Corporate Capture Research Articles

The Rule of Law and Corporate Actors: Measuring Influence

AbstractThis article proposes an approach for conceptualizing and assessing the extent to which corporate actors impact the rule of law environment in different societies. To achieve this, the methodology for the Corporate Actors and the Rule of Law Index is developed based on a reimagined methodology derived from the Rule of Law Index by the World Justice Project, originally conceived in a state-centric manner. The methodology proposed in this article includes the following factors: preventing corporate capture and corporate contribution to structural inequality, corporate integrity and transparency, meaningful stakeholder engagement; order and security; impact on the regulatory sphere; corporate accountability for human rights abuses; access to grievance mechanisms. Measuring the influence of corporate actors on the rule of law and indicating the dynamic of this influence significantly contributes to the overall understanding of the rule of law environment. The absence of such measurement distorts the comprehension of the balance of power in a society, impedes the development of legal regulation, obstructs the identification of problematic issues in ensuring the rule of law, and hinders efforts to address them.

Agrarianizing climate accords & discord: food, agriculture & agrarian movements at UNFCCC Conference of the Parties

ABSTRACT How do agrarian justice movements factor into the UNFCCC annual global climate Conference of the Parties (COP)? How have they appeared and erupted, been excluded, appropriated, and barely allowed – over the years, and, in particular, at the 2022 COP27 and 2023 COP28? This paper asks and begins to answer these overlooked questions. In the heads-of-state negotiations, transnational agrifood, land, and labour issues do not take centre stage explicitly, but retain their power as irrefutable crises; agri-food topics finally commanded prominence as crux to climate governance – yet ripe for corporate capture . In the accords themselves, agrarian mobilizations again serve as the backdrop, marginalized via scalar and developmental discourses, epistemic devaluation, and political economies of agro-corporate dominance. In the actual conference, land-based, campesina/peasant/farmworker coalitions participate through the channels of Approved NGO Observer Organizations. Indigenous nations, at the heart of agrarian movements garner limited recognition of their outsized efficacy at agro/biodiversity stewardship and thus climate justice and survival. Yet, from these contested peripheries, agrarian struggles nevertheless manage to command attention, forge transnational coalitions, and, against great odds, set key terms for the COP talks themselves. Drawing on collaborative event ethnography and policy analysis, this paper traces the contours of this improbable – yet, from the long durée vantage: foreseeable – dynamic of agrarian coalition power expanding from the marginalized majority, at COP27, COP28, and beyond.

Rural social movement strategies confronting global food crises: ‘overcoming the crisis of capitalism or exiting altogether from capitalism in crisis?’

ABSTRACT This essay examines the impacts of global food crises on rural social movements (RSMs) and recalls the context of the capitalism in crisis within which their resistance efforts are situated. It reviews key areas of RSM action: building alternative practice, deconstructing dominant narratives, boosting organizational strength, deepening political education, mobilizing to win battles that impact peoples' livelihoods, expanding convergence among movements, and reclaiming governance from corporate capture. It suggests that the transformative potential of this multitude of activities might be further sharpened by setting them within a long-term strategy of contrasting and progressively supplanting the capitalist mode of organizing the economy and society.

Business as usual? Cannabis legalisation and agrarian change in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT This article examines the emerging legal cannabis sector in Zimbabwe since 2018, which focuses on medicinal and industrial cannabis with unlicenced uses remaining criminalised, as well as its implications for agrarian change. It shows that the formal sector is set up in a way that prioritises those with substantial resources – marginalising small-scale farmers and illicit cultivators. While this presents the risk of corporate capture, various factors combine to undermine agribusiness' production. However, prohibition of recreational cannabis and the formal sector’s focus on export markets combine to preserve illicit cannabis markets and allow continuation of illicit livelihoods.

Capture and corporate cooptation: the role of the Mexican Foundation for Health in public health policy

IntroductionCorporate capture responds to efforts to strengthen regulation or prohibition of commercial determinants of health [tobacco, alcohol, sugar-sweetened beverages, ultra-processed products (UPFs), commercial milk formula, and pharmaceuticals], in an attempt to interfere with public health policies that threaten the commercial, economic, and political interests of major industries. This manuscript proposes the characterization of the corporate capture of public health in Mexico, exercised through the Mexican Foundation for Health (FUNSALUD).MethodologyAn analysis of FUNSALUD and its stakeholders was carried out under the framework of commercial determinants of health, using a qualitative methodology, and executed in five stages: document analysis from 1985 to 2021; identification and characterization of stakeholders; semi-structured interviews; classification of corporate strategies; and relationship mapping.ResultsActors in the pharmaceutical, food, tobacco, alcohol, commercial milk formula, and sugar-sweetened beverage industries were identified as corporate members of FUNSALUD. We identify six corporate strategies used to interfere in public health and food policies, highlighting the role of a revolving door bureaucracy in the case of the Ministry of Health.ConclusionThe Mexican Foundation for Health has functioned as a front organization created by the private sector to influence public policy decision-making, protect corporate interests, and oppose international recommendations to combat non-communicable diseases.

AI for social good and the corporate capture of global development

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) movement, which aims to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). It argues that, through AI4SG, Big Tech is attempting to advance AI-driven technosolutionism within the development policy and scholarly space creating new opportunities for rent extraction. The article situates AI4SG, within the history of ICT4D. It also highlights the contiguity of AI4SG with the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), a framework that places AI and other digital innovations at the center of national and international development and industrial policy agendas. By exploring how Big Tech has attempted to depoliticize datafication, we thus suggest that AI4SG and 4IR are mutually reinforcing discourses that serve the purpose of depoliticizing the development arena by bestowing legitimacy and authority to Big Tech to reshape policy spaces and epistemic infrastructures while inserting themselves, to an unprecedented degree, between the citizen (data) and the state (development and policy).

Do the Results of Elections Represent the Will of the People?

This research paper explores the evolving concept of the "will of the people" in modern democracies and assesses the limitations of electoral democracy in representing this fluid will. Drawing on the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the author argues that the traditional view of the general will, which assumes homogeneity and a single common good, is no longer applicable in heterogeneous and diverse societies. Instead, the author proposes a new measure for the will of the people that acknowledges its fluidity and non-closure. The paper reconciles with the challenges of electoral democracy, including the presence of career politicians, citizen disengagement, and corporate capture, which hamper its ability to effectively represent the will of the people. In response to these limitations, the paper proposes sortition as an alternative approach to governance that promotes citizen engagement, diversity of representation, and responsiveness to the changing wills of the population. By embracing sortition and reimagining the role of elections, democracies can strive for a more representative and responsive democratic system that truly reflects the will of the people.

Modernising the ‘king of the road’: Pathways for just transitions for the Filipino jeepney

Transitioning to cleaner technologies and public transport service delivery are fundamental needs in addressing the climate crisis and realising mobility justice, especially in the Global South. But while low carbon transport is a vital element of meeting this demand, the transition process must be just and not disenfranchising to the thousands of informal transport workers who will be negatively affected by state transport modernisation programmes. This is why this research engages with the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program (PUVMP) in the Philippines, which aims to replace the so-called ‘king of the road’ called jeepneys with modern vehicles. These public utility vehicles (PUVs) are a major cultural icon in Philippine streets that served the riding public since the aftermath of World War II. But without receiving any technological and business innovations, they have become major targets for government intervention that are largely unaffordable to low-income jeepney drivers and operators. Through my interviews with Philippine government transport agencies, private sector representatives, and civil society organisations alongside a review of media coverages and policy and academic discourses, and participant observation, I navigated around the issues surrounding the PUVMP. This programme is largely seen by jeepney organisations and critical civil society organisations as means to phase out this Filipino cultural icon, an anti-poor measure, and a means for the corporate capture of the public transport sector. With these issues, the quest for just transitions through anchoring the PUVMP to having incremental changes, inclusive dialogues, and industry support serve as important considerations to ensure the sustainability and inclusivity of this programme, especially in the post-Covid 19 pandemic era.

Producing food utopia(s) at the UN Food Systems Summit: A thematic discourse analysis of Australia’s Summit Dialogues

Australia’s National Food Systems Summit Dialogues, held as part of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), are examined here as a case study exploring the production of utopian narratives within food systems governance. A large body of literature has critiqued the UNFSS on the basis of democratic governance and corporate capture, and some authors have also linked these critiques to the processes of knowledge production at the Summit. However, little research has examined these processes at a micro level, exploring the discursive means by which narratives about the food system are produced in multistakeholder governance contexts. Recognising the UNFSS as a site of struggle and contestation between various ‘utopian’ visions for the future food system, this article asks: What kind of food utopias were produced at the Dialogues, and how? Thematic discourse analysis of the Dialogues – focusing particularly on elements of critique, experimentation, and process – reveal two distinct food utopias, based on technologically-mediated sustainability and multistakeholder participation respectively. This analysis reveals the ways in which ‘utopian’ narratives about food and agriculture are discursively constructed according to ideological assumptions – and, as in this case, may end up reproducing the status quo food system rather than offering the possibility of transformative change.

The UN Committee on World Food Security: An opportunity to counter the ongoing corporate capture of FAO

The UN Committee on World Food Security: An opportunity to counter the ongoing corporate capture of FAO

Beyond Climate Due Diligence: Fossil Fuels, ‘Red Lines’ and Reparations

AbstractThe scale and scope of the climate crisis and its drastically worsening impacts means that even as a ‘climate due diligence’ obligation is increasingly taking shape as a dimension of human rights due diligence, there is also growing evidence of the limitations of this emerging norm. This article provides four critiques of climate due diligence based on its insufficiency, its conceptual ambiguity, its operational limitations, and its structural limitations. It argues that these critiques could be addressed by regulatory reform that draw clear ‘red lines’ based on the need to prevent the development of any new fossil fuel and address the ‘corporate capture’ of regulatory institutions by the fossil fuel industry. Additionally, it calls for reparations to ensure effective access to a remedy for existing and potential future climate-related human rights impacts that business has caused or contributed to.

Parity as radical pragmatism: Centering farm justice and agrarian expertise in agricultural policy

Rather than treating symptoms of a destructive agri-food system, agricultural policy, research, and advocacy need both to address the root causes of dysfunction and to learn from longstanding interventions to counter it. Specifically, this paper focuses on agricultural parity policies – farmer-led, government-enacted programs to secure a price floor and manage supply to prevent the economic and ecological devastation of unfettered corporate agro-capitalism. Though these programs remain off the radar in dominant policy, scholarship, and civil society activism, but in the past few years, vast swaths of humanity have mobilized in India to call for agri-food systems transformation through farmgate pricing and market protections. This paper asks what constitutes true farm justice and how it could be updated and expanded as an avenue for radically reimagining agriculture and thus food systems at large. Parity refers to both a pricing ratio to ensure livelihood, but also a broader farm justice movement built on principles of fair farmgate prices and cooperatively coordinated supply management. The programs and principles are now mostly considered “radical,” deemed inefficient, irrelevant, obsolete, and grievous government overeach—but from the vantage, we argue, of a system that profits from commodity crop overproduction and agroindustry consolidation. However, by examining parity through a producer-centric lens cognizant of farmers‘ ability, desire, and need to care for the land, ideas of price protection and supply coordination become foundational, so that farmers can make a dignified livelihood stewarding land and water while producing nourishing food. This paradox—that an agricultural governance principle can seem both radical and common sense, far-fetched and pragmatic—deserves attention and analysis. As overall numbers of farmers decline in Global North contexts, their voices dwindle from these conversations, leaving space for worldviews favoring de-agrarianization altogether. In Global South contexts maintaining robust farming populations, such policies for deliberate de-agrarianization bely an aggression toward rural and peasant ways of life and land tenure. Alongside the history of parity programs, principles, and movements in U.S., the paper will examine a vast version of a parity program in India – the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system, which Indian farmers defended and now struggle to expand into a legal right. From East India to the plains of the United States and beyond, parity principles and programs have the potential to offer a pragmatic direction for countering global agro-industrial corporate capture, along with its de-agrarianization, and environmental destruction. The paper explores what and why of parity programs and movements, even as it addresses the complexity of how international parity agreements would unfold. It ends with the need for global supply coordination grounded in food sovereignty and solidarity, and thus the methodological urgency of centering farm justice and agrarian expertise.

Deadwood: People, place, and neoliberal forest policy in British Columbia, Canada

This article describes the people and forests in traditional Secwépemc territory in the Interior Plateau of British Columbia (BC), Canada. It examines the intersection of neoliberal forest policy and profound ecological change in the south-central region of the province, with careful attention paid to the wider contexts of settler colonialism. The article critiques the implementation of forest policy reform (the Forest and Range Practices Act, enacted in 2004) as it coincided with one of the first major climate change events of landscape-altering magnitude in BC – the mountain pine beetle outbreak. Between 1998 and 2014, the outbreak resulted in tree mortality for roughly half of the mature lodgepole pine trees in the province. It left an expanse of ‘deadwood’ on the landscape, leading to heightened social and political conflict over how the beetle-affected areas were managed. Research methods include transcripts from a public hearing in Tk’emlúps/Kamloops, supplemented by eighteen semi-structured interviews. The article argues that the confluence of neoliberal forest policy and climate change has further entrenched the settler colonial and corporate capture of forests.

Concerns about the "corporate capture" of The Academy article.

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Variegated forms of corporate capture: The state, MNCs, and the dark side of strategic coupling

AbstractMainstream literature on global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs) has increasingly demonstrated how the state and political conjunctures play a central role in strategic coupling. Nonetheless, scholarly attention still remains on the role of firms and their strategies. By focusing on firms, GVC and GPN scholars often underestimate the influence that non‐firm actors such as the state have on strategic coupling, especially concerning its negative development implicationsits “dark side”. To contribute to this literature, this article proposes an approach and research agenda to examine how processes of corporate capture evolve via strategic coupling. This approach is based on the interplay of three variables: the strategic selectivity of states; the strategic action of firms; and states' predominant mode of insertion into GPNs. I argue that corporate capture is much more common and variegated in capitalist states and consequently in strategic coupling than often assumed in mainstream literature.

Environmental Procedures at the FCC: A Case Study in Corporate Capture

Environmental Procedures at the FCC: A Case Study in Corporate Capture

The corporate capture of the nutrition profession in the USA: the case of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

The involvement of unhealthy commodity corporations in health policy and research has been identified as an important commercial determinant contributing to the rise of non-communicable diseases. In the USA, health professional associations have been subject to corporate influence. This study explores the interactions between corporations and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), and their implications for the profession in the USA and globally. We conducted an inductive analysis of documents (2014-2020) obtained through freedom of information requests, to assess key AND actors' dealings with food, pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations. We also triangulated this information with publicly available data. The USA. Not applicable. The AND, AND Foundation (ANDF) and its key leaders have ongoing interactions with corporations. These include AND's leaders holding key positions in multinational food, pharmaceutical or agribusiness corporations, and AND accepting corporate financial contributions. We found the AND has invested funds in corporations such as Nestlé, PepsiCo and pharmaceutical companies, has discussed internal policies to fit industry needs and has had public positions favouring corporations. The documents reveal a symbiotic relationship between the AND, its Foundation and corporations. Corporations assist the AND and ANDF with financial contributions. AND acts as a pro-industry voice in some policy venues, and with public positions that clash with AND's mission to improve health globally.

Corporate Capture of the laws application in Colombia: a new form of capture for public policy actions

Abstract The law popularly known by the title ‘Junk Food’, was approved in Colombia in 2021 after years of advocacy from the Civil Society. Many authors as M. Mialon (2019, 2020, 2021) have documented the level of actions to intervene in the legislative space of the Parliament in Colombia created by the food industries to change the terms of the content of this law. Nowadays and after the approval of the text interpreted as a victory for Civil Society, Colombia is confronted with the re-regulation of the law, leading to a new form of capture: the capture of the spaces of decision-making actors in public health policy in the country. We present an analysis of the case from a follow-up study designed by our organization FIAN Colombia (human rights organization that advocates for the right to adequate food and nutrition). The data used in this process of monitoring and action research comes from the observational data of the advocacy scenario made during the debates of the law in the Colombian parliament, based on the proceedings of the work meetings with congressmen, academia and civil society. This research-action process makes it clear that the collective action of advocacy from civil society manages to mobilize conditions to denounce the corporate capture of decision-making spaces and the execution of public health policies, and generates pressures based on research free of conflict of interest to reduce this capture. Similarly, there is a capacity to demand accountability that was generated from this process in Colombia, and that turns out to be a pilot experience for other regions.

Corporate capture of public health by food industries in Europe

Abstract Corporate capture is the deliberately planned process whereby political decisions respond to a particular interest of a private nature, in detriment to the public interest. The result is an unjust regulation or the absence of regulation where this is necessary for the protection of the common good. Corporate capture of public health has to do with commercial determinants of health, such as alcohol, tobacco, sugar-sweetened beverages and ultra-processed foods. Capture-related actions are targeted at civil society, experts, public-health officials, civil servants and politicians. These actions range from material (corruption, revolving doors and donations to political parties) to intellectual (distortion of science and professional training), social (control of information and communication) and/or cultural (group identity, status and relationship of the regulator with the representatives of private corporations). The most common capture strategies are aimed at biasing scientific results, creating consumers from an early age, promoting a good image of corporations, questioning the legitimacy and appropriateness of governmental intervention aimed at regulating their activity, controlling professional education; and exerting pressure on governments and international bodies. To illustrate this phenomenon, we present findings from several examples of corporate capture of food policies in Europe. Preliminary results from publicly available information suggest that most of the mentioned tactics were used in Europe in order to block nutritional profiles, health warnings on food and effective food advertising regulations. We suggest implications for how European legislation can better protect European citizens, especially children, from vested interests aimed at promoting the consumption of unhealthy food and beverages.

2.H. Workshop: Commercial determinants and global capture of public health- cases spanning the world

Abstract Growing research around the globe shows that for-profit corporations incur increasingly adverse impacts on health and well-being of people, the planet and the global economy. Their health damaging products and practices fuel non-communicable disease epidemics, damage the earth's natural environment and interfere in health policy making. Such corporate interference in social and public health policy, research and practice is well documented for the pharmaceutical, tobacco, food and beverage, alcohol and arms industries. A commercial determinant lens allows a better understanding of heath inequalities by drawing attention to corporate actors and their tactics as drivers of ill-health rather than people's behaviors. This framework also makes it possible to present interventions to counter these influences. This workshop panel of 5 scholars and activists from around the world who are members of the Governance, Ethics and Conflict of Interest in Public Health Network serves to confirm the detrimental reach of industry practices and the global responses to this interference in public health. It aims to add to the emerging body of knowledge on commercial determinants of health using innovative research approaches and findings. The format is a series of 5 short sequential presentations, followed by an interactive discussion with the audience, moderated by the panel organizer. The presentations will showcase the research methods used including multi-stakeholder interviews, policy analyses, systems mapping and analyses of policy debates. The presentations will also document examples and cases of corporate capture of food industry in Europe, a global mapping of corporate systems, industry interference in health-protecting laws in Columbia, exploitation of humanitarian emergencies in Lebanon, and suggestions of ways forward to protect adults and children from industry vested interests with a Public Health Playbook. Key messages • Corporate interference in public health is a growing concern globally for its health harming influence on health systems and future generations. • Continued concerted research revealing overt and covert health harming industry practices is needed to counter their impact on PH in a world fraught with global challenges and uncertainty.