This panel session will explore the contemporary challenges faced in the building of alternative seed commons in the context of growing loss of genetic agrobiodiversity and climate change. In the context of a growing concentration of seed firms, alternative peasant seed networks are nowadays developing across the world by proposing a paradigm shift from the classical non delegative and hierarchical genetic breeding and seed certification towards participatory breeding systems by peasants. The panel will address the legal issues posed at the international by seed treaties, but also the organizational and epistemic challenges posed at national levels for supporting the development and democratization of collective participatory breeding systems of at the farmer level. It also will question the way scientific knowledge and access to data can measure agrobiodiversity evolution
The state plays an indispensable role in policy-making to govern the commons, collective action, and formal and informal institutions in postcolonial societies. To overcome socio-ecological crises, the state uses public policy as a tool to manage and govern the commons, thereby often limiting citizens’ capacity to access these commons.
In the analysis of interactions between state, citizens, and non-state actors in policy processes, the role of power is emerging as an important factor in understanding these complex set-ups. Explicit considerations of power may reveal underlying colonial continuities, entrenched power asymmetries, and persisting inequalities that cut across social, economic, and political arenas and affect the decision-making processes and institutions under investigation. However, emerging approaches to conceptualising power are yet to find broad application in policy and institutional anlyses.
In this panel, we invite contributions that draw on postcolonial, decolonial, and subaltern theorizations or framings to integrate critical reflections on power in their public policy analysis of commons governance.
Papers in this panel question assumptions about the nature of goods and social dilemmas in commons. They explore how variations in interdependence may influence environmental governance. Rather than intrinsic, dichotomous, or fixed types of goods; variation in uses, users, and interdependence, and how institutions deal with these, can shape the excludability, subtractability, and indivisibility of environmental goods and the potential for conflict and cooperation. Rather than a few symmetric static social dilemmas, interdependence may be better understood as diverse, dynamic, mostly asymmetric, and involving various forms of power. Unpacking the complexity of power in social-ecological systems requires going beyond typical social dilemma models to develop a better typology of how power influences the dynamics and outcomes of social-ecological systems, and their governability. This panel will invite participant questions and present brief provocations to stimulate conversations about going beyond conventional conceptions of commons to better understand environmental governance in contexts of heterogeneous interests, asymmetric situations, and power dynamics. Additional paper proposals related to the panel topics are invited and the scope of the abstract and panel session may be adjusted accordingly.
Developing means of accelerating modern plant breeding and stirring it towards stewardship of agricultural systems whilst dealing with global policrises demands a better insight in how humans and crops co-evolve since industrialization and how modern knowledge systems in plant breeding play a role in these processes of coevolution. Human-crop coevolution has been a dynamic process for over 10.000 years, but modern plant breeding has a wide range of practices from peasant seed to industrialized plant breeding systems. They differ in their objectives, processes and outcomes, but still are driven by the same underlying means of cultural evolution present in modern day knowledge systems across multiple-levels. Drawing from Multilevel Selection Theory, I analyze how variation, selection, replication, and innovation operate across different levels in knowledge systems of plant breeding science works, based on the cases of the German seed system in three crops (canola, winter wheat, and maize). Cultural evolution introduces additional mechanisms of replication aside of learning leading to cumulative retention of information in technologies, which are embodied in crops and their underlying genetic diversity. I consider crop breeding in interaction with the context in which it is being researched and developed and propose a framework for looking at plant breeding with a coevolutionary lens that explicitly includes and explains the socio-cultural factors influencing path-dependencies in plant science. Goal is to develop a framework useful to analyze genetic diversity in crops to investigate patterns of change over time across a wide variety of contexts and crops. By understanding the reciprocal influences between humans and crops, we can enhance our approaches to sustainable crop improvement in the Anthropocene.
Institutional diversity plays a pivotal role in shaping the governance of industrial agriculture, particularly as it interacts with technological developments in plant breeding. Advanced breeding technologies and local to global market dynamics coevolve with crops, influenced by socio-economic and cultural factors. This paper proposes an ontology to epistemology approach thereof for tracing institutional evolution and its influence on the genetic pools of crops. By integrating the concepts of cultural evolution, like multilevel selection theory and generalized evolutionary theory, I explore how the coevolution of plant breeding systems in their functional and organizational arrangements shapes the retention and transmission of crop genetic diversity.
As a governance research community we currently lag an approach that adequately accounts for the evolutionary dynamics and multi-level nature of the researched social-ecological systems for industrialized agriculture. To fill this gap between epistemology to methodology, I apply notions of sociogenomic methods—typically used to trace social behaviors in genetic material—to quantify the impact of institutional factors on crop genetics. By altering these methods and combining them with Multilevel Selection Theory and evolutionary economics, the study provides a new approach to empirically track institutional impacts on the genetic diversity of crops. Using the German seed systems for canola and winter wheat as case studies, I demonstrate how institutional and technological factors can be mirrored in quantitative analyses. I see this paper as a potential piece for the study of institutional diversity in an industrialized context offering a coevolutionary perspective contributing to agricultural resilience and biodiversity conservation.
