Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reconstructing Rights: New Transnational Governance

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This study will evaluate civil society's role in participatory governance and its implications for rights claims, strategies, and worldviews as related to the regulation of agrarian markets and food. The expansion of the global food market coupled with rising food prices over the past two decades have occasioned claims concerning how regulation should proceed both domestically and internationally. Food policy institutions on multiple scales have adopted new institutional structures to include input from multiple constituencies. In the United States, municipal, regional, and state governments have developed food policy councils comprised of the multiple stakeholders of the food system. This emerging form of "multi-stakeholder" or "new" governance is part of a broader regulatory reform that has also been adopted by transnational food policy institutions. This study asks how participation in these new forms of lawmaking leads constituents to reconfigure and reimagine rights-based claims within new sites of governance and ultimately transforms the politics of human rights.To answer this question, this ethnographic project will analyze participation in food policy councils, domestic and transnational networks, as well as global sites of food policy regulation through participant observation and social network analysis. It contributes to scholarship in anthropology and socio-legal studies by empirically examining the efficacy of new forms of regulation the emergence of a new transnational legal culture. The project will be important to policymakers and citizens with interests in governance in multiple sites with many stakeholders