs prepare affected people for public speaking.

Journal

Agriculture and Human ValuesSpringer Journals

Published: May 16, 2014

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