THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Introduction
This research will center on the representations of gender inside food security policies, how they
change while travelling between different scales of policymaking. This means addressing literature
from the nascent field of feminist food studies and centering on the over-specified term of food
security. Food security has been dubbed a problem of [economic] development, a gendered
problem, an ecological/environmental problem, among others. Having been in use in
intergovernmental policy contexts since the 1970s, definitions of food security abound. Similarly,
feminisms gained prominence in international governance organizations and policymaking during
the same period, resulting in different interactions between these two domains. The attention given
to these interactions between gender and food scholars has been meagre, providing fertile grounds
for further inspection.
A. Feminist Food Studies
In 2006 Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Harber called for the consolidation of a scholarly field
called feminist food studies. This is at the crossroads of two interdisciplinary fields, Gender and
Womens Studies and Food Studies. According to their diagnostic few scholars in food studies
brought a gendered or feminist perspective to their work on food, and feminist scholars focused
only on womens food pathologies (Avakian and Harber 2006:2). These authors attempt a
classification that shows how during the 1990s both fields converged, indicating how knowledge
has been gained from this interdisciplinary junction. Allen and Sachs (2007) try a similar endeavor,
attempting a more systematic classification and indicating three research domains that can be said
to ascribe to feminist food studies: the corporeal, the socio-cultural, and the material. I will describe
each of them arguing how they are generating conversations to which my research proposal wishes
to speak to.
Embodied politics
The first domain references embodied politics. As posited by J. K. Gibson-Graham, the body is
an overdetermined social location in which a multitude of social, political, physiological, and
discursive practices participate in constituting the act of starvation (1996, 96). One such discursive
practice is public policy. As Lucy Jarosz has argued, hunger is often used interchangeably with
Food security in intergovernmental policy platforms (2011:117). However, most of the literature
in this domain doesnt pay much attention to the construction of a bodily discourse through public
policy. Instead, it usually traces how the political economy of food commodification transforms
gendered bodies differently. For example, Susan Bordo (1990/1998) examines eating disorders
through a foucauldian discourse analysis that allows her to identify 'technologies of body
management': the intersection of discourses of femininity, mind-body dualism, and femininity
produce an array of phenomena such as dieting and eating disorders that transform womens
bodies in particular into docile bodies. Kathy Davis (1991) has a less grim view, focusing on how
women seek to change their bodies to empower themselves against institutional structures that are
more difficult to change individually, dealing with subjective encounters that define a persons
boundaries of ab/normality, d/efficiency, and in/justice. In sum, it can be said that this domain
draws attention to how the agrifood system has consequences on the human body through
gendered difference.
This lack in the literature is stressed by Gibson-Graham (1996:97): Given the centrality of the
economy to modernist social representations it is necessary to defamiliarize the economy as

feminists have denaturalized the body, as one step toward generating alternative social conceptions
and allowing new political subjectivities to be born. In as much as food security is deemed an
economic problem, the authors post-development stance can be assimilated. It is significant to
follow suit from feminists scholarship on the politics of the disordered/ing individual body, and
apply it to the social/economic body, allowing its reimagination/denaturalization for new political
subjectivities to emerge.
Susan Buck-Morss makes a similar call, advocating for research that offers a critical vision of the
social body that, as a result of economic interdependence, offers (new) political alternatives. She
sheds some light on how to do this. One example interesting for this research proposal, BuckMorss detects a paradox in the logic behind the idea of the laboring man described in Adam
Smiths The Wealth of Nations, one of the founding texts of contemporary economics; that each
real body is stunted in order for the social body to prosper (1995:448). Albeit speaking
metaphorically, the desiring contradictions of the dichotomous model of the economic subject
that she diagnoses as schizophrenic1, the measurement of the growth/prosperity of the individual
and social bodies has been the concern of interdisciplinary research, sometimes referred to as
auxology. The stunting of bodies while augmenting wealth has occurred, revealing nutrition-laden
class inequalities, although it has been positively correlated during most of the 20th century (Fogel
2004:34ff; Floud et al 2011:34ff). In this way, embodied wealth points to the structural imbalance
where class difference is the by-product of national wealth and it is class difference that
determines ones power in the marketplace, including the power to bargain effectively for the price
of ones own labor (Buck-Morss 1995:449).
Auxology, an accompanying multidisciplinary, although subsidiary field of human development,
has consolidated around the idea that biophysical growth and its measures (commonly height and
weight) mirror nutritional status, health and wealth, as well as socioeconomic and political
conditions. Thus, human development literature argues that the human body can be a measure of
development, both economic and otherwise. For example, Floud et al (2011) present the argument
that development can be embodied, as they deal with the evolution of anthropometric indicators
as explanatory variables of economic success, or as proxies themselves of wealth gains. From a
less critical angle than those of Buck-Morss or Gibson-Graham, technology-Darwinian arguments
about technophysio evolution are made by this school Fogel and Costa (1997), Fogel (2004),
Baten and Carson (2010), Baltzer and Baten (2007); Floud et al (2011). The accelerated
transformation of the human since the 18th century (changes in the size, shape, and capabilities of
the human body) is explained by this research as the consequence of technological change,
particularly in food production and distribution, as well as combating disease.
This literature advances that it is changes in the global food system, and not individual choice the
principal driver of the long term caloric energy imbalances leading to malnourishment. In
particular, nutritional status tends to reflect conditions on food in/security, and allow to describe
power relations, including gendered differences. The common grounds of the disciplines invested
in this research is the use of energy as a metaphor allowing for the mechanization of life. More
explicitly, they hold the premise that all living beings convert energy into work: Human beings,
1

Explicitly, Buck-Morss puts defends the thesis that self-discipline is required of the producer, and insatiable
desire is required of the consumer; but since they are the same person the construction of the economic subject
is nothing short of schizophrenic (1995:454). This diagnosis was also noted famously by Deleuze and Guattari
in the two volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This confluence is brought forward by J.K. Gibson-Graham
(1996). That there is a latent bodily ontology in the theory of value is explicated by Foucault (1975The order of
things). According to Amariglio there is a predominance of bodily desire in Marxism while Neoclassical
economics emphasizes its labouring aspects (1988:585). Buck-Morss seems to find a more complex depiction,
both desiring and labouring, in Adam Smiths writings.

from conception to death, take in energy in the form of food and warmth and expend it in body
maintenance, growth, exercise, and work both physical and intellectual (Fogel et al 2011:3).
Although this last literature has incorporated some critiques from feminist economics,
measurement of the human body continues to be substantively male inside the economicdominated field of development. For practical reasons or other biases, the teleology of
development imposes men as the measure of the human. That the privileged productive male body
is the measure of all others can be read in the following passage:
[In] rich countries today, around 1,800 to 2,600 calories of energy are available for work
of an adult male ages 20-39. Note that calories for females, children, and the aged are
converted into equivalent males aged 20-39, called consuming units, to standardize the
age and sex distributions of each population. This means that if females aged 15-19
consume on average 0.78 of the calories consumed on average by males aged 20-39, they
are considered 0.78 of a male aged 20-39, insofar as caloric consumption is concerned, or
78 percent of a consuming unit (Fogel 2004:10-11)
This point is made fiercely in the Feminist Critique of Political Economy made by Gibson-Graham
(1996:101ff). They are keen to point out that this (as any theory about the economy) is a gendered
construction: Man's body, constituted as an organism structured by a life force that produces
order from within, became at this time the modern episteme, setting unspoken rules of discursive
practice that invisibly unified and constrained the multifarious and divergent discourses of the
physical, life, and social sciences2 (p.101-102).
Another critical angle to this discourse comes from the intersection of science and technology
studies with poststructuralist economics. Attention is given to the discursive production of the
body inside economic discourse, a project started by Jack Amariglio (1988). This is the case of
Philip Mirowski, who states that natural philosophers created a system of accounts or evaluation
stemming from their economic milieu (1989:106). Mirowski presents a genealogy of economics
and physics by tracing the concept of energy as a metaphor. This is to say, the discourse of the
body has been constructed in connection to those of physics and economics since Foucaults
classical period. In such a context, anthropomorphics is a metaphor constructed in relation to
those of motion and value, which have discursively distantiated since the seventeenth century.
Body/motion characterizes symmetry of energy, the body/value face will prove in many respects
the most controversial aspect, because it is responsible for the less-acknowledged
anthropomorphic and social character of the energy concept, the religious overtones and the
cultural influences so often spurned as the opposite of scientific argument (Mirowski 1989:108).
The body began then to be imagined as a machine that transforms energy, from food to work. It
is thus important to acknowledge in this research that there are discursive strategies at play in the
production of texts that aim to manage populations, which relate the body with economics and
physics, food being the common term.
This field of research has been advanced recently shifting the geographical focus by Latin
American scholars (Roldan 2010, McGraw 2007). Stephan Pohl-Valero has pursued this enquiry
with an emphasis on the Colombian context, offering a framework of analysis of the body-as-amachine (both human and social) through the categories of nutrition and race. This describes a
2

They are building on Foucaults idea that the emergence of Man and his body as the grounds for disciplinary
knowledge as stated in The Order of Things. Amariglio (1988), an economist who made efforts to bring
Foucaults analysis into Economics is cited frequently by Gibson-Graham.

project of social engineering [that] began to take shape in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, when Colombian doctors, engineers, and lawyers were building a nascent field of
knowledge about work that appropriated and articulated notions of thermodynamics, medical
physics, political economy, and laboratory physiology (Pohl-Valero 2014:456). The importance
of a balanced diet that would optimize the productive national and individual body is analyzed by
this author through the lens of race. Like in Mirowskis work, this literature has not employed a
gender lens systematically despite its apparent relevance (Pohl-Valero:460; Mirowski 2002:282;
Gibson-Graham:101). This lack will be addressed and further developed in the CEE.
In sum, the domain of embodied politics can be further enriched by the building on the
subdomains described above. As Allen and Sachs (2007) proposed, this domain inside feminist
food studies can expand outside from body discontent and the production of eating disorders. The
present research proposal seeks to investigate how the above literature about embodiment can
unite into an analysis of the food security discourse inside contemporary policy texts, including a
comparative historical element. If knowledge about the human and social bodies continuous to be
about ordering and measuring, the production of food security policies can be studied as an
apparatus/dispositif of present day biopolitics. Policy discourses that speak of how the ideal body
is to be constructed and that evaluates how the present bodies of the populations they seek to
govern are, can and should be studied through a gender lens that unearths subjacent
discriminations that perpetuate inequality.
FOR THE CEE
diet became a field of research and a social intervention articulated in the languagesimultaneously
natural and culturalof the energy-centric physiology of nutrition and through a particular conception of
heredity that, within the field of childcare (or, as I will discuss below, what experts called puericulture),
suggested that the human machines optimization for work was a heritable condition (Pohl-Valero:460)
began to take shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Colombian doctors, engineers, and
lawyers were building a nascent field of knowledge about work that appropriated and articulated notions of
thermodynamics, medical physics, political economy, and laboratory physiology. At the heart of this
research we find the pursuit of an ideal that sought to optimize workers productivity from an energy-centric
point of view; in it, diet began to be understood primarily as the energy sourcemeasured using the
thermodynamic unit of caloriesneeded for the human machine to work efficiently.

Roldn, Diego P. 2010. Discursos alrededor del cuerpo, la mquina, la energa y la fatiga:
Hibridaciones culturales en la Argentina fin-de-siecle. Historia, Ciencias, Sade -Manguinhos 17,
no. 3: 643-61.
McGraw, Jason. 2007. Purificar la nacin: Eugenesia, higiene y renovacin moral-racial
de la periferia del Caribe colombiano, 1900-1930. Translated by Marcela
Echeverri. Revista de Estudios Sociales, no. 27: 62-75.

Discerning bodies in economic discourse

The body in modern economic discourse (Amariglio and Ruccio)
Skeptical reflections on flat bodies and heavy metal
Gendered subjectivities in neoclassical economics
The disavowal of the sexed body in neoclassical economic (HEWITSON

These bodies of literature have the possibility of joining in this bodily domain of embodied
politics inside the field of feminist food studies critically addressing gender in the
construction of bodily identities inside food policy texts. This research intends to do
precisely this, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The socio-cultural domain
The socio-cultural domain that Allen and Sachs (2007) identify focuses on studies that inquire how
women are constructed as responsible of food provisioning inside the household without being
equally represented in food spaces outside domestic labor. Concomitantly, care through nourishing
forges womens subjectivities in their social spaces and reproduce culture. Anthropology of food
pioneered this domain although geography, and political ecology within it, have cultivated gender
analysis. Uma Narayan (1995) is a notable example, where food is located across and within cultural
spaces, centering her analysis on colonized-colonizer relations. Narayan shows how the British
mission to civilize India came along a motley attempt to incorporate the Indian-Other into the
Colonial Self, in a similar fashion as a variety of plates from Tamil speaking cuisines got grouped
into the term curry, later turned into a British spice from India that no Indian had ever imagined.
She also remarks how gender roles continue to be implicated in the scripts of their respective
nationalisms and cultural identities (1995:72). Just as for Narayan the influence of the colonies
on colonizing powers is as complicated a matter as the impact of the colonizers on their colonies
(1995:67), this domain will provide a useful conversation to approach the multilayered ways in
which global policies affect the making of local ones.
Vandana Shiva, a relevant figure of Ecofeminism, has raised her voice against the ways in which
global designs affect ex-colonial communities. Shiva has advanced a view where women, specially
from the third world, have been traditional food providers, and such a role has been much valued
in sustainable cultures (1988; 2000). Shiva has codified that the sustainable representation of nature
is that of the mother (2000:50ff), as against the patriarchal view of development rhetoric that
negates natures capacity of regeneration and engendering (bio)diversity (1988:1ff).
The criticisms against this essentialist vision of women and the environment is summarized by
Nightingale (2006:4ff). Shivas assumption that women are closer to nature and strive for its
protection, although important to spur a global womens environmental movement, ignored very
real differences that exist between women and worse, rely on the notion of an essential female
nature (Nightingale 2006:5). Women are depicted as an almost homogenous lot, sharing the
sympathy and understanding of environmental change. However, the environmental knowledge
of rural women was esteemed critical and decisive. Culturally-specific gender roles, the same as the
practices of men and women in relation to their agro-environment, became relevant for political
economic analysis.
In Bioparacy Shiva seems to incorporate some of the criticisms, while arguing that there is a
capitalistic logic at play that labels matter as nature that enables the expropriation of resources
from those who would otherwise claim it theirs. Sustainable communities, and women in
particular, are usually guardians of biodiversity, medicinal knowledge and practices, seeds, and
genes, which are now being patented by institutions for commercial use and away from those who
could otherwise claim them as their own: indigenous communities, patients, countries, etc.
Biopiracy is thus a natural right of Western corporations, necessary for the development of
Third World communities over the new colonial frontier that are the interior spaces of the
bodies of women, plants, and animals (Shiva 1998:11). In such refashioning, Shiva continues to

argue with passion that the global food system is highly corporatized and technology invested,
allowing for the domination of Western Technological Man through the anti-feminine principles
of modernization and development, subsequently exploiting and subjugating both women and
nature. In particular, she has exposed what can be called a biopolitical apparatus/dispositif she
labels bioparacy3.

1. Vandana Shiva (2000) Stolen Harvest

The notion of activity being purely male was constructed on the separation of the earth from the
see, and on the association of an inert and empty earth with the passivity of the female. The
symbols of the seed and the earth, therefore, undergo a metamorphosis when cast in a patriarchal
mould; gender relations as well as our perception of nature and its regeneration are also
restructured (1998:47-48)
2.
3.
4.
5.

Andrea Nightingale against Shiva

Rossi Braidotti against Shiva
Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2013; 2014), Hayes-Conroy and Sweet (2014)
Raj Patel

Women and girls are disproportionately disempowered through current processes and politics of
food production, consumption, and distribution. This isnt an accident. Capitalisms gendered
division of labor removed women from the workplace, prohibiting women from teaching, healing,
and engaging in science for centuries. Even though the barriers to womens participation in the
workplace are being dismantled, were very far from equality. The average wage [for women] is 78
cents on the dollar in the U.S., and worse elsewhere. That process isnt natural. It was created and
built through history for women to be excluded from the workplace and only to be brought in
during certain times, such as war. 2014, Food Sovereignty as Decolonization, you talk about
how European colonization of North America attacked Indigenous womens roles, status, and
knowledge of food. Women held immense knowledge about harvesting, use, stewardship,
processing, and promotion of medicinal plants. Women have not always been traditionally in the
home, so to speak.

Andrea Nightingale has inquired how gender inequalities are sustained in places where women
assume the greater part of agricultural work, throughout her fieldwork in rural Nepalese
communities.
. Inequalities between men and women are not only a consequence of environmental issues,
gender is a cause of environmental change in the sense that gender is inextricably linked to how
environments are produced. When gender is conceptualised as a process, the complex interplay
between gender, environment and other relevant aspects of social and cultural processes can be
analyzed (Nightingale 2006:2).

Shiva does not ascribe to a post-structural or foucauldian position. However, I consider that her analysis can
be phrased in such a way, contributing to the biopolitical framework of my proposal. This potential has been
also recognized by Braidotti, who stresses that the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference
(woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy (2013:111).

Following Shiva, Rossi Braidotti advances that Environmental theory stresses the link between
the humanistic emphasis on Man as the measure of all things and the domination and exploitation
of nature and condemns the abuses of science and technology. Both of them involve epistemic
and physical violence over the structural others and are related to the European Enlightenment
ideal of reason. The worldview which equated Mastery with rational scientific control over
others also militated against the respect for the diversity of living matters and of human cultures
(2013:48). Similarly contemporary capitalism is bio-political in that it aims at controlling all that
lives. It has already turned into a form of bio-piracy (Shiva, 1997), because it exploits the
generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells (2013:95)
Vandana Shiva (1997) stresses the extent to which bio-power has already turned into a form of
biopiracy, which calls for very grounded and concrete political analyses.
Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy. The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge.
Boston, MA: South End Press.

While women remain responsible for food provision in the home, the nature of this caring work
of feeding others has shifted over time. Few families or individuals in households eat all of their
meals together. Household members who work, go to school, or spend time outside the home
often eat breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner away from home in restaurants, cafeterias, or
other food establishments.

Feminist theory has made multiple strides in examining the intersections between gender, race,
ethnicity and class (Narayan 1995; hooks 1998). Rather than viewing women as a unified category,
awareness of this intersectionality provides a more complex stance to understand women's work
and lives. These intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class define who does what work in
the food systems and under what conditions.
Regardless of culture, class, or ethnicity, the majority of women cook and serve food for their
familiesa cultural universal of care and sustenance.
Food work is not merely physical but involves relentless mental and caring laborplanning meals,
worrying about nutrition, and arranging and serving meals (DeVault 1991).
In solving the food-provision puzzle women typically select food that pleases other family
members, especially their husbands (Sutor and Barbour 1975; Burt and Hertzler 1978; Schafer
and Bohlen 1977).
Thus, although women choose the food from supermarket shelves, their decisions often reflect
the preferences of others. And, if they make the "wrong" decision, tension, arguments, or
violence may ensue. As with other household work, women experience a fundamental
ambivalence between the tedium and marginalizing aspects of their work and the love and caring
they feel for their families.

The material domain

["material domain" which I find closer to what i'm doing.]

The third domain is concerned with the material aspects of gender relations throughout the food
system, focusing on who controls what while others become or remain vulnerable. This has been
done, for example, through commodity chain analysis and the sociology of agriculture.
A

commodity chain traces the links between the set of processes and actors along a chain that are

involved in transforming a resource or set of component parts into a finished commodity, which is
finally
distributed
to
consumers.
See
more
at:
http://www.genderanddevelopment.org/page/gendered-commodity-chainsreview#sthash.5sF6GAel.dpuf

1. Stephanie Ware Barrientos gendered commodity chain analysis

The authors observe that the globalization of production has opened up opportunities for women
to enter new areas of paid employment, earn an income, gain independence and participate more
actively in social life. But it has also created new challenges, as much of this employment is
informal, with poor working conditions and a lack of labour rights, and has to be carried out in
addition to household and family responsibilities. The globalization of production is increasingly
based on integrated global value chains, in which there are direct linkages between production,
distribution and retailing. A continuum is emerging between formal and informal work in global
production. Gender inequality arises because men are more likely to be concentrated towards the
formal end of the continuum and women towards the informal end (with some exceptions)
(Barrientos, Kabeer, Hossein 2004:v).
Globalization has changed the role that the various stakeholders can play in supporting more
gender-sensitive policies involving government, the private sector, trade unions and other civil
society organizations [MISSING OBJECT] to develop more joined up policy initiatives that
are gender sensitive and take into account the changing roles of women in the world of work and
at home (2004:2)
2. Aihwa Ong (?)
3.

the gendered construction of production and consumption practices remains a major omission in the
debates over the relationship between production and consumption (Lockie and Kitto 2000). Studies
of consumption in the sociology of agriculture typically view consumers as ungendered subjects. This
focus on consumption is driven by a shift in the politics of resistance in the food system.
Barrientos demonstrates that there is underestimation of female work in agriculture as labour
flexibilization policies allow female temporary engagement in low wage industries such as fruit production
in Chile to meet the fruit needs of the Northern hemispheres appetite for off-season crops during winter.

Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966), claims that policy makers have to avoid violating food
taboos in order to make policies implementable.
mainstream eaters would remain privileged consumers, benefitting from the structural inequalities
and unpleasant material realities that often form the contexts in which ethnic food is produced
and consumed
Narayan (2013[1997]:159ff) argues food allows to think about how colonial and postcolonial
identities are formed. She engages in a comparative examination of both location and time (IndiaGreat Britan and colonial vs post-colonial times) to put forward her thesis on food colonialism

and culinary imperialism as aiding the construction of identities in contemporary societies,

specifically ethnic identities in Western countries.
Inside food studies Marion Nestl, founder of such a department at NYU says

Andrea Cornwall explores the emergence within dominant development discourse of particular
ways of thinking about the causes of and solutions to poverty. It traces and situates shifting
narratives on poverty, from the growth discourse, to poverty reduction using a basic needs
approach, to the neo-liberal approaches reflected in Structural Adjustment Porgrammes and Social
Funds, to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which place poverty reduction at the centre stage of
policy frameworks.
.. she calls for an examination of the what she terms new policy spaces, including ex-/inclusion
dynamics.

[describe what has been done from that 'domain' that is pretty much the precedent of my research]

Feminist critical geography and political ecology overlap in order to advanced this call. Building on the

contributions of feminist political ecology, Jarosz shows how, parallel to the changes in the global
food system, the (geographically) scaled definitions of food security have also varied in
international food policy. If food security was initially conceived of as a population problem as it
became a popular term during the 1970s in the international development agenda, where
governments were prompted to act jointly or at the national level, it has since then shifted its focus
to the household and to gendered individuals. Ultimately, scale is constructed so that it is
embodied by the gendered individualthe poor rural woman in the ambiguous position of being
necessary to the attainment of food security through her gendered responsibilities, but who also
threatens food security by contributing to population growth (Jarosz 2011: 128).
Through a poststructuralist discourse analysis, Jarosz investigates how international policy has
constructed food security as a concept in terms of geographical scale and gender. By reading
relevant policy documents of the FAO and the World Bank she traces how global food security
policies have shifted the focus of policy action from the global to the gendered individual,
privileging economic growth policies over ending hunger. Women become pivotal to eradicating
world hunger as they become responsible for the increase agricultural output in order to attain
their own way out of hunger and at the same time responsible of reducing population growth
(Jarosz 2011:127-131). Acknowledging that efforts to include women from these two international
governing institutions into their analysis is important, Jarosz political-ecological lenses pin-point
that hunger becomes an individual concerned with economic and technical solutions while erasing
any link to the political economy of access to resources [rephrase].

Variations in body size were a principal means of adjusting the population to variations in the
food supply (Fogel 2004:16).
This conflict between vigorous economic growth and very limited improvements or
reversals in the nutritional status and health of the majority of the population suggest that
the modernization of the nineteenth century were a precondition for the remarkable

achievements of the twentieth century, including the unprecedented improvements in the

condition of life experienced by ordinary people (Fogel 2004:19).

What Fogel calls the second Agricultural Revolution started around A.D. 1700,
coincidental with the expansion/solidification of colonialism.
B. POLITICAL SCIENCE
Policy networks and epistemic communities
1. Epistemic communities are less a "new" international actor or unit of analysis than they are
a vehicle for the development of insightful theoretical premises about the creation of
collective interpretation and choice. (Adler and Haas 1992:368)

This research is concerned about global connections and the production of difference. The
emergence of Bogotas local policy is committed to reproducing the global design while at the
same time acknowledging and claiming its local specificities. It is interested in the local-to-global
networks of power and meaning.
[identify the gap in the literature, then restate my main question]
Building on this analysis, I propose to investigate not only the shifts of scale inside food policy
discourse, but also how food policy discourse varies according to policy-making scale. Jarosz
names few examples of countries with the assumptions that World Bank recommendations were
enforced without paying attention to the national reconfigurations of FAOs food security policy
guidelines. As she mentions, by the 1990s, food security is indistinguishable from neoliberal
development discourse, which emphasizes competitive entrepreneurial individuality, deregulation
of international trade, an economistic definition of poverty alleviation, and the privatization and
downsizing of social services (2011: 130-131). I propose to do a similar analysis, but paying close
attention to the Colombian case, where national and municipal-scaled policies were produced.

In contrast to neofunctionalism, however, we do not

seek to explain the processes by which authority is transferred from the
nation-state to international institutions as problems become more technical
and amenable to the creation of scientifically based common meanings. And we
are not merely interested in analyzing scientific and political styles of thought
as they combine to create various types of world order.11 Instead, we regard
learning as a process that has to do more with politics than with science, turning
the study of political process into a question about who learns what, when, to
whose benefit, and why. (Haas+:370)
we adopt an
ontology that embraces historical, interpretive factors, as well as structural
forces, explaining change in a dynamic way.
how it stands along other literature

Feminist political ecology [resource access issues are deeply embedded in social relations that are
gendered, classed, raced ad power-laden (Jarosz 2011: 130)]

Agarwal, B. 1992. The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India. Feminist
Studies 18: 11957

Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B. and Wangari, E. 1996. Feminist Political Ecology.

Routledge.
Schroeder, R. 1999. Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in the Gambia. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Andrea Nightingale
Andrea Cornwall [poverty/development, participatory methods, gender, policy spaces]

Decolonial contributions
the politics of knowledge generation as systematic acts of governing, reducing and controlling
knowledges and bodies that do not subscribed to a Western cannon. The Catholic Church, western
science and mainstream academia were constantly mentioned as sources of techniques of control.

Contributions from Queer Ecologies

What are the toxic residues of unrecognized or unacknowledged polluted politics that continue to reassert the normalized body and the naturalized environment and therefore impede the potential for forging
coalition politics that move us toward a more just, green, and sustainable future? (Giovanna Di Chiro)
explore the impact of environmental changes on bodies, peoples resistances, living and flourishing in the
face of major environmental destruction and climate change. We are interested in how does gender,
sexuality and race play out in these changing environments/ landscapes? How can we form different
imaginaries and think more creatively about research that queers (cracks open) ecology as it is understood
in ecofeminism, science, development, politics and social movements? How do we understand the
emotions, the fears, the changes on our bodies, desires sense of past, present and future? How can we stay
with the troubles transhumanism, toxic waste, military and economic violence, embrace messy and
multiple identities and labels while searching for a collective sense of flourishing, learning from different
conversations, political, cultural and social positionings and imaginaries?

Where development studies stand

Development and the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) since the 1990s, their
renewed agenda. The role of the promotion of gender equality (third MDG) and women
empowerment. How it became transversal along development projects, how it has been
incorporated into World Bank conditional transfers, how it has impact evaluation (the difficulties of
implementation, monitoring and assessment). The particularities of gendering food security projects.
(check who is Klasen, 2005). Gender is now a focus point in most development projects, also in
agricultural and rural development projects (Lambrecht, Vanlauwe, and Maertens 2014:3)