Voicing dissent: environmental governance, community development, and accountability

This paper examines the ways firms and communities construct local spaces of environmental governance. I explore the strategies and metrics of accountability that communities use to proactively participate in regulatory... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the ways firms and communities construct local spaces of environmental governance. I explore the strategies and metrics of accountability that communities use to proactively participate in regulatory decisions when their interests are counter to powerful outside investors, in this case transnational seed firms. Three questions guide this work. First, what strategies do communities pursue to enact change when they feel existing regulations do not ensure environmental protection/safety or labor rights? Second, what actions do communities take to hold firms accountable in the face of this discontent? Finally, what role does the local state play as a mediator between these two competing interests? These questions directly link the issues of governance and accountability with power and place. My account is based on multi-sited ethnography in the three main research and development (R&D) hubs for genetically modified (GM) corn seed in Chile, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii and in the headquarters of an industry-leading firm in Iowa. The GM corn seed industry is an important case because firms’ competitiveness hinges on staying in particular environments, rendering them somewhat place-bound—which may be used by communities as a negotiating tool for better environmental and labor arrangements. This spatial constraint changes the relationships that firms seek to maintain with regulatory actors and local communities, making this case an excellent space to analyze how communities can play more active roles in environmental governance to ensure practices of accountability. I use interview, observational, and secondary data to build a framework to understand how communities participate in the environmental governance of their communities. My findings suggests that firms react to local regulatory challenges by embedding themselves in leadership positions that shape the local context and by enacting aggressive staying strategies that often include legal battles. Communities, on the other hand, rely on different strategies to shape regulatory environments. I argue that communities draw on four main strategies to demand accountability of their corporate counterparts and to play more active roles in governance: 1) supply chain mapping; 2) legal strategies; 3) building advocacy networks; and 4) voluntary reporting mechanisms. This paper analyzes which strategies provide opportunities for democratic practice and details some of the lessons learned and limitations. These cases show that the differential abilities of communities to effectively participate in environmental governance is rooted in local histories of power inequality, in the resources that the local state and communities possess, in the networks to which they have access, and in their capacity to pursue alternative paths of development.