The Micropolitics of Transforming Global Food Governance: Food Sovereignty Movements in the UN Committee on World Food Security

This thesis is about the micropolitics of transforming food and agriculture governance institutions in a complex and uncertain world. For decades, food sovereignty movement actors have been mobilising to resist the privatisation of land, seeds, labour, culture and knowledge. Since 2010, they have been participating in policy negotiations inside the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) through an autonomous International Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism (CSIPM). The CFS is the only global food governance arena in which non-state actors have the formal right to participate in all stages of policy formation along with governments. This study shows how a locally rooted, yet globally extensive ‘movement of movements’ is doing governance differently, so that small-scale food providers and workers, who produce the majority of the world’s food, are directly heard in policy discussions.

The research was undertaken as an experimental praxis of working in solidarity with CSIPM participants over more than three years. I took part as a member of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) and the CSIPM Working Group on Facilitation, and as co-facilitator of the CSIPM Youth Working Group, contributing to an emergent methodology of ‘facilitating participation’.

Drawing on poststructuralist feminist, Indigenous, institutional, and social movement theories and practices, the thesis offers a micropolitical account of four key dimensions of transformative work:

• the micropolitics of grassroots participation in CFS policy processes
• discursive struggles over concepts like food security, markets, agroecology, and innovation
• the embodied, emotional, and affective experience of participation, including how the design of formal governance sites shapes deliberation
• relational practices of self- and collective reflexivity

While acknowledging the realities of grassroots struggles against transnational agribusiness, the thesis argues for an analytical approach that recognises the negotiability of power. It offers a hopeful story of an extraordinary experiment in transforming food governance, highlighting the collective agency of diverse actors who are doing governance differently.