Material power and normative conflict in global and local agrifood governance: The lessons of ‘Golden Rice’ in India

This special section aims to investigate the interaction of global and local forces in shaping agrifood governance. It starts from the recognition that a multitude of actors and norms shape today’s agrifood system. The resulting opaqueness of the systems makes it extremely difficult to understand and explain processes and outcomes of agrifood governance. Given the sustainability challenges facing the agrifood system, improvements in our understanding of what the interaction of global and local actors and norms means on the ground are urgently needed, however. The section, therefore, analyses agrifood governance in India across a selected group of cases. It does so by employing a systematic framework emphasizing the material and ideational dimensions of power and their interaction. The section has chosen India as the setting in which to analyze this interaction due to the crucial role the food demand and supply of this rising power plays in today’s agrifood system. This article provides the special sections’ analytical framework, which uses the interplay of material and ideational dimensions of power as a focal lens. In addition, the article applies this framework to an empirical study of the political conflict around GMO foods in India, specifically the case of ‘Golden Rice’.