P19 - Discursive Strategies and Struggles in Transatlantic Agriculture and Trade
PANEL Organizers
• Gerry Alons (g.alons@fm.ru.nl), Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)
• Daniel Derock (dj.derock@student.ru.nl), Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands)
SUMMARY
Food security, climate change and sustainable resource management are pressing global societal challenges which are likely to dominate international policy agenda's for decades to come. These challenges intersect in two important policy fields -agriculture and trade- and it is only by concerted efforts in these domains that these issues can be effectively addressed.
Differences in EU and US policy paradigms and attitudes towards food safety (e.g. GMO's, hormone-treated beef) and farm support, have led to important transatlantic (trade) controversies over the years which remain unresolved. Recently, however, the EU and the US started negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is expected to address these contentious issues enabling more concerted agricultural trade policies and affecting wider international cooperative endeavours, such as the WTO Doha Round. For now, however, a successful TTIP remains uncertain and agricultural trade related issues are likely to block progress in the negotiations. Both the EU and the US have taken tough stances on the issue, reflecting dominant domestic interests and preferences. In this panel, we seek to address the role of discourse and discursive strategies in the policy process surrounding the TTIP negotiations. More specifically, we welcome papers focusing on (one of) the two questions below:
- Bottom-up: How do interested publics express themselves while seeking to influence policy actors and to what extent and how do they succeed in effectively constraining their government in the TTIP negotiations?
- Top-down: To what extent and how do policy makers and negotiators interact with the public (NGOs, think tanks, interest groups, social movements) and what kind of discursive strategies do they apply to legitimate their positions and affect public attitudes towards TTIP?
Combining the answers to both these questions, we aim to gain more insights in the linkage between argumentation, position-taking and decision-making on TTIP.
KEY WORDS
Agriculture, trade, TTIP, discourse analysis
ROOM
Faculty E2.14
SESSION 1 : 8/07/15 : 17:00-18:30
Chair: Gerry Alons (g.alons@fm.ru.nl), Radboud University (The Netherlands)
Discussant: Gerry Alons (g.alons@fm.ru.nl), Radboud University (The Netherlands)
• Transatlantic Trade and Agriculture: A Comparative Analysis of Competing Interpretations
Emanuela Bozzini (emanuela.bozzini@unitn.it), University of Trento (Italy)
• Geographical Indications as Global Knowledge Commons. Intellectual Property Rights and Discursive Strategies in Polycentric Governance
Armelle Mazé (maze@agroparistech.fr), Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) (France)
• Talking about GMO’s in Transatlantic Trade: Small Talk or Dealbreaker?
Daniel DeRock (dj.derock@student.ru.nl), Radboud University(The Netherlands)
