Peasants Negotiating a Global Policy Space ― La V??Campesina in the Committee on World Food Security

With members in 80 countries of the world, the global peasant movement La Vía Campesina (LVC) has planted itself firmly on the international scene. With a focus on agency (the capacity to act), this book explores the opportunities and challenges for mobilised peasants to engage directly in the global policy processes within the Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

Since the reform of the CFS in 2009, civil society actors engage in the policy processes of this UN Committee from a self-designed and autonomous global Civil Society Mechanism. Rather than analysing the La Vía Campesina’s relationship with the CFS from a ‘success-failure’ viewpoint, the book examines the strategies, tensions, debates, and reconfigurations arising from rural actors engaging in a UN Committee. Whereas the expectation of the dominant literature on social movement studies is that social movements will either disappear or institutionalise, the book presents empirical evidence that La Vía Campesina is building a much more sophisticated and democratic model.

The book sheds light on the interaction between social movement activists seeking to become actors (through participation and voice) and the conditions necessary for this to happen. In particular, the chapters reveal some of the challenges in achieving "full" participation in a formal UN Committee. The direct participation of representatives of peasant organisations in the CFS processes is highlighted as a pioneering example of a more complex, inclusive and democratic foundation for global policy-­making.

Ingeborg Gaarde is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS),? Paris, France She has over ten years of experience as an independent consultant and researcher and has worked with numerous international organisations?on issues surrounding global policy-making, social advocacy, participation?and negotiation.