Suchergebnisse

(PRODUCT)RED™ (hereafter RED) is a cobranding initiative launched in 2006 by the aid celebrity Bono to raise money from product sales to support The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In this paper we argue that RED is shifting the boundaries of 'causumerism' (shopping for a better world) by enrolling consumers in ways that do not rely on accurate knowledge of the products or specific understanding of the cause that The Global Fund engages but, instead, rely on a system of more general, affective affinity between the 'aid celebrities' who are behind RED (such as Bono) and the consumers who buy iconic brand products to help 'distant others'. While in many other forms of causumerism, labels or certification systems 'prove' that a product is just, in RED, aid celebrities provide the proof. From the consumer point of view both labels and celebrities provide a similar simplification of complex social, economic, and environmental processes. At the same time, we argue that there are important distinctions as well—labels and certifications are ultimately about improving the conditions of production, whereas RED is about accepting existing production and trade systems and donating a proportion of sales income to help distant others in Africa. The iconic brands sitting under the RED umbrella also play an important role as they offer a consistent and known venue for channeling consumer affect. We argue that celebrity validation, backed up by iconic brands, facilitates at least three shifts in the realm of causumerism: from 'conscious consumption' (mainly based on product-related information) to 'compassionate consumption' (mainly based on the management of consumer affect); from attention to the product and its production process toward the medical treatment of the 'people with the problem' (AIDS patients in Africa); and from addressing the causes of problems to solving their manifestations.

Redistributive processes do not belong to the pantheon of Neo-liberalism. In this framework, inequality of resources can only be addressed by equality of opportunity. Even in 'softer' impersonations of Neo-liberalism, corporate (mis)behaviour is tamed by corporate social responsibility, not by state disciplinary action. Yet, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, the state can not ignore political pressure for redistribution, even if only rhetorically. The process of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt at marrying redistribution and Neo-liberal economic policy. The South African state, however, has different degrees of power to force real or imagined redistributive efforts in different sectors of the economy. Fisheries – along with energy, telecommunications, and mining – is one of the sectors where the allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the state theoretically more likely to be successful in achieving BEE. In this paper, we examine redistributive processes in the hake deep-sea trawl (HDST) industry through a historical analysis of the principles, narratives and management systems that have been used to identify certain groups as 'legitimate fishers' since the late nineteenth century. We place this evolution as a background for a nuanced understanding of the first allocation of long-term fishing rights that took place in early 2006. We conclude that BEE, despite ist formal intentions, is doubly conducive to the interests of large-scale South African capital – for which investment in fishing is only one among many others. First, it has largely confirmed the historical share of fishing rights to incumbent, largely white-controlled, operators. It has also allowed for the more flexible allocation of rights via the market in response to changing environmental, economic and social conditions. Second, BEE has created a new layer of 'black captains of industry' to whom incumbent players are increasingly outsourcing primary production in a volatile, high-risk, and currently loss-leading sector. While fishing operations are being outsourced under the banner of redistribution, fish trade is still effectively controlled downstream by white capital through logistics, distribution, marketing and branding assets.

Standards are replacing tariffs as the main trade barriers facing African agro-food exports. This book examines the challenges and opportunities that new public and private standards present to African countries - focusing on food safety, environmental and climate change, and social and labour standards.

AbstractPower is a central, but largely undertheorized, concept for scholars of global value chains (GVCs). In this introduction to a special issue on power and inequality in GVCs, the authors summarize the key insights from the articles gathered here and explain how the collection advances our understanding of the types and forms of power operating in GVCs and their effect on different dimensions of inequality.

AbstractThere is increasing interest in the study of globalization on whether the emergence and consolidation of global value chains (GVCs) have exacerbated inequalities within and across nations and/or how GVCs may be leveraged to mitigate them. Although power asymmetries have been identified as a central factor shaping (un)successful GVC participation, dominant discourses still disregard the links between power and inequality or use these concepts interchangeably. In this article, we provide an analytical approach to GVC‐related inequalities (within, along and through value chains) and examine how they may co‐evolve with different types of power (bargaining, demonstrative, institutional and constitutive). We apply this approach to the case study of the hake value chain in South Africa to illustrate how existing inequalities are manifested, challenged, mitigated or exacerbated—and draw an agenda for future research.

AbstractThe changing shape of sustainability governance has been a key academic and policy concern in the past two decades, as part of a wider debate on the interactions between public and private authority in governing the economy, society, and the environment. In this article, we contribute to these debates by examining how these interactions operate locally and across jurisdictions in three conservation and development initiatives in Tanzania and what impact they have on the functional quality of sustainability governance. We find that clear division of responsibilities, coupled with material incentives for communities and equal and transparent distribution of benefits, are key positive contributors to functional quality. These factors underpin the complementary interactions (collaborative at the local level; institutional layering across jurisdictions) that are needed to successfully negotiate and implement the compromises needed to balance conservation and development goals. We also find that competitive dynamics are harmful to functional quality, especially those taking the form of local institutional duplication and of dominance by central government across jurisdictions. These tend to appear especially when sustainability initiatives involve multiple stakeholders with wide discrepancies in resources, interests, and power, which leads to compromises determined in a top‐down manner.

The authors show how certification assembles 'sustainable' territories through a complex layering of regulatory authority in which both government and nongovernment entities claim rule-making authority, sometimes working together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes competitively. It is argued that territorialisation is accomplished not just through (re)defining bounded space, but more broadly through the assembling of four elements: space, subjects, objects, and expertise. Four case studies of sustainability certification in seafood are analyzed to show that 'green gabbing' is not necessarily the central dynamic in assembling sustainable territories, and that certification always involves state agencies in determining how the key elements that comprise it are defined. Whereas some state agencies have been suspicious of sustainability certification, others have embraced it or even used it to extend their sovereignty.The authors call for more nuanced understandings of sustainability certification as made up of multiple logics beyond the market.

In November 2003, the South African wine industry held its first consultative conference on 'Black Empowerment'. The press reported to the world that the industry was at last entering 'the new South Africa'. For years, it had been a byword for white power and black exploitation – famous for the grim working conditions, poor wages, degrading institutions, and authoritarian, racist white farmers. In contrast to the past, when talk of change was the prerogative of white and male industry insiders, a wide range of industry stakeholders were invited, and the conference itself was dominated by new black faces and voices. A Wine Industry Plan was presented, in which 'Black Economic Empowerment' (BEE) figured as a central element. In this paper, we argue that far from representing a decisive break with the past, BEE in the wine industry is in important ways continuous with it. BEE allows the industry to avoid potentially more uncomfortable options to redress current and past race-based imbalances – such as land redistribution, import boycotts, and better working conditions for grape pickers. An essentialist racial discourse, pivoting on ahistorical and dislocated notions of 'blackness' has been used to displace the transformation agenda away from challenging the impoverishment of the many to ensuring the enrichment of the few. What commitment to farm worker interests remains is couched solidly in self-amelioration discourse (education, training, combating alcoholism) rather than on farm worker organization and the nature of the labour regime on wine farms. At the same time, marketing and codification technologies are deployed to move the terrain of restructuring from a political realm to a managerial one – where a small cohort of black entrepreneurs can operate with new legitimacy. This terrain is characterized by branding, advertising, image building on the one side; and by codes of conduct, a sectoral BEE charter, scorecards, and auditing on the other. In a way, these tools are allowing both the standardization and the de-racialisation of labour and social relations in the wine industry, an industry characterized by slavery and exploitation in the past, and by more or less benign paternalism in more recent history.