4
decision making on genetically modified agricultural production that follows, I will look
for how these dimensions appear at different levels. I will also consider whether any
given governance institution implicitly or explicitly accepts the authority of others in
shaping its own governance structure and what kinds of networks may link the different
levels.
For environmental governance in particular, Vogler draws on John Searles’s
theory of institutions and its insistence on the importance of both brute (physical) and
socially constructed facts. This focus will be represented here by consideration of the
ways genetically modified agricultural crops – in particular, soybeans – are embedded in
global commodity chains (GCC). The commodity chains approach offers some parallel
concepts to those of multilevel governance with its description of multiple linked nodes.
In this approach, a product is traced through various production stages to its final
consumer. The chain itself can be characterized by its length, by the kinds of interaction
between different nodes, or by different patterning of the nodes. Each chain has an input-
output structure, territoriality, and a governance structure (Gereffi 1994:96-97). The
commodity chains approach is used here to help identify a set of material components of
governance that would be missed by most governance scholars, who focus very heavily
on political and social facts. For example, the existing soybean GCC is oriented around a
conception of soybeans as physically identical (Bender and Westgren 2001).
1
Among
other things, this means that any governance of genetically modified (GM) soybeans that
presumes they are different from regular soybeans will probably require setting up a new
commodity chain, with all of its nodes and their links potentially redefined.
1
In contrast, some other agricultural commodity chains, like those for fresh produce, are already highly
differentiated on quality grounds (Friedberg 2001) and could more straightforwardly accommodate new
quality dimensions such as genetic modification.
Convention