Private Autonomy-Public Authority? Boundary Contestation in Transnational Food Governance

The politicization of food and agricultural policy-making is a key goal for rural activists and their allies within the food sovereignty movement. This entails a problematisation of the market-public authority boundary that prevails within neoliberal conceptions of food and farming systems, and a demand for increased participation opportunities for ‘affected publics’ in transnational food and agricultural policy-making arrangements. Whilst opportunities for formal participation in institutional bodies such as the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) have arguably advanced some of these objectives, in this paper I argue that these opportunities are being undermined by an ongoing reification, amongst institutional actors, of this boundary. Indeed, its preservation is arguably encoded into the organisational model that is evident within such fora as the CFS: multi-stakeholderism. In this paper, using the analytical lens of ‘boundary contestation’, I explore some of these dynamics, and identify possible routes forward to their overcoming. Central, in this last regard, will be the struggle to promote reflexivity amongst institutional actors.