Lone Riisgaard

Integrating Poverty and Environmental Concerns into Value-Chain Analysis: A Conceptual Framework

Many policy prescriptions emphasise poverty reduction through closer integration of poor people or areas with global markets. Global value chain (GVC) studies reveal how firms and farms in developing countries are upgraded by being integrated in global markets, but few explicitly document the impact on poverty, gender and the environment, or conversely, how value chain restructuring is in turn mediated by local history, social relations and environmental factors. This article develops a conceptual framework that can help overcome the shortcomings in ‘standalone’ value-chain, livelihood and environmental analyses by integrating the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects of value chains that together affect poverty and sustainability.

Prospects for Labour in Global Value Chains: Labour Standards in the Cut Flower and Banana Industries

Global value chain (GVC) governance is central to analyses of labours strategic options. It frames the terrain on which labour campaigns and institutions — such as private social standards and international framework agreements — contribute to the social regulation of value chains. GVC concepts help to emphasize how power in the employment relationship transcends organizational boundaries, as well as how industrial power is shifting from the sphere of production to that of consumption. Based on extensive case studies of the banana and cut flower value chains, we explore the implications of GVC restructuring for the scope and form of labour rights strategies.

Towards more stringent sustainability standards? Trends in the cut flower industry

Sustainability initiatives have proliferated in many industries in recent years. This has led to an increasing number of standards that exist in parallel seeking to address more or less the same social and environmental issues. In this paper I explore whether parallelism has spurred a race to the bottom in flower standards seeking to regulate social conditions in the production of cut flowers aimed at the European Union market. The analysis suggests that while less stringent standards still dominate, so-called higher bar standards are gaining importance, as is the active inclusion of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and trade unions in monitoring standard compliance – a practice which potentially could allow standards to address more locally embedded and hidden problems like for example discrimination or lack of freedom of association. Nevertheless, less stringent standards still predominate and although an ongoing multi-stakeholder harmonisation initiative has real potential to ‘scale up’ more stringent standards, so far it has mainly benefited developed – not developing – country growers and workers.

Localizing Private Social Standards: Standard Initiatives in Kenyan Cut Flowers

As a response to the emergence of Northern-based social standards in the cut flower export industry, a range of Southern social standard initiatives have emerged. In this chapter, I analyse two Kenyan standard initiatives in the cut flower sector — a business initiative and a multi-stakeholder initiative. I investigate how international social standard requirements are ‘localized’ and the results of this localization for different stakeholders. The analysis shows that when the standards are negotiated and applied, the power relations that exist both between local stakeholders and along the global value chain (GVC) for cut flowers are reproduced. Placing local standard initiatives in the context of GVC governance, this chapter also illustrates how they can be seen as indirectly playing into the governance agenda of retail buyers, because local standards (particularly multi-stakeholder standards) offer better insurance against conflict and create necessary consensus and ‘back-up’ from critical voices, both locally and in buyer markets.

Changing labour power on smallholder tea farms in Kenya

Informal wage workers on smallholder tea farms make important contributions to world export of tea. The literature on global production networks only recently began to pay more detailed attention to conceptualizing the role that labour plays in such networks and has so far focused mainly on industrial settings – not smallholder farming. Similarly, the literature on sustainability standards has focused on wage-workers in large-scale workplaces such as factories or plantations. This article seeks to remedy this lack of attention and make contributions to both literatures by arguing first, that labour agency in export-oriented smallholder tea production in developing countries may not be advanced much by the sustainability certifications demanded by Western buyers and second, that labour agency can nevertheless be present at ‘the margins’ of global production networks even though informal rural wage workers are most often assumed to lack both ‘structural’ and ‘associational’ power. These arguments are made on the basis of a case study of on-farm wage labour in smallholder tea production in Kenya. The article finds labour’s bargaining power to be stronger in some locations compared to others and that differences between locations can be fruitfully explored by looking not just at workers insertion into the vertical structures of the global production network but by also including more ‘horizontal’ dimensions relating to the local context in which smallholder tea production and on-farm wage-workers are embedded.

Powers of the Mask: Political Subjectivation and Rites of Participation in Local-Global Protest

Mask-wearing political protests have been global front page news for several years now; yet, almost no literature exists which attempts to engage the symbolic density and ritual role played by such mask-wearing acts. We argue that mask-wearing has political potentiality which relates to deeper-lying anthropological features of mask-wearing. The powers of the mask reside in the transformative ability of masks to unify and transcend key oppositional categories such as absence/presence and death/life, creating possibilities where conventional boundaries of the possible/impossible no longer restrict. By questioning the communicative rationality of the modern ‘public’ and the ‘sphere’ in which it operates, we approach mask-wearing as a ‘communicative opening’. Building on earlier critiques of liberal democratic normativity, we further argue that the ‘utopia of transparency’ is itself a regulatory power and that mask-wearing exposes the very notions that were supposed to form the background of modern, emancipatory politics: transparency, free speech and representative democracy.