Transnational Food Law

Transnational food law is a growing field of practice that has emerged with the globalization of food and agricultural systems. This chapter analyzes the role of food and agriculture as a legally constitutive site of struggle. As both a basic need and an economic commodity, food is an object around which struggles over the organization of markets, the authority of legal institutions, and the regulation of powerful actors have consistently fomented. After surveying the role of agrarian struggles in shaping early international law, this chapter analyzes the contentious regulatory space of transnational food security governance. It argues that contemporary governance is shaped by competing paradigms—a “productivist” and “food sovereignty” paradigm—which transnational actors struggle to translate across a variety of regulatory institutions, arenas, and processes. This chapter thereby demonstrates how food and agricultural governance remain a critical space of struggle over the democratic and regulatory possibilities of global governance.

When Market Organization Does Not Help: High Ambitions and Challenges in the Market for Eldercare

In this chapter, we discuss the organization of markets for publicly financed services, inspired by the model of the ‘perfect market’, with the Swedish eldercare sector as our example. We demonstrate how market organizers try to compensate for a malfunctioning price mechanism by gathering and disseminating information through the use of rules, membership, and monitoring. In trying to imitate the perfect market as closely as possible, regardless of the preferences of buyers and sellers, market organizers emphasized simplified and, most notably, comparable information. These attempts contributed to greater homogenization of eldercare services, thereby counteracting the greater diversity and customization that was an original aim of the marketization reform. The result is a market that satisfies neither its creators nor the eldercare users it was meant to serve.

Multiplicity, Complexity, and Recurrent Change

The empirical studies presented in the book are used to describe four types of market organizers observed—sellers, buyers, profiteers, and ‘others’—and to describe the elements of organization used. In the cases analysed most of the organization elements were used many times, to the extent that the term market bureaucracy is appropriate. Often market organization was supported with information and artefacts. The processes of market organizing and reorganizing were complex and dynamic. They involved several organizers with different interests, including organizations primarily active in other markets, recurrently or even perpetually reorganizing the market. Market organization often led to unintended consequences and met resistance, ideals of how to organize often shifted, and market organizers were more or less able to learn from their experience of organizing. The organization of markets tends to lead to a fragile order. The present state of market organization must be understood as a (temporary) result of organizing processes rather than a stable state due to some inherent characteristics of a market.

The Organization of Markets

The term organization has earlier been used in the context of markets, but what is missing from current literature is a more systematic analysis of this notion. We present an analysis of partial organization that provides a theoretical framework for the discussions in the remaining chapters. Organization is described as a decided order where the most fundamental decisions are about membership, rules, monitoring, sanctions, and hierarchy. We exemplify how these ‘organizational elements’ are common in contemporary markets—not only in markets within formal organizations such as exchanges, but also in the more common form of markets described in the book, markets outside formal organizations. We demonstrate that a decided order has specific characteristics that make it salient to distinguish it from orders emerging from mutual adaptation among market actors and from institutions in markets.