2
Will Brazil and Argentina produce, consume, and trade genetically modified
agricultural products? This seemingly straightforward question in fact elicits and
amplifies many of the ongoing debates about the nature of governance in the 21
st
century.
To what extent can individual nation-states choose and implement policies according to
national development strategies and preferences, especially on an issue that is both
economic and environmental? What other actors and institutions above and below the
level of the nation-state might influence – or be able to constrain – the state? In this
paper, I draw on two rather different literatures, on multilevel governance and global
commodity chains, to develop a general approach to such questions. At the same time, I
argue that the actual answer to any particular version of such a question will be specific
to both time and place, reflecting contingent relationships among the various parts of the
explanations.
The concept of multilevel governance has acquired special importance among
scholars of the European Union, who frequently evoke it to note that supranational forms
of governance are taking the place of national political authority (Beyers 2002). In this
usage, the term has many similarities to the debate within American political science
about authority migration between levels of government (Gerber and Kollman 2004). In
both cases, these literatures offer helpful reminders that governance may take place at
many levels of political authority, each of which has distinct properties and participants.
In addition, they point out the mutability of the locations of governance, with the result
that “political actors may regard the structure of political authority as fluid and uncertain,
deliberately and strategically seeking to shift authority as a political strategy (Gerber and
Kollman 2004:397).”
Convention