Magicians at Work: Modellers as Institutional Entrepreneurs in the Global Governance of Agriculture and Food Security

Lise Cornilleau

doi:10.23987/sts.65187

Abstract

Global models of agriculture act as the epistemic basis for quantitative foresight, which guides international policymaking and research on agriculture. With the new political sociology of science as a backdrop, this article studies the actors who develop and use these models through the lens of field theory. Contributing to the dialogue between the neo-institutionalist field theory and its Bourdieusian version, it describes the structure and the dynamics of the strategic action field of modelling organizations, using the Bourdieusian notions of “succession” and “subversion” to refine the characterization of challengers. It also discusses the insights of the Bourdieusian concept of “homology” to analyse the relations between the field of model producers and the field of model users. Whereas Bourdieu provides a primarily descriptive account of homologies, which are close to a “social magic without magicians” for Roueff, the present text describes magicians doing the work of producing homologies. Some modellers use intercomparison to reduce competition and to have their models used in the field of global governance, thus strategically producing homologies, while resolving the main modelling conflict of the field. These actors benefit from the recent change in the modelling field under the influence of climate change, to behave as what Fligstein and McAdam have called “institutional entrepreneurs”. The article concludes that this amended version of field theory makes it possible to describe the co-construction of a range of models developed by competing organizations and the controversial making of global agricultural governance. Doing so, it complements the co-production framework, which often focuses on a given site of expertise production and a site of global governance.

Highlights

IntroductionA sudden rise in global agricultural prices (mainly grains) and massive acquisition of farmland by foreign investors hit several developing countries, and fanned the flames of political disputes in the so-called Arab Spring
The 2008 economic and financial crisis shook the agricultural sector
The accuracy of these models is under scrutiny by experts from the Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – a research institute in economics part of the Consultative Group in International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) – and more broadly within the academic field of agricultural economics, dominated by American, European, and Chinese universities

Summary

Introduction

A sudden rise in global agricultural prices (mainly grains) and massive acquisition of farmland by foreign investors hit several developing countries, and fanned the flames of political disputes in the so-called Arab Spring. This crisis reminded us of the vulnerability of agro-food systems that have become globalized. Climate change and the financialization of agricultural markets creates concerns that resource pressures, and resulting episodes of agricultural and food price volatility, would become more frequent In this troubled context, economic models of world agriculture are the primary knowledge tools that decision-makers use to reflect on the future of agriculture and to arbitrate between policy options at an international scale. If the role of models in the global governance of agriculture is crucial, they have received less focus than in the cases of finance (McKenzie, 2006) or climate change (Dahan, 2007)

Objectives

Conclusion