Hot grapes: How to locally redesign geographical indications to address the impact of climate change

Abstract

Geographical indications (GIs) represent the main legal framework for protecting the tie between site-specific food products and their places of production. Climate change recently emerged as a major challenge to the framework, uncovering its inaptitude to account for shifting product identities. Scholarly studies have so far debated the main ecological, cultural, and economic issues that climate change poses to GIs. But, they overlooked systemic conceptual problems affecting their legal framework. This paper uses philosophical tools typical of analytic metaphysics to provide an original conceptual framework for rethinking GIs. We begin with a recognition of the conceptual challenges that climate change poses to the legal framework for GIs. Next, we present our framework for GIs, articulating its internal dimensions while offering some examples. Finally, we appraise the functions that the framework can play in rethinking GIs: provide a broad and flexible theoretical structure, while also contributing to design new participatory strategies for deliberating about their identities, which involve a usually silenced class of stakeholders. Our work contributes to broadening the scopes and methods of philosophy as well as to complementing disciplines traditionally dealing with climate change, by supplying missing conceptual tools. The framework we lay out can be used as a proxy for rethinking GIs through new decision-making processes that carve out a role also for local actors and communities along with the usual stakeholders.