The Real Dirt on Responsible Agricultural Investments at Rio+20: Multilateralism versus Corporate Self-Regulation

This article uses a fine-grained anthropological and linguistic analysis to expose the routine negotiating practices and power games behind the conclusion of paragraph 115 on responsible agricultural investments during the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012. These negotiations are simultaneously a telli...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLaw & society review Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 39 - 67
Main Authors Müller, Birgit, Cloiseau, Gilles
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.03.2015
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Subjects
Agricultural land
Appropriation
Congresses and Conventions
Games
Investment funds
Land
Language
Language Usage
Language use
Legitimation
Linguistics
Multilateralism
Multinational Corporations
Multinational enterprises
Negotiation
Policy Making
Power
Self Control
United Nations
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Summary:This article uses a fine-grained anthropological and linguistic analysis to expose the routine negotiating practices and power games behind the conclusion of paragraph 115 on responsible agricultural investments during the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012. These negotiations are simultaneously a telling example for the quotidian stuff of international governance—an arena in which much larger forces are played out through small language-based tactics, and they are representative of an exceptional moment when global multilateral policy making in the frame of the United Nations was challenged by the legitimation of private authority and corporate self-regulation. Combining anthropological and linguistic methods, the article focused on language use, analyzing the ways in which people interact in a highly coded language, how they "perform," by exploring, playing with, and twisting the grammatical structures of the spoken language. At issue is the large-scale appropriation of agricultural land all over the world by multinational corporations, investment funds, and foreign governments.
Bibliography:istex:62A78C6D69273D5D45282A187A53612AC361FA95
ArticleID:LASR12121
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We wish to thank the Ecoverio team for the great collective experience of doing fieldwork together and for all the stimulating discussions. A special thanks to Jean Foyer and Sarah Benabou for commenting on the manuscript and to Elise Demeulenaere and Denis Chartier for sharing the adventure of doing fieldwork at the Rio+20 negotiations on “Food” and for passing on their notes to us. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their interesting and challenging comments.
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ISSN:0023-9216
1540-5893
DOI:10.1111/lasr.12121