Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy

Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of what may be termed as seed activism. In this opening paper of the JPS Special Forum on Seed Activism, we explore the surge of mobilizations the world over in response to processes of seed enclosures and loss of agrobiodiversity. A historical overview of the evolution of seed activism over the past three decades traces a paradigm shift from farmers’ rights to seed sovereignty. Some of the main threats to peasant seed systems – from seed and intellectual property laws to biopiracy, corporate concentration and new genome editing technologies – are analyzed along with strategies by peasants and other activists to counter these developments. We take stock of what has been achieved so far and of the challenges ahead, and suggest some avenues for future research.

How can citizens living under increasingly militarized and authoritarian regimes exercise political voice? Using an in-depth case study of naked protest in modern day Uganda, this article finds that naked bodies allow citizens to employ three types of overlapping power to confront a militarized authoritarian state: biopower, symbolic power, and cosmological power. The study illustrates one way in which citizens seek to engage militarized regimes—and in doing so, how political voice takes particular forms with limited capacity to instigate broader political claim-making that might be associated with country- or region-wide political action.

The literature frequently recommends purposive sampling of elites based on the assumptions that random sampling negatively affects the response rate and that it induces bias. I test these assumptions drawing on metadata from 282 samples of political, economic, and social elites, and on microdata from 2,658 elites. First I use permutations to calculate confidence intervals for the expected response rate following each sampling method. Second, I estimate the effect of random sampling on the final response rate using a range of regression models. Finally, I compare the distributions of the estimators for the average age, the share of male elites, and elites' ideology by simulating repeated random and purposive samples. Results indicate that both random and purposive sampling of elites generate sufficiently large samples, as well as consistent and unbiased estimators of population parameters. Contradicting methodological guidelines in the field, the conclusion is that random sampling of elites is efficient.

Relations between militaries and masculinities-and hegemonic masculinity and the state-are well-established in the literature on gender and development. However, there is less research on how militarised masculinities relate to state governance strategies. This paper, based on qualitative research conducted in northern Uganda between 2014 and 2017, offers a gender analysis of youths participating in informal security arrangements. Civilian male youths accept poorly paid or unpaid work in the informal security sector in the hope of gaining access to livelihoods that will enable them to fulfil masculine ideal-types. However, this arrangement denies them the resources necessary to achieve the ideal-type of civilian masculinity, as well as the state's military masculinity, which produces young men as subjects of the ruling regime. To reconfigure this relationship between civilian and militarised masculinities, one should understand informal security organisations in the context of alternative livelihood arrangements and take a long-term approach to the demilitarisation of the Ugandan state.

This article analyzes legal disputes involving Monsanto's patents and royalties for Roundup Ready soybeans, Bt cotton and Bt eggplant in two important GM-crop producing countries. It argues that Monsanto implemented private royalty collection systems adapted to the specificities of crops and agrarian conditions in Brazil and India. The corporation thus enjoyed in practice the same extraordinary degree of IP rights in these countries as in the United States irrespective of significant differences between patent and plant variety laws of both countries and the US. NGOs and farmers' movements played a key role in drawing public attention to these issues while challenging the legality of the patents and royalty collection systems.

This chapter focuses on the spending dynamics around one of the largest social funds globally: the European Social Fund (ESF). More specifically, it explores the institutional conditions and the tensions around its use/lack thereof in Italy, one of the largest recipients of the Fund. While financial execution does not subsume the effective implementation or the effectiveness of the activities that are funded, the chapter suggests that it is a key marker in the policy debate in Italy, and seeks to analyse the terms of this debate by placing it in its institutional and financial context, in particular against the backdrop of reforms enacted at both the European Union (EU) and the domestic level. It argues that late spending is not only a marker of a series of institutional blockages, it also reveals a specific mode of governance that is shaped at the same time by national, regional and supranational institutions, norms, and interests as well as by flows of funds and ideas that converge and materialise in a variety of administrative, political and financial practices.

What do the lived experiences of young people tell us about the currency of youth in United Nations (UN) climate summitry, at a time in which youth is endowed with symbolic capital?Initially, self-representing as 'youth' in and around UN climate summits appears to open doors for young people, particularly since the creation of additional youth engagement mechanisms that followed the 2019 Fridays for Future protests.Based on four years of fieldwork, this article shows that youth can be both a limited and limiting currency in global climate politics.Indeed, the currency is finite, leading different youth groups to compete for speaking slots and visibility.Further, an increasing amount of young people have come to realize that youth is a limiting currency to advocate for environmental justice claims.These findings, which would not have been possible without an ethnographic and collaborative approach, contribute to existing calls challenging the ways that theory, research, and practice are oriented toward young people in climate politics.

In 2017, we established a reading group that sought to make sense of how to understand, respond to, and inherit the international projects of which we were becoming a part (or, increasingly, apart).1 A seminar followed, and, in 2018, a workshop was held called ‘Learning from Failure’,2 which included our two essayists. Picking through the mounting debris of the liberal (secular, anti-racist) international order are, Vasuki Nesiah, on ‘Freedom at sea’,3 and Adam Sitze, on ‘The crime of apartheid: genealogy of a successful failure’.4 Essays to come from the project will explore revolutionary failures and the role of failure in the ethical formation of international lawyers.5 Nesiah and Sitze fashion themselves, and their intended readers, in the role of inheritor-critics: the heirs to the others of the promised liberal secular anti-racist international law —who have been its victims, conscripts, beneficiaries, and even authors, but rarely its rivals. Simply put, the task the authors of these pieces identify for the inheritor-critic is to sift through the purported successes and failures that continue to wash upon us with the rising waves and piling debris.

What explains youth political mobilization in Uganda – or lack thereof? This article challenges the simple dichotomy of youth as either a dangerous or disengaged political constituency. Instead, we analyze the conditions that determine whether youth can coalesce as a politically salient category. For many, the outcome of the 2021 Ugandan elections defied expectations. A large and underemployed youth population combined with the emergence of self-proclaimed ‘youth candidate’ Bobi Wine, led both international and domestic analysts to predict a strong youth challenge to National Resistance Movement (NRM) dominance. However, while Bobi Wine captured the opposition vote, he was unable to create a new youth constituency that could overcome existing political and regional cleavages. This article draws on interviews and fieldwork on youth political mobilization during the 2021 elections to identify and analyze a range of historically rooted methods that the NRM effectively deploys to mobilize and fragment youth. The findings confirm the need to look beyond rallies and rhetoric to analyze whether the conditions are right to allow youth to emerge as a politically salient category.

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature has focused on how different states continuously “make race” by legitimizing certain racial categories while invisibilizing others. Much less has been written on the actual processes of transforming race into a bureaucratic category when implementing antiracist public policies. This article focuses on the recent use of verification commissions to validate the racial self-identification of potential beneficiaries of racial quotas at federal higher education institutions in Brazil. We argue that through their choices, particularly through their definition of what race is, of who can see race, and of how to see race, these commissions are transforming not only understandings about affirmative action’s aims but also understandings of race. The study focuses on three potential consequences of commission practices for Brazilian racial boundaries: the disciplining of racial identifications, the decontextualization of race, and the individualization of racial injustice.

Abstract What will the regulatory state of the South (RSoS) look like in the coming decade? This paper takes stock of contemporary practices of institutional reform in development, and their historical trajectory, to chart a possible pathway. Empirically, I identify a practical shift in development since the early‐2000s. On one side are Washington Consensus practices that assume a “non‐reflexive” relationship between people and institutions, meaning that people, in general, do not or should not reflect on their values and political position. On the other side are practices that assume a “reflexive” relationship between people and institutions, meaning that people reflect on their values and political position, and contest and shape the institutions that govern them. Analytically, I identify the emergence of an infrastructure that has enabled development actors to put this shift into practice. Proceeding inductively, I argue that it is composed of three specific technologies – massive data‐gathering of people's political and social values; adaptive institutional design processes; and large multistakeholder platforms. Theoretically, I explore the political structures embedded in these technologies and sketch some of their consequences, particularly in light of the centrality of institutional reform to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals over the next decade.

Millions of people from India’s northeastern state of Assam have to defend themselves against suspicions that they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. I explore how one such group of individuals, who work as waste pickers in Delhi, protect their citizenship against the combined vulnerabilities of being Assamese, Muslim, and residents of an unauthorized slum. I show that they develop a split relation with the government, defined by a costly requirement to vote in their borderland villages, and by avoidance for all matters linked to everyday life. By working hard in an occupation shunned by everyone else, they seem to uphold this citizenship of extraordinary political obligation and minimal entitlement. But when this equilibrium unravels around the debt that they contract to pay for basic services and for the trip home to cast their ballot, the price of their condition determined by suspicion, is revealed.

We sketch a novel mode of governance—‘global ungovernance’ (GU)—which draws on and informs the articles in this special issue. GU operates in the context of transnational institution-building projects which at once pursue big visions with claims to universality (eg, building ‘markets’ or the ‘rule of law’), and at the same time offer no adequate prescriptions. We argue that the ‘impossibility of closure’ becomes a central problematic of practical activity in GU—by which we mean the ultimate practical impossibility of matching institutional structures with desired outcomes in these contexts. Viewed as a set of organised practices, GU evinces a commitment both to pursue closure and to embrace its impossibility, equally competently and even at the same time. As a result, GU changes the nature, purpose and conditions of possibility of institution-building techniques and practices.

Christine Lutringer’s interview with Leo Saldanha and Bhargavi Rao reflects the pivotal role of their NGO, the Environment Support Group (ESG), in bringing about changes in practices and policies of solid waste management in Bangalore. The campaign for a new solid waste management policy, which was co-organised by ESG, underscores the significance of the legal activism initiated by civil society groups. The public interest litigation (PIL) that united the various affected parties was key to transforming the solid waste management policy of the municipality. Saldanha and Rao discuss the strategy of their NGO while showing how a progressive ruling by a court led to the decentralisation of solid waste management. They also point to the challenges of implementing the judgment and to the fact that processes of waste collection and disposal are not merely technical, administrative matters but are eminently social and cultural issues. ESG’s advocacy activities have, therefore, aimed to secure fair and respectable treatment for solid waste workers, an aspect that has otherwise been eclipsed in the public debate on waste. The interview concludes with reflections on ESG’s endeavours over the last twenty years to promote environmental and social justice in Bangalore.

Abstract In her article from 2019, Fleur Johns describes a change: from a style of development work marked by a propensity for ‘planning’, to one marked by a propensity for ‘prototyping’. Our project in this paper is to propose a modest shift in perspective. Where Johns traces a transition from old to new styles, we emphasise the enduring links between planning and prototyping, such that both styles are best understood through their ongoing relationships and entanglements. Returning to Pulse Lab Jakarta (PLJ), the site of Johns’ initial inquiry, we offer a reinterpretation of what might be novel about PLJ for development practice. Our claim is that to understand the particular intervention that PLJ represents, and the new modes of practice it produces, it may be helpful to understand PLJ's work in the manner of a ‘modular’ attachment to existing development apparatuses, that combines big data analytics with design thinking. We then develop some reflections and speculations on the forms and novelty of PLJ in light of our redescription of its work in the language of modularity.

The editorial introduction by Christine Lutringer and Shalini Randeria delineates the overarching themes that are the foci of this special e-issue, namely the policy shifts and changes in practices of solid waste management in Bangalore following the 2012 ‘garbage crisis’. It suggests that civic mobilisation among the middle classes (and especially legal activism) have played a crucial role in the demand for, and partial implementation of, an efficient and sustainable solid waste management system. Crises and subsequent reforms thus constitute fruitful vantage points from which to explore larger processes of policy change. The contributions to this issue offer insights into the interplay between changing food consumption patterns, social practices of sustainable consumption, new forms of civic activism and emerging policy responses. On the one hand, they examine how middle-class engagement, through legal activism and neighbourhood mobilisation, has shaped public perceptions as well as public policies. On the other, the contributions combine insights into some important aspects of domestic and restaurant food production and consumption with an analysis of their implications for waste generation and disposal. Designing sustainable policies to address the environmental impact of changing food consumption patterns thus requires careful analysis of not only consumption practices at the level of the household but also of practices related to waste generation, prevention, segregation and disposal.

The diverse ways that extreme climate events are expressed at the local level have represented a challenge for the development of transgenic “climate-ready” (resilient to environmental stress) seeds. Based on the Argentinean “HB4” technology, this paper analyzes how ignorance and a sunflower gene are mobilized to overcome this difficulty in soy and wheat. HB4 seeds can be understood as myopic: the technology does not obstruct the capacity of soy and wheat plants to sense droughts, but it prevents their natural reaction, which would be to put a halt on crop production and redirect their energy toward survival. Plants thus become “short-sighted” to droughts. Informed by ignorance studies and by the immunological concept of tolerance, this paper analyzes HB4 myopia as a type of nonhuman ignorance: an asset that allows plant breeders to achieve varied plant responses to droughts and to encode their capitalist values (that prioritize production over survival) into plants’ DNA. Moreover, ignorance becomes a molecular commodity that can be selected, transferred between organisms, and traded in markets. HB4’s prioritization of production resonates with other technologies of climate adaptation and mitigation that do not promote structural changes to the capitalist system.

Cette contribution examine un volet stratégique de l'intervention publique dans le secteur agricole de l'Inde. Mis en place dans les années 1960, le système d'achat public et de prix minimum de soutien joue depuis lors un rôle pivot dans la politique de sécurité alimentaire. Ce système vise à garantir une rémunération suffisante pour les paysans, la constitution de stocks et une distribution publique aux consommateurs les plus pauvres. Le gouvernement utilise également la politique de prix pour stimuler la production de denrées agricoles spécifiques car les prix de soutien influencent les décisions des paysans sur l'allocation des cultures et des types de production. Concrètement, il vise à atteindre des quantités minimales de grains alimentaires dans le pays. Cette politique a conduit au ciblage de certaines denrées, régions et formes de production. L'article analyse la logique du système d'achat et ses effets pour les paysans, à la fois économiques et sociopolitiques. Il montre que les débats actuels sur les réformes en cours portent sur un ciblage plus explicite des catégories de paysans et des régions que ce système pourrait servir à promouvoir.

Abstract How can we understand the delegation of power and authority – for example, from a polity to an administrator ‐ in a world of fragmented governance? In this paper, I introduce the practices of contemporary ‘rule of law’ and ‘governance’ reform , which reframe this question in politically powerful ways. These practices are increasingly important in development contexts, and beyond. Practitioners begin with the assumption that some sort of administration occurs in the development contexts in which they work. They then focus on how to convene a political community in which to embed – and potentially legitimate ‐ that administration. They thereby reconfigure the question of delegation into one of autonomy – or managing the extent to and ways in which the administrative legal system self‐produces. In doing so, I argue that contemporary rule of law practitioners wield constitutional power under the rubric of workaday administrative reform. At the same time, they efface their political accountability.

Abstract What motivated right-wing and conservative parties to endorse a policy of land expropriation and redistribution in Brazil? I argue that urban-dominated right-wing parties endorsed agrarian reform in order to: (i) reduce crime in wealthier metropolises by reversing rural–urban migration; and (ii) gain competitive advantage against left-wing challengers. To test this argument I conduct process tracing, analysing over 500 elite statements about agrarian reform, drawn from archival, interview and survey data. In addition, I model land expropriations at the municipal level and show how right-wing administrations disproportionately expropriated land in the states of origin of migrants and, within those, in localities where the Left was more competitive. My results portray how two externalities of inequality – crime and competition with the Left – motivated conservative support for agrarian reform in Brazil.