The purpose of this project is to examine the organizational linkages and cultural meanings connecting civil society organizations in Latin America and Europe that are involved in debates about plant biotechnology and genetically modified food. Current research about transnational civil society suggests an increasing polarization between organizations willing and/or able to negotiate with the formal political institutions establishing the rules of the global economy and those that (have to) engage in more confrontational practices. Civil society debates about genetically modified food are particularly contentious and thus offer a unique setting for empirically addressing these widening concerns about a growing participatory gap within organized transnational civil society. Building on the student investigator's participation in current research documenting the overall scale, composition, and significance of regional civil society networks in Latin America, the proposed project is a comparative, multi-location analysis of two transnational organizational networks that link non-governmental organizations and farmers' organizations in Latin America with their counterparts in Europe and the United States. The project seeks to explore how political context, forms of decision-making, as well as cultural understandings of genetic engineering shape network negotiations about the use of collaborative versus confrontational advocacy. The study pays particular attention to the practices and perspectives evident in different locations of both networks (in regional as well as network structural terms) in order to probe the extent of internal democracy. The research design involves semi-structured and open-ended interviews with key network representatives in various organizational sites in Mexico, Honduras, Germany, Belgium, and the US to examine the history and character of network linkages and decision-making processes, and to capture the discursive practices relating to genetic engineering. In addition, two intensive case studies of network participants in Mexico and Germany will serve to explore local everyday practices in two different non-central locations of both transnational networks to be analyzed. Participant observation in these locations will pay particular attention the role of personal leadership, the organization of office work, and the interactions with network members, other civil society organizations, as well as state/international institutions in order to trace how advocacy strategies shape up in practice. Finally, the historical trajectory and broader cultural and political significance of civil society networks concerned with plant biotechnology will be examined based on content and discourse analysis of network activity reports and websites maintained by participating organizations. The proposed research will contribute to a critical reassessment of the meaning of accountability and representation in this local-global context. Rather than assuming conventional conceptions of democratic legitimacy, the proposed project attempts to contribute to social science understanding of the political and cultural practices and visions that emerge simultaneously above and below established channels of political participation and the conditions under which these divergent definitions of the situation will challenge dominant notions of democratic representation.
