Climate change is bringing IOs and other relevant partners together in new, exciting, and—as this section will show—sometimes questionable ways. Climate risk insurance, or climate (change) insurance, is both representative of emerging social policy solutions and an opportunity to refect upon the extent to which IOs are moving beyond the realm of their 'regular' work in research, advising, and assessment. Climate insurance is an example of the economization of climate change and is rather unique in its ability to bring together a wide range of actors from the public and private spheres. The proliferation of work in this area is not so surprising when considering that economic language and doctrines satisfy the liberal governance model, especially where action at the national level may be deemed insuffcient, thus opening space for IOs to exert soft power (Palmujoki 2010). Extreme weather events have been typically fnanced by a mixture of public and international disaster relief, however, as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of both sudden and slow-onset climatic events, the international community—including IOs—have been forced to question existing tools for tackling the economic consequences of climate change (Miller and Swann 2016, 81). As a result, IOs, governments, and private enterprises are all considering the potential for insurance as a tool for both adapting to and addressing potential losses and damages due to climate change. From the perspective of IOs concerned with the more wide-reaching effects of climate change on the future of sustainable development, the potential of climate insurance is arguably even more important; according to Kof Annan, former United Nations Secretary General, climate insurance "may hold answers for some of the more obstinate problems faced by the poor and the vulnerable" (Hellmuth et al. 2009, iii).

There are two major points of consensus stemming from this feld: First, that dependent on its use, climate insurance represents an option or tool for combatting the more drastic effects of climate change and for adapting to future risks and losses (International Finance Corporation 2016, 1; Montt et al. 2018, 12); and second, climate insurance must be planned, funded, and carried out by a range of actors from the public, private, and international spheres. This is in recognition of the fact that better coordination of shared approaches may result in better climate adaptation tools (Wilby et al. 2009, 1197). In other words, polycentric governance is a requirement, and this defnitively requires the involvement of IOs (Kreft et al. 2017, 24; Miller and Swann 2016, 70). Although the pervasive nature of climate change as regards wider social policy was illustrated in the last section, climate change insurance as a potential solution to many of the ills caused by climate change deserves stand-alone consideration. This is due to its ability to both bring together a unique array of actors from public, private, and international sectors, and present unique challenges that are equal parts practical, theoretical, and ethical.

The last decade has seen a proliferation of work in the feld of climate risk insurance and climate fnance more broadly, with IOs playing no small role in both establishing the concept and paving the way for future work in this area. The UNFCCC is considered the leading organization in this regard. As part of 'Cancun Agreements' at COP16 in 2010, the Green Climate Fund and 'fast-start fnance' were established, where developed countries pledged to mobilize funding which would go through IOs in the hopes of reaching populations most vulnerable to climate change (UNFCCC 2020a). The Green Climate Fund (of which the World Bank is trustee, although the Fund is subject to the COP) aims to tap into both public and private fnances in order to bankroll projects in climate change mitigation and adaptation (Green Climate Fund 2020). By 2015, the Fund had obtained over US \$10 billion in pledges and had begun approving investments (Kreft et al. 2017, 36), and despite a lack of new contributions from the United States, in the latest fundraising round (2019) developed countries pledged an additional US \$9.8 billion (Yeo 2019).

The Cancun Adaptation Framework (another result of COP16) also promoted "risk assessment and management as well as risk sharing and transfer mechanisms such as insurance at local, national, sub-regional and regional levels," and suggested the creation of a climate risk insurance facility "to address impacts associated with severe weather events" (Warner et al. 2013, 39). Perhaps most consequential for current work in this area is the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (commonly referred to as the WIM), which was established in 2013 during UNFCCC climate negotiations to look into insurance scheme options that may address climate change problems (Spreng et al. 2016, 130). States party to the UNFCCC are fully aware of the potential of climate risk insurance, with some 38 countries (representative of over four billion people and "approximately half of the world's extreme poor") privy to the 2015 Paris Agreement including climate risk insurance approaches (or at least some mention of the issue) in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) (Kreft et al. 2017, 10). There is also a consensus at the international governance level that differentiation between developed and developing countries plays an important role for future work in this area, with the G7 calling for climate change insurance schemes (Spreng et al. 2016, 130) and the UNFCCC Article 3.1.1. explicitly recognizing "differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities," with developed countries responsible for taking the lead "in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof"' (United Nations 1992, 9).

The intensive work of the UNFCCC in this area is more easily understandable when considered in relation to the bigger UN Agenda on Sustainable Development, where climate insurance holds plenty of promise. Historically, those vulnerable to risks such as environmental disasters have typically fnanced their recovery by way of "savings and credit, informal kinship arrangements, government relief and international donor support" (Linnerooth-Bayer et al. 2019, 489). Insurance options may therefore relieve IOs from many of the associated costs of climate change, such as humanitarian aid. Multiple IOs have unsurprisingly begun investigative work, with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and WFP establishing a Weather Risk Management Facility in 2008 to test the feasibility of index-insurance (IFAD 2020). Nonetheless, the potential for climate insurance to pave the way for an increase in the rich-poor divide remains a concern, particularly given that climate change itself "raises awareness and willingness in populations to insure but threatens the affordability and availability of cover" (Lamond and Penning-Rowsell 2014, 2). This is something that IOs which are involved in developing policies and schemes, and for which fair and equitable sustainable development is a major reason for investing in insurance options, are concerned about. A potential issue may be increased engagement between the private sector and developed countries, at the expense of, or as a substitute for, continued offcial development assistance (ODA).

Not only is the prospect of reduced costs of interest for IOs, but wider work on climate insurance nominates IOs as middlemen for fnancing projects. For example, one study has proposed a regional fnancial mechanism funded by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and developed countries for tackling rising sea levels in Small Island Developing States based on the success of existing fnancial contributions to the African Risk Capacity (ARC), which has provided insurance to African countries affected by drought (Wenta et al. 2016). Similarly, the United Nations University (UNU) has outlined that IOs are well positioned to provide both technical and fnancial assistance, and occupy a unique position for facilitating regional and international dialogue on insurance options (Warner et al. 2013, 40). It is therefore in the interest of IOs that any mechanisms they fund be professionally researched; the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) is an example of an arrangement for research on insurance options between Munich Re and UNU (Kreft et al. 2017). Other IOs that have in the past partnered to investigate the prospects of insurance for development include Oxfam America, UNDP, WFP, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), and IFAD (Hellmuth et al. 2009).

While it has been argued that State-backed schemes provide social benefts and protection measures for vulnerable populations that purely private enterprises 'struggle to emulate,' the inclusion of IOs with specifc goals to improve the lives of target populations offers an opportunity to balance the scales against exploitation (Lamond and Penning-Rowsell 2014, 5). Conversely, partnering with IOs under the auspices of sustainable development for climate change provides an access route for insurers who are keen to exhibit altruistic qualities, as the International Finance Corporation (2016, 1), a member of the World Bank Group, has argued. To date, partnerships between private or proft-driven insurers and IOs have resulted in hybrid schemes such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), a partnership where "World Bank instruments and donor funds are accessed by a private company owned and operated by its regional members to support its not-for-proft goals" (Warner et al. 2013, 30). Another example is WFP and Oxfam America's R4 Rural Resilience Initiative, which relies on donations from a range of other IOs, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, and insurance frms interested in extending their humanitarian work to reach hundreds of thousands of farmers in Africa to improve "resource management through asset creation," provide insurance, allow for livelihoods diversifcation, micro crediting, and improvements in savings (World Food Programme and Oxfam America 2018). Whether or not such arrangements result in pushing the Sustainable Development Agenda and tackling social problems caused by climate change, or merely facilitate access to 'emerging markets' for foreign insurance companies (potentially limiting the ability of national governments to determine their own social protection measures) remains a critical and serious question.

#### Conclusion

This chapter has traced the development of global social governance as eco-social policy with a focus on the links between climate change and social policies. It has described the temporal shift within the global discourse on climate change with an emphasis on the roles of, and collaborations between, an increasing number of IOs. It has explored some interconnected issues of social and climate change policies and highlighted how many IOs are engaged in the feld. In a third step, it was shown using the example of climate risk insurance how an insurance mechanism brings actors and efforts together within multi-actored and multi-level processes to facilitate tackling individual social shocks caused by climate change, as well as how such a tool may bundle the resources and capacities of IOs involved.

More specifcally, this chapter has outlined advancements in discourse at the IO level on climate change and how this connects to global social policies. It has illustrated how a shift toward framing climate change in the context of sustainable development has led to a ballooning of IOs engaged in this area. The argument that IOs occupy an important space as conveners and for exerting infuence—particularly 'soft' governance—when it comes to social policy and climate change, has been shown with the example of climate risk insurance.

This argument is, however, specifc to the perspective on global ecosocial governance employed: Gough (2014) has, for example, considered green growth and how economic and social policies come together with reference to that perspective. Here, a lot of questions remain concerning the ability of IOs to counter the interests of powerful, economically oriented states or big business. Nonetheless, eco-social policies, the links between climate change and social policies, and the specifc roles of IOs (and other actors) is still highly underexplored, and considering global social governance as global eco-social policy is a perspective in need of further consideration in the years and decades to come.

#### References

https://www.nature.com/news/policy-map-the-interactions-betweensustainable-development-goals-1.20075. Accessed April 19, 2020.

bodies/executive-committee-of-the-warsaw-international-mechanism-for-lossand-damage-wim-excom/workshops-meetings/cop24-side-eventrecommendations-of-the-task-force-on-displacement. Accessed 5 May, 2020.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Water as Global Social Policy—International Organizations, Resource Scarcity, and Environmental Security

# *Jeremy J. Schmidt*

#### Introduction

If you pick up a book on water politics—practically *any* book on the topic – you are almost certain to fnd a claim like this: water doesn't obey political boundaries. Usually, the quick inference is that water conficts are likely; a logical step that combines the fact that water began fowing eons before politics were around to be obeyed with the political reality that many international borders operate with varying degrees of reference to scarce water resources. An arguably more interesting point, however, is the leitmotif such claims convey. Namely, that global water policy requires an effective combination of space and politics. Among the potential combinations, several leading contenders populate a wide literature. There are spaces of empires, nations, states, mega-cities, agricultural regions, watersheds (or river basins), local communities, Indigenous peoples and, increasingly, aquatic ecosystems themselves. Opposite these, politics

J. J. Schmidt (\*)

Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 275

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_12

crisscross state sovereignty, treaties, rights, customs, Indigenous laws, technical criteria, infrastructure, economics, guesswork, and in some cases, equity. Intersections of space and politics anchor two aims of this chapter. The frst is to map how International Organizations (IOs) have shaped, and continue to shape, global water policy. The second is to consider how IOs have infuenced global discourses. These two aims support a more ambitious argument: that water be treated as global social policy – not as merely instrumental to the public management of social risks in other domains.

This chapter has four sections: The frst defends a key premise of the argument that water is *social* and not only *natural*. The second maps the historical role IOs have played in colonial and state hydrological programs. Here, IOs actively shaped key parameters of what it meant to act *internationally* on water policy. This affected the subsequent rise of *global* water policy. The third identifes the role of IOs in driving discourses of global water policy, particularly those of scarcity and security that link the environmental, economic, and political risks connected to water. Here, there are similarities with other environmental areas where Cold War scientifc networks collaborated with IOs to forge global approaches to social policy through hybrid networks of epistemic authority. But there are also important differences owing to how IOs critiqued early approaches to sustainable development for inadequate attention to water. This catalyzed efforts to make water central to social and industrial policy, largely through what is known as integrated water resources management (IWRM). That project reached its height in the 1990s. The fourth section focuses on how, as IWRM waned, IOs redeployed their infuence to govern considerations of risk and security in response to global environmental change and economic crises. This approach now dominates global water discourse and demands critique regarding *for whom* water has become a domain of global social policy.

#### Social Water

Water is not taught as something that is social. In fact, only a small fraction of the diagrams used to represent Earth's water cycle in textbooks include humans (15%) and even fewer (2%) identify human impacts on the global water system (Abbott et al. 2019). This is a serious oversight. Humans have been appropriating more than half of the annual available freshwater since 1995 and have pushed the hydrological cycle so far off balance that it no longer operates within the normal bounds of variability (Postel et al. 1996; Milly et al. 2008). The upshot is that the image most people have in their heads of the global water cycle – implicit in much of water policy – is deeply fawed. Water does not fow carefree through an eternal, stable cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation from the oceans through the atmosphere and back to earth. To that image, we must add a growing litany of ways in which humans short-circuit water systems: microplastics in raindrops, pharmaceutical loading in rivers, tens of thousands of mega-dams, increased water vapor from climate change, glaciers and ice sheets in rapid retreat, a warming and increasingly acidic ocean, severe droughts, and monsoons that by turns fail to materialize or intensely burst in ways not previously experienced.

How can we think of water in social terms? Anthropologists have described water as a "total social fact" owing to how it is not only biophysically necessary for social life, but also constitutive of multiple institutions of social life (economic, religious, health) such that decisions in one domain cannot be cleanly parsed from others (Orlove and Caton 2010, 402). Part of this has to do with the materiality of water itself and the fact that it is shared by upstream and downstream communities, cities, and nations. Another aspect, however, is water's position amid social norms. For instance, access to water, such as for household connections, often functions as the material and social site for making demands on the state for public goods, and even for citizenship itself (von Schnitzler 2016; Anand 2017). Anthropologists are not alone in their assessment of water as not wholly social but not only natural. Geographers and many others have similarly studied the constitutive role of water in social relations. Recently, this approach has also been extended to connect the practices of scientists and hydrologists to global discourses (Schmidt 2017; Dry 2019). This provides a route to think about water both socially and globally and, I argue here, to consider the historic role of IOs in forging these links. Among the earliest attempts to think of water globally and socially was by Julian Huxley (1935, 1943), the enthusiastic eugenicist and United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organisation's (UNESCO) frst Director-General, who lauded the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States for its model of integrating water control and social policy across education, health, and rural development. Huxley thought the TVA a model for UNESCO itself. The most infuential instance of water as social policy, however, is surely cost-beneft analysis, which was given its original expression in the 1936 *Flood Control Act* in the United States before it went on to become virtually ubiquitous in social, economic, and environmental policy (Porter 1995; Kysar 2010).

Understanding water socially also provides resources for examining contests and conficts. It does so by virtue of identifying how different social practices – legal, economic, scientifc, religious – are themselves not free of the material constraints water sets: it evaporates, it gets polluted, it fows, it foods, it erodes infrastructure, it squirrels away across property boundaries, and it is variable in its distribution over space and time. As a result, politics are not external to the practices that give an account of where water is and when. That we can think of water socially, however, still requires an approach to doing so. Mine will become evident throughout the chapter (see Schmidt 2017) as one set against popular versions of social constructivists in which water is wholly social; a hydro*social* cycle such as Linton (2010, 3) proposes when he argues that "Water is what we make of it." Water can be many things, but a fouter of physics is not among them. As a result, centering the material account of water is key. Where does this leave us with respect to the politics of international organizations? First, we can follow others who have laid the groundwork for thinking of IOs in the water sector as entangled with social confict, contests, and discourses not suffciently captured by theories of rational decision making (Conca 2006; cf. Murphy 1994). Second, we can recognize that, like other domains of global social policy, changes in the water sector frequently pace changes in global governance generally. Here, we can extend Abbott et al.'s (2016) analysis of how structures of global governance shift to also think about their material undercurrents. To do so, this chapter contests the premise of historically powerful actors that water be treated non-socially – as merely a 'natural resource'—in the frst place (Schmidt 2017; Scott 1998).

## From River Basin Organizations to Global IOs: Historical Context

Historically, water IOs are of two main types. One is populated by international river basin organizations (RBOs) that are spatially oriented to transboundary waters shared by two or more countries. Often, though not always, these are organized according to the physical space that directs water fows – the river basin or watershed. Owing to the diversity of these political and spatial environments, RBOs exhibit considerable variety, diversity, and levels of authority (see Schmeier 2012; Lautze et al. 2013). Some operate at the level of treaties, others advise (offcially or unoffcially) on technical or economic concerns, some are imposed, still others limp along. RBOs often refect regional and transnational power relations that establish discursive and material hegemony – hydro-hegemony – over transboundary waters (Mirumachi 2015; Warner et al. 2017). There are presently over 120 RBOs that operate on 110 international watercourses worldwide; a tally dutifully kept in an open-access database by Oregon State University's Program in Water Confict Management and Transformation.1 In 1997, the UN Watercourses Convention was adopted to provide international norms regarding the use and conservation of water crossing international borders. This was accomplished largely by codifying existing utilitarian norms as the basis for pursuing equitable water sharing arrangements (Blatter and Ingram 2001). Where did these norms come from? A second group of IOs played a key role. This group includes actors more familiar to other domains of global social policy and which also infuenced RBOs, such as the World Bank. These IOs are not constrained to watersheds or state territories, and often are explicitly oriented to projects advantageous to global industry, agricultural trade, and fnance. In this section, and as Fig. 12.1 illustrates, I provide a snapshot of how RBO experiences and IO interactions infuenced one another and how both began to shift when 'global' water policy began to take shape with the launch of UNESCO's International Hydrological Decade.

Projects of state-making often exercised control over water as a constitutive aspect of spatial rule. These projects could have international dimensions if either water itself crossed existing borders between states or when colonial powers appropriated water elsewhere. Mitchell (2002) argues that colonial thinking about water, space, and politics continues to exert contemporary infuence. He's correct. The draining of marshes for farmland and cities, the damming and straightening of rivers, and the establishment and maintenance of irrigation infrastructure all provide the material evidence for the moral ordering of water under different state-making projects (Scott 1998; Pisani 2002; Blackbourn 2006; Pritchard 2011; Gilmartin 2015; Pietz 2015). When these state-making projects were exported to colonies they remade landscapes and social relationships (Mitchell 2002; D'Souza 2006; Bhattacharyya 2018). In so doing,

<sup>1</sup> See: https://transboundarywaters.science.oregonstate.edu/content/international-riverbasin-organization-rbo-database. Accessed March 21, 2020.

**Fig. 12.1** Global water policy IOs: scale and discourse

colonialism exported not only techniques for controlling water, but also an approach to water politics aligned to Eurocentric, racialized notions of the 'international' constituted by recognition and reciprocity among sovereign nations (Pitts 2018).

For instance, as Yao (2019) shows, 'control over nature' was central to how the 'international' was constituted in nineteenth century debates over civilization and progress. These debates stem from the frst international RBO: the Danube Commission established in 1856. The Danube Commission was especially occupied with whether Russia's lack of territorial control over the Danube River met (or did not meet) the Eurocentric 'standard of civilization' (Yao 2019). A peculiar, if not quite universal feature of applying the so-called 'standard of civilization' was the predominance of engineering as both a practice and disposition to reconciling water with political boundaries. One can only control nature with the right tools, and engineering was a main one. There were many complicating factors to using engineering as a kind of social test, especially owing to the challenges that arose when water control required technical feats that engineering hadn't yet mastered (Mukerji 2009). But there were advantages to using engineering for social ends because it was the kind of expertise that could travel. Facilitated by colonial networks like those of the Dutch and British, engineers shaped and reshaped landscapes across the Middle East, and South and South East Asia (Fasseur 1992; Amrith 2018). Beyond overt colonialism, engineering became a key practice for harnessing water in ways that aligned standards of civilization premised on the 'control of nature' with the spatialization of 'international' water politics. In short, to qualify for reciprocal international agreements was to be able to engineer control over water.

The emergence of transnational water engineering expertise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to a diverse set of discursive and technical practices for states and for RBOs (Teisch 2011). Owing to considerable diversity across RBOs (see Mukhtarov and Gerlak 2013), I focus not on the historical contingencies of individual RBOs but rather on how state-making projects began to intersect with the IOs that act globally. The Indian case provides an excellent example: The frst major hydrological project after India gained independence from Britain was a multi-purpose river basin development scheme for irrigation, electricity, and food control in West Bengal. The Damodar Valley Corporation (still in operation today) established the idea of a 'nationalist engineer' as one who controlled water in lockstep with advancing national Indian identity (Klingensmith 2007). The explicit organizational model for the Damodar Valley Corporation was the TVA of the United States, a factor that mattered critically in a confict over the Indus River on the eastern side of India with neighboring Pakistan in 1951. In that case, tensions over how to share the Indus river were at fever pitch after the World Bank struggled to broker a deal between the two nations. Then, the second director of the TVA, David Lilienthal, managed to get both parties to the table, in part by appealing to the American model of development as a common discourse for multi-purpose river basin planning (Mason and Asher 1973; Ekbladh 2010; Gilmartin 2015).

In the Indus case, a shared ethos of water control and state identity helped shoulder the burden of international negotiation that allowed expertise from the TVA to frst shape 'nationalist' engineers in India and then broker an RBO mediated by the World Bank. The Indian case was not entirely unique. Post-WWII, America's TVA was exported to dozens of countries as the quintessential model of 'international development' promoted by UN agencies, such as UNESCO (see Scott 2006; Ekbladh 2010). Notably in the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, the TVA provided a key organizational model (Biggs 2006; Ekbladh 2010). In 1957, the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East backed the creation of the Mekong Committee (later the Interim Mekong Committee) following the independence of Cambodia, Laos PDR, and Vietnam from France (Matthews and Schmidt 2014). The creation of an RBO on the Mekong subsequently went through different permutations as the seven countries making claims to the river sought – or were compelled to seek – an international coordinating organization (Gardner 1997; Biggs 2011). The cases of the Indus and Mekong also speak to a larger dynamic in which the control of water was increasingly connected to broader, global discourses about international coordination for development.

One effect of using the river basin, or watershed, as the spatial scale for RBOs was the emergence of a discourse on integrated river basin planning by the United Nations (1958; White 1957). Driven by the insight that it is better to coordinate the use of shared waters than not to, RBOs and IOs soon developed a shared discourse of integration. However, and as even a quick perusal of the University of Oregon's RBO database reveals, the organizational structure, funding mechanisms, and economic and datasharing agreements among RBOs vary widely and do not easily reveal a straightforward model of 'integration' (cf. Schmeier 2012). This diversity posed challenges for fostering international norms of integration for RBOs, exemplifed by the fact that it took four decades until the UN convention on watercourses was adopted in 1997. It may be too strong to draw direct causal links, but that convention was made more likely as the result of IOs who moved RBO discourses on 'integration' from the international sphere to the global.

#### IOs and Global Water Policy

The shift from *international* to *global* water politics offcially began in 1977 with the United Nations Conference on Water in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The impetus for the 1977 conference was not water control per se, but rather an integrated global approach to water that individual states had no prospect of controlling. Namely, the cumulative effects of water use that could affect the global water cycle itself. A decade earlier, that concern had been the catalyst for hydrologists in the United States to propose an International Hydrological Decade (IHD), which was convened by UNESCO from 1965–74. The IHD operated, like many international scientifc networks during the Cold War, by appealing to – indeed establishing notions of – scientifc objectivity presumed independent of national interests (cf. Reisch 2005; Wolfe 2018). Directed by the American Raymond Nace, the IHD combined Russian hydrological expertise with an expansive network of international engineers and scientists. It was through the IHD, in fact, that hydrology 'came of age' as a science, as Nace (1980) would later put it. In this section, I outline how, as the search for 'integration' moved from the *international* to the *global,* existing IOs evolved and new IOs began to populate global water policy.

Although UNESCO formally convened the IHD, it also reached out to the World Meteorological Organization (previously known as the International Meteorological Organization). Again, space and politics combined to socially affect water as international scientifc collaborations established and standardized the feld of global hydrology. This time, as Nace (1967, 550) captured at the outset of the IHD, the issue was that water challenges were "a global problem with local roots." That is, a challenge of linking local temporal and spatial variability at the scale of individual watersheds to the global water cycle. The task of IHD scientists was to link these scales objectively. Indeed, the goal was to ft scientifc hydrology with universal categories, such as those implied by Nace's (1969) interim report entitled *Water and Man: A World View*. Supporting this project, a raft of reports told similar stories of 'water and man' and the universal co-evolution of hydrology and societies. These did not displace the racial categories entrained in the 'international' and instead universalized human-water histories in more teleological fashion, where evolution toward global water politics naturally refected social progress (e.g. Biswas 1970; Fitzsimmons and Salama 1977).

At the mid-point of the IHD, in 1971, a new expert IO was created. The International Water Resources Association (IWRA) evolved out of the American Water Resources Association and held its frst World Water Congress in 1973 in Chicago. The IWRA quickly became a key global knowledge broker as its epistemic community helped forge the emerging discourse of global water policy through meetings and its journal, *Water International*, which it launched in 1975. By the end of the IHD, in 1974, the familiar empirical picture of the hydrological cycle critiqued above – lacking people – had quantifed the global water system. After the IHD ended, a series of international events and actors began to prepare for the 1977 UN Conference on Water in Mar del Plata. The IWRA, as well as the International Institute of Environment and Development (also founded in 1971) began to partner with global organizations such as UNESCO, HABITAT, and the World Bank to orient global water governance toward a dual assessment of water's global distribution as mapped against human needs. At Mar del Plata, these two pillars provided the basis for a new discourse of water scarcity that ported the scientifc objectivity of global hydrology over to social policy. The putatively objective basis of the new discourse on water scarcity provided a way to incorporate the engineering of water control with social policy in what was known as Rational Planning (Biswas 1978). Rational Planning was not unique to water (see Lindblom 1999), but in this sector it used water's statistical variability in any particular state as the basis for decision making. These statistical distributions continue to travel widely and have been rehearsed innumerable times in descriptions of the Earth's water, in which oceans account for around 97% of the total water on the planet, freshwater only 3%. Of the latter, most is locked in ice or deep underground, with the remaining freshwater comprising a scarce reservoir that ought to be managed rationally to achieve utilitarian ends of maximum well-being. This empirical account was bolstered by the water atlas published by UNESCO just after the IHD ended (Korzoun et al. 1978).

Discourses of water scarcity established in Mar del Plata arrived just prior to the widespread adoption of neoliberal policies that sought an enhanced – in some versions exclusive – role for free markets in environmental sectors. At Mar del Plata, similar ideas were in circulation as the idea of water scarcity was interpreted by the World Bank as requiring forms of water pricing to enhance conservation (Warford 1978). As neoliberal policies were applied in structural adjustment programs in Chile and elsewhere in the 1980s (often supported by the World Bank and other parties to the 'Washington Consensus') they became a live testing ground that produced mixed results not only for privatization but also for discourses of global water policy (Bauer 2004; Goldman 2005; Boelens et al. 2010). Through discourses of water scarcity, however, an emerging role for water specifc IOs arose. By this time, the International Water Resources Association had convened its World Water Congress several times since its inaugural launch in the 1970s, and routinized meetings involving scientists, government offcials, and non-governmental organizations met every 2 or 3 years. This meant that when neoliberalism hit the ground there was already an established global network of water expertise intersecting with other IOs such as the World Bank or the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (see Schmidt 2017).

The IWRA proved a critical IO in the 1980s, especially in its response to the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development report, *Our Common Future*, also known as the Brundtland Report on sustainable development. Members of the IWRA (1991) critiqued *Our Common Future* for what they perceived as insuffcient attention to water issues. Then, determined not to let the upcoming opportunity to put water on the sustainable development agenda at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 pass, they organized a preliminary meeting in Dublin. The conference produced what are known as the "Dublin Principles," which concretized neoliberal policies in many respects by declaring that water "has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good" (Dublin Statement 1992, np). The principle came fourth in a list, and as a way to integrate water's environmental importance, the need for participatory forms of management, and the unique role of women in provisioning and safeguarding water under conditions of scarcity. It also became a fashpoint of confict and contest as IOs began to push the idea of integrated water resources management, or IWRM, based on the Dublin Principles into global sustainability agendas.

Through IOs like the World Bank, UNESCO, and the IWRA, the idea of IWRM became virtually hegemonic in the 1990s as a way to integrate human and environmental water uses while maximizing human well-being (Conca 2006). The upshot of IWRM's 'integration' of global hydrology and water pricing was congruent with what Bernstein (2001) described as the "liberal compromise" of sustainable development: the promotion of markets as the most effective instrument for environmental relief. This compromise solidifed further in the 1990s through the creation of new IOs that carried both a technical and social remit, such as the Global Water Partnership (GWP) in 1996. The Global Water Partnership (2000) soon established itself as a key knowledge broker through a series of infuential Technical Reports on IWRM that argued water was both a social and economic good (Rogers et al. 1998). The GWP continues to play a key role in promoting IWRM worldwide as it has expanded to include over 3000 partner organizations in 183 countries. The same year, the World Water Council was launched. An outcome of a special session at the IWRA World Water Congress in 1994, this new IO sought more direct political infuence for the water sector in global economic and environmental policy. It quickly launched its own journal, *Water Policy*, to help establish credibility as a multi-stakeholder convenor and also began to convene triennial World Water Forums. Its editor-in-chief, Jerome Delli Priscoli (2000), explicitly sought to naturalize 'integration' in the water sector; he claimed it arose from a universal human longing to return to the comfort of the womb.

#### Water IOs: From IWRM to Global Social Risks

At the turn of the new millennium, water IOs took stock. Many of the projects promoting IWRM were faltering, often critiqued for weighting technical criteria of water control too heavily and not paying suffcient attention to social contexts or institutions (Blomquist and Schlager 2005; Dellapenna and Gupta 2008). Even for the World Bank (2004) IWRM had lost its luster, not least owing to backlash against water privatization and social resistance to neoliberalism (see Olivera 2004). Adding further urgency was the 2006 United Nations Development Program (2006) report on the inequitable connections of water scarcity, social power, and poverty. The ensuing reappraisal of IWRM, however, also took place in a context where humans were altering the global water system (Schmidt 2013). The rational approach to water scarcity soon incorporated emerging, adaptive approaches to resource management and governance as well as emerging discourses of water security to bridge from existing IWRM programs to structural governance changes (Cook and Bakker 2012). Here, water's materiality once again constrained and compelled policy responses.

Established IOs and new intervenors navigated the challenge of institutional inertia around IWRM – including development and fnancing commitments – and efforts to reckon with new social and biophysical realities. The IWRA continued convening the World Water Congress while the World Water Council hosted its World Water Forum. The World Water Forums in the Hague (2000) and Kyoto/Shiga/Osaka (2003) brought together experts and government ministers to align the water sector with the sustainability agenda then taking shape around the Millennium Development Goals. Experts in the water sector, however, were beginning to wonder openly whether the discursive consensus of IWRM and water scarcity were enough, or effective (Biswas 2004; Gleick and Lane 2005). A signifcant element of the discontent was unease about the conceptual lock-in of IWRM at a time when evidence was mounting that humans were increasingly driving the global hydrological cycle – both through direct, large-scale appropriation of water and through indirect changes to land cover and the global climate system (see Vörösmarty et al. 2004). Several factors led, in fairly rapid succession, to a decade of intense transformation in how IOs affected global water policy: (1) The World Economic Forum established itself as an independent assessor of progress toward the Millennium Development Goals in 2004, and soon began publishing annual risk reports on the state of "global risks" (Schmidt and Matthews 2018). (2) Energy and food price shocks in the years preceding the 2008 global fnancial crisis led Ban Ki-moon to ask the World Economic Forum to focus on water security at the 2009 meeting in Davos. (3) This led to the World Economic Forum (2011) using its discursive infuence to establish water security as linked to shared structural risks linking across what is now known as the water-energy-food nexus (Schmidt and Matthews 2018; cf. Pigman 2007). Together, these changes added to notions of water scarcity a growing recognition of water security that prompted IOs in global water policy to shift away from efforts to use water as the material basis for 'integrating' various domains of social policy. Instead, the water-energy-food nexus established a different normative basis; water was *already* integrated across multiple social policy domains that produced systemic risks to the global water cycle and to the global economy. As such, the task of policy was to govern this form of integration; or what the World Economic Forum (2011) described as the structural undervaluation of water in the global economy.

Established IOs such as the Global Water Partnership responded to these changes by renovating existing institutional stances. For instance, the GWP built on its earlier report on *Water as a Social and Economic Good* and its defense of the Dublin Principles in 1998 through a new technical report on *Water Financing and Governance* amid the 2008 global fnancial crisis (Rogers et al. 1998; Rees et al. 2008). Indeed, paralleling the broader fnancialization of the global economy (see Krippner 2012), the water sector turned to fnancial tools for global water policy, such as the use of credit risk ratings, debt-for-water swaps, microcredit schemes and infrastructure fnancing to address issues of water security across the water-energy-food nexus (see Kolker et al. 2016; Schmidt and Matthews 2018). The Global Water Partnership (2012) made special use of resilience to link the systemic risks to water-energy-food nexus and the global economy. Here, the water sector paced broader policy discourses that had adopted the language resilience after the 2008 fnancial crisis to bridge environmental and economic risks (Cooper 2011). Responses to energy, food, climate and fnancial crises, however, were not suffcient: The Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation was not met. Worldwide, billions of people still lack basic sanitation infrastructure and hundreds of millions lack access to clean, reliable drinking water.

In 2010, the United Nations passed the Human Right to Water and Sanitation. The landmark agreement created a key moment for IOs and for states, many of whom had drifted toward (if they had not already embraced) enhanced uses of market mechanisms in the water sector. The response of IOs created new contests, particularly as new networks like the World Economic Forum engaged with large corporate actors (PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestlé) to forge new working groups, such as the 2030 Working Group, that sought input into the Sustainable Development Goals. While civil society organizations interpreted the Human Right to Water and Sanitation as a clear victory over privatization and other neoliberal agendas, many global IOs took the view that the best way to deliver on the right to water was through the market. Here, World Bank programs on "water for all" that had established transnational policy expertise sought to capture the right to water and to channel it into existing structures of political economy (Goldman 2009). Debates over the right to water continue, especially as different approaches to utilizing the right are mobilized across different legal and social contexts (see Langford and Russell 2017; Sultana and Loftus 2020).

A fnal, further twist was added to the feld of IOs as the OECD (2013, 2017) began to position itself with respect to water security, global governance, and the nexus of land, water, and energy. The OECD had long had an interest in water and governance, and its increased attention to the portfolio came just as the UN created the High-Level Panel on Water as part of its efforts to develop political momentum to deliver on the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Here, water policy refected shifts in global governance that increasingly use 'goals' or targets to steer both states and markets (see Kanie and Biermann 2017). The UN High-Level Panel likewise used the language of resilience to describe complex systems in terms of responses to disturbance, and as being subject to critical thresholds, shocks, and tipping-points. These descriptions of interconnected economic and environmental systems mirrored the discourse of the Sustainable Development Goals, where resilience was increasingly used to link global environmental risks to the sustainability agendas (e.g. Sachs 2015). From 2016 to 2018, the UN High-Level Panel on Water completed its frst major initiative on "valuing water" and committed to the human right to water while positioning that right amid discourses of enhancing resilience across economic and environmental systems (Schmidt 2020). In so doing, the High-Level Panel did not, as originally hoped, get through the bricolage of global water contests. Instead, it has reaffrmed the central discourses IOs have developed and employed by naturalizing the form of 'integration' achieved under neoliberal programs through which human impacts on the global water cycle, and the Earth system in general, have been amplifed (see also Schmidt 2019).

#### Conclusion

IOs have played multiple, critical roles in global water policy. There is much more to be researched and examined about them – water continues to disobey political boundaries. The aim of this chapter has been to argue for a treatment of water as global social policy. To do so requires tracking the architecture of arguments through which a particular and powerful social view of water has come to dominate global water governance through discourses of control, integration, scarcity, and security. This has involved IOs working in multiple ways to: negotiate international agreements, facilitate international scientifc collaborations, defne integrated approaches to water management, and to align water with emerging development agendas in the context of economic and environmental crises.

There are many dissenting narratives occluded from, and deliberately excluded by, the current architecture of global water governance. The upshot is that the water risks faced by those marginalized in intersectional ways across both urban and rural areas, and in view of colonial histories and ongoing settler colonial structures, remain unaddressed. And this is only to constrain the explication of risks to our own species. One implication of the foregoing argument is that further, critical study of water as global social policy is paramount to reckoning with the social power that continues to be wielded through control over it. A second is that, in order to follow through on not treating water as merely instrumental to other policy domains, it is essential to confront the material reality that multiple other domains – such as health, education, and industry – are interdependent with water. So, it will not do to think of water non-socially, nor to hope we can make whatever we like out of water. Rather, it is imperative to treat water as not only natural and not wholly social, and to develop an architecture for global social policy capacious enough to govern water equitably.

#### References

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# International Organizations and Food: Nearing the End of the Lean Season?

*Anna Wolkenhauer*

### Introduction

Food is many things. Most essentially, it is a source of nutrition—a source of life. Food is also culture, identity, and history. It provides autonomy and independence. And food embodies humans' relationship to the land. It is a source of income; a tradeable product and a global commodity. Food is a precious good and a vulnerable one too. Given its diversity of qualities and functions, how can food be delineated as an object of global social policy? If social policy is not only taken to include redistributive and protective interventions, but likewise those that aim to improve individuals' productive capacities and ability to earn an income (Mkandawire 2010), then food security comprises not only the "access to suffcient, safe and nutritious food that meets [people's] dietary needs and food

I thank Felix Anderl, Stephen Devereux, and the editors for much-valued feedback on an earlier draft. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.

A. Wolkenhauer (\*)

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 297

K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_13

preferences for an active and healthy life" (FAO et al. 2019, 186), but also access to the means of production.

At least since the food price hikes and subsequent crises of 2008 and 2011, food security has become a global concern. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated at the time that "the number of undernourished people in the world in 2008 [was] 915 million […], the highest [absolute] number estimated over the past 3–4 decades" (FAO 2009, 104). Four famines were recorded between 2000 and 2011, all of them in Africa (Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, and Somalia) (Devereux 2018a, 195). In 2019, the FAO found that the number of people who suffered from hunger was again on the rise, reaching over 820 million, with the largest share of undernourishment (almost 20 percent of the population) in Sub-Saharan Africa (FAO et al. 2019, 3). Achieving food security and the reduction of hunger are key aims in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they remain far from reached ten years out from the target year 2030.

International policies on food have historically been marked by a tension between visions of a global regulatory agency mandated to ensure equitable food supplies across the world and concerns about trade interests. While the more radical vision drove the initial post-war formation of the FAO, it was soon undermined by the widespread reliance on market forces, as promoted especially by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). In the course of time, food policy became enmeshed with broader agendas of poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods, while structural adjustment undercut productive capacities in the Global South. This history is important to understand not only the lack of success of international efforts at reducing global hunger, but also the current architecture of arguments in global food policy.

At present, the feld of global food policy is marked by the reemergence of productive concerns, however, the realization of these concerns is somewhat constrained by the international free trade system institutionalized through the World Trade Organization (WTO). Within these boundaries, international agricultural institutions provide technical research, humanitarian relief, and linkages between food and other social policy programs, while the underlying structural causes for food insecurity largely remain in place. Thus, large parts of the populations in the Global South remain unable to secure suffcient food, despite working in agriculture.

The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. The next section traces the history of the major international organizations (IOs) since their respective founding dates and discusses discursive and policy shifts up until the turn of the millennium. The third section then looks at contemporary debates around food and revisits the major IOs that were previously introduced. The chapter concludes that despite the narrowing of the discourse about food security, new movements can be distilled that promise to reopen some of the neglected debates about food and its production.

## History: IOs and Food Policy in the Twentieth Century

#### *Constituting the Post-Colonial Order*

Food has been a global issue long before it became institutionalized as a policy feld of international organizations after the Second World War (WWII). Questions of international trade and agricultural policies have long been interlinked, and during the colonial era, the securing of agricultural products was a central motivation for the European conquest of countries in the Global South (Orford 2015, 9). The International Institute of Agriculture (IIA) was founded in 1905 and was the frst formal initiative to create a global mechanism for exchanging information on commodities. Based in Rome, the IIA conducted a number of conferences between 1920 and 1934 and would later be integrated into the FAO (Staples 2006, 69; Liese 2012, 114). In 1937, the Permanent Agricultural Committee of the International Labour Organization (ILO) was set up to deal with problems related to agricultural labor (Nelson 1949, 525). In the interwar period, hunger came to be seen as a major global problem (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 102), urban-rural disparities came to the fore (Forclaz 2019, 354), and knowledge about the importance of adequate nutrition grew (Staples 2006, 68–69).

Connecting nutrition and production, the FAO of the United Nations was conceived during the last years of WWII and offcially founded through the approval of its constitution by representatives of 44 member states in October 1945 (Shaw 2007, 9). The preamble of the FAO's constitution described its mandate as raising nutrition levels, improving the effciency of food production, contributing to rural development, and expanding the world economy overall (Phillips 1981, 9).

In 1946, a Rural Welfare Division was set up to act as an overarching unit that would connect the various technical divisions of the FAO, which were in turn responsible for fsheries, forestry, and other specialized felds (Forclaz 2019, 355). The Division was directed by Horace Belshaw, who adopted a holistic approach to rural development, attributed key importance to local knowledge and subjective measures of well-being, and was skeptical of overly top-down, expert-driven development programs (Forclaz 2019, 352–53, 359). The Division acted like the "conscience of FAO in rural welfare matters" (Phillips 1981, 128). In these early years, the FAO aimed to strengthen smallholder agriculture, as increasing their production would improve health and living standards as well as food availability (Forclaz 2019, 356). The approach taken by the FAO experts was informed by historical lessons, such as from Denmark's redistributive land reform and support to smallholders (Forclaz 2019, 358).

The FAO formulated a vision for a global food system which refected the wider post-war optimism that global problems could be resolved through international cooperation (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 99–100). One of the early propositions came from its frst Director General, John Boyd Orr. He presented to the FAO's 1946 conference the idea of setting up a World Food Board for holding buffer stocks and for providing credit to developing countries (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 109). The food held by the Board was supposed to be used for famine relief and sold at reduced prices to countries in need (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011). It would also use its stockholding to prevent a fall in prices that might discourage food production (Staples 2006, 85–86). At the same time, it was hoped that the Board would thereby contribute to peace between nations (Staples 2006, 87).

While the conference initially approved of Orr's suggestion and set up a commission tasked with thinking out the details, the idea was eventually buried upon opposition from the US and the UK, who feared losing autonomy over trade policies (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 110). Both were opposed to a strong FAO with regulatory powers and preferred an organizationally weak institution that would concentrate on offering technical advice, like the IIA had done previously (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 107–08). Others, notably Latin American countries would have preferred an FAO with more far-reaching powers (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011). Ultimately, instead of creating a World Food Board, it became a national undertaking for many countries to hold food buffer stocks, while international policies revolved around economic growth with the belief that this would eventually enable everyone to buy suffcient food (Staples 2006, 92–93). The 1950s were the height of modernization theories, which were focused on industrialization more than on agricultural development (Frey and Unger 2017, 11–12; Maxwell 2001, 39).

The FAO's second Director General, Norris E. Dodd, who was in offce from 1948 until 1953, again tried to endow the FAO with powers to balance out price fuctuations in food commodities, but his proposal was equally rejected (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 112). In the 1950s, the FAO then slowly gave up on its grand visions and resorted to focusing on technical assistance (Staples 2006, 99). Parallel to reducing its ambitions, the FAO's budget on the contrary grew. Supplementing its own small budget, the rapidly growing UN Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA, later to become the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)) doubled its funds to the FAO as part of its increased rural development aid (Forclaz 2019, 361). Consequently, the FAO's ability to undertake short-term technical assignments upon request by member governments grew (Forclaz 2019). The largest number of experts deployed came from the US and other Western countries and the way in which these technical missions worked was short-term, without much familiarity with the broader socio-economic contexts of receiving countries (Forclaz 2019, 363). The shift toward "piece-meal" technical tasks was further underlined in 1951, when the Rural Welfare Division was dismantled and reduced to a sub-division of the agriculture division in conjunction with the FAO headquarters moving from Washington to Rome (Forclaz 2019, 361; Phillips 1981, 128).

Food defcits gained renewed attention in the 1960s. Under the framework of its "Freedom from Hunger" campaign, the FAO increased its budget by 350 percent and further expanded its technical assistance programs in developing countries (Jachertz and Nützenadel 2011, 114; Phillips 1981, 72). In the same year, the United Nations adopted a resolution to distribute food through the UN system to "food-defcit" populations (Shaw 2009, 59). At the time, the US had been accumulating large food surpluses and had created its own "Offce of Food for Peace" in the Executive Offce of the president (Shaw 2009). The FAO warned that "dumping" large amounts of food could have negative consequences on receiving countries, and led the initiative to develop a system through which food aid could be used as part of the larger global developmental effort rather than as a political tool (Shaw 2009, 60; Shaw 2001, 3). This became the rationale for the creation of the World Food Program (WFP) in 1961 (Shaw 2009, 62–63). The US, however, made sure that this would coexist with, rather than replace, bilateral food aid programs (Shaw 2009). The WFP was created with a dual mandate: to provide long-term developmental, and short-term humanitarian assistance (Shaw 2001, 2), with the relative weight between the two shifting back and forth over time.1 In the frst three decades after its creation, the WFP directed twothirds of its resources toward developmental interventions, mainly through "food for work" and school feeding programs, and one-third toward emergencies (Shaw 2009, 76). This would reverse in the 1990s (Shaw 2009). Another important change concerned the sourcing of the food. The WFP shifted from using donated food from donor countries toward tapping into local and regional food markets (Maxwell 2008).

Last, the World Bank (WB) was one of the early organizations engaged in food policies after WWII. Under the World Bank Group, the International Development Association (IDA) was created in 1960 to offer loans on concessional terms, and the World Bank's overall aim turned toward poverty reduction (Shaw 2009, 71–76). The share of credit it provided to agricultural projects grew during the 1960s, not least due to the so-called Green Revolution during which crop yields in Latin America and Asia signifcantly increased between the 1950s and 1970s and thus required major investments in irrigation, drainage, and other related services (Pincus 2001).

In 1964, the World Bank decided to work together with UN specialized agencies, and a deal was made that the FAO would prepare agricultural projects for World Bank lending (Shaw 2009, 114). The World Bank itself increased the number of staff in its agriculture department too (Shaw 2009). After an initial period of mainly providing loans for large infrastructure projects (roads, harbors, airports, dams), the World Bank's investment portfolio broadened from the mid-1960s, and agriculture became one of the main foci (Stryker 1979, 326–27), "designed to beneft 'the poorest 40 percent'" (Mkandawire 2010, 42). The IDA invested heavily in small farmers, supplying them with seed and fertilizer to foster cash crop production, which happened at the expense of the growth of local staple foods (Tetzlaff 2012, 266). Especially under the leadership of World Bank president McNamara (in offce from 1968–1981), small farm development was seen as crucial for combining growth with poverty reduction (Pincus 2001).

The "Green Revolution" gave rise to high hopes in technology and science for resolving the world's hunger problem. While progress in

<sup>1</sup> https://www.wfp.org/history. Accessed May 16, 2020.

natural sciences and technology had also been key for earlier agricultural revolutions (see Mingay 1977 on the UK), this marked the frst large-scale and global "diffusion" of agricultural knowledge, such as that on highyielding crop varieties. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were at the forefront of developing an international agricultural research program, beginning with research on rice and wheat improvements (Hazell 2009, 1). Even though many of the technological solutions of the time were not appropriate for smallholder production (Harwood 2009), the "Green Revolution" was perceived as a success story of science, thereby laying the foundations for the signifcant role that global research organizations would come to play in food policy. Besides the two foundations, there was also the FAO, the UNDP, and the World Bank that began to lobby for donors to invest more funds into agricultural research (Shaw 2009, 66). This led to the creation of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 1971, an umbrella body for research institutes that was initially tasked with studying possibilities of increasing output in staple foods (Shaw 2009, 66, 88, 154). The FAO, however, only reluctantly became a co-sponsor of CGIAR, as it meant giving away the lead it had in providing agricultural research by doing so (Shaw 2009, 96).

#### *The 1970s: High Time for Food Security*

In the early 1970s, the world's worst food crisis "in modern history" (Shaw 2010, 664), which included famines in the Sahel, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia (Devereux 2000, 6), led the FAO to propose an international initiative for world food security and for setting up an early warning system (Phillips 1981, 74). At this time, the FAO was roughly half fnanced through the UNDP and half fnanced through extra-budgetary sources like trust funds (earmarked funds from donors for specifc countries) (Phillips 1981). In 1974, a World Food Conference (WFC) was convened in Rome, though not on the FAO's premises (Shaw 2009, 96). Nonetheless, it still organized much of the program and managed to gain political support for many of its proposed activities. These included setting up a Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) and strengthening its work on pesticides, seeds, plant and animal diseases, nutrition, extension, research, and training (Phillips 1981, 75). One of the goals defned at the WFC was the eradication of hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity within a span of ten years (Martha 2009, 451). In the subsequent years, member governments agreed to increase the FAO's budget, though simultaneously suggested that it divert some of its resources away from headquarters (which was perceived to be overstaffed) into country offces (Phillips 1981, 75). After a review, some areas of the FAO's work were scaled down, including activities related to economic policies and world agricultural development, while the new short-term Technical Cooperation Program was initiated (Phillips 1981).

The 1974 conference also led to the establishment of various new institutional bodies. One of them was the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), an intergovernmental committee within the FAO tasked with serving as a forum for reviewing and following up on the decisions made at the conference (CFS 2015, 1). Another one was the shorter-lived World Food Council. Created in 1974, it was meant to function as "a political overview body and was to serve as the eyes, ears, and conscience of the UN system regarding world food security issues" (Shaw 2010, 664). Its coordination mandate allowed the president of the WFC to attend meetings of the governing bodies of the relevant UN agencies, in addition to holding meetings with their executive heads individually and collectively (Shaw 2010, 676). However, while given huge responsibilities, the WFC never received enough resources or authority and was dissolved in 1993 (Shaw 2010, 690).

Finally, a new international fnancial institution was created in 1977 following the recognition during the 1974 conference that investments in food and agricultural production needed to be signifcantly increased (Martha 2009, 451). The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was to be funded by voluntary contributions, a large share of which was to come from OPEC countries. It initially focused on funding food production in the poorest developing countries (Martha 2009, 453), and later diversifed into other areas, such as rural fnance, fsheries and livestock, irrigation, and rural poverty reduction more generally (Shaw 2009, 143–45). As contributions remained behind commitments, IFAD became a small provider of grants and loans when compared to the World Bank and regional development banks (Shaw 2009, 63, 87).2 Nonetheless, it is the only IFI that has the mandate to invest its resources exclusively into agriculture in developing countries (Martha 2009: 457).

Throughout this period, the relative weight of the World Bank grew. Against an overall rise in World Bank lending and a growing number of World Bank staff, the increase in the share of agriculture in its lending

<sup>2</sup> https://www.ifad.org/en/history. Accessed May 16, 2020.

portfolio from 18 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 1981 was considerable (Pincus 2001). By the late 1970s, the World Bank had become the most powerful international fnancial institution for development (Stryker 1979, 325), and debt owed by countries in the Global South started to accumulate (Tetzlaff 2012, 266). Apart from being the largest lender, the World Bank also began to dominate in terms of defning global development paradigms, based on the expertise of its economists from around the world (Tetzlaff 2012, 262–63). As a "knowledge bank", it has since had signifcant infuence on the global development discourse (Van Waeyenberge and Fine 2011). It further increased its infuence over CGIAR by increasing its funding and by persuading the CGIAR members to accept that their chairperson would be the vice-president of the World Bank (Shaw 2009, 114–15). Meanwhile, the FAO declined in relative importance and power (Unger 2019, 456).

The 1960s and 1970s were marked by governmental support for agriculture in the Global South. As in industrialized countries in the past, the strategies employed by states included land reforms, the provision of inputs and extension, national marketing agencies, governmental price setting, and stockpile management (Chang 2009). By taking account of and countering smallholder vulnerability, these could be classified as social protection policies (Devereux 2009, 6). While the FAO was supportive of such measures, it could not prevent them from becoming discredited during the neoliberal era of structural adjustment and agricultural liberalization.

#### *Neoliberal Shifts*

In the 1980s, after a short period of prioritizing rural poverty reduction, the World Bank shifted instead to concentrating on "eliminating all obstacles to a 'perfect market' as the presumed optimal path to growth" (Van Waeyenberge et al. 2011, 6). The bundle of neoliberal economic policy prescriptions commonly summarized as the "Washington Consensus" included the removal of subsidies, the deregulation and liberalization of trade, and the elimination of parastatal agencies (Oya 2004, 129). The national food security policies referred to above fell victim to these reforms, being perceived as largely ineffcient and too costly. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank's "Berg Report", published in 1981, found that domestic pricing policies had been biased against agriculture, disrupted market mechanisms, and crowded out the private sector (World Bank 1981; Loxley 1983; Devereux 2009, 6). The FAO underwent a policy shift too: from approaching food security at the national level (thus promoting grain-stockholding and self-suffciency) to defning it at the individual and household level (for which imports were deemed more effcient) (Jarosz 2011). How and why this shift within the FAO occurred would merit further scrutiny.

During the 1980s, the World Bank provided so-called agricultural sectoral adjustment loans (ASALs) to countries of the Global South that were linked to the elimination of subsidies and the liberalization of prices for agricultural inputs and outputs (Pincus 2001). The envisaged solution was that by lifting price "distortions" imposed by the state, smallholders would be enabled to prosper freely (Oya 2004, 128). Having been identifed as the problem, governing elites were now circumvented by donors, who preferred working through NGOs (Mkandawire 2010, 42–44). Overall, the reforms effectively dismantled the capacities of states to promote social and economic well-being. Their reduced investment in public goods for the agricultural sector coupled with trade liberalization threatened the survival of many farmers (Chang 2009, 2). Moreover, the wide-reaching fnancial market deregulation that began in this period enabled speculations on food, which eventually became one of the main drivers of the food price crises of 2008 and 2011 (Sonkin 2020).

During the height of structural adjustment, food security was reconceptualized. While it was still a concern to IOs in this period, it was largely decoupled from the production of food. As agricultural interventions by states had been discredited, structural adjustment reforms aiming at macroeconomic stability and economic growth were believed to ultimately also beneft poor people's ability to purchase food in the (globally connected) marketplace. According to the World Bank in the 1980s, the solution was "raising the real incomes of households so that they can afford to acquire enough food" (World Bank 1986, 5). Food security hence became mainly an issue of how to access it for consumption (Maxwell 2001, 24–25; Orford 2015, 6).

A critical juncture originated in the academic debate about famines. In 1981, Amartya Sen published his seminal work "Poverty and Famines" in which he pointed out that food crises were often not the outcome of insuffcient food availability, but of insuffcient access to food (Sen 1981). He suggested the framework of entitlements to make the case for paying more attention to individuals' and households' unequally distributed ability to access food, either through one's own production, by purchasing it from labor investment, or through food assistance (Sen; Devereux 2000, 19). With his intervention, Sen aimed to counter what had been received wisdom until then, including within the FAO: that food security was mainly a supply-side issue. Instead, he argued, one also needed to consider the inequalities and political dynamics within countries that accounted for people suffering from famines even in cases where food was available. While constituting an important intervention into an apolitical, technical discourse about food security, this work was simultaneously compatible with the interpretation that food security was achievable through a reduction of poverty and improved access to markets for the poor (Devereux 2000, 20).

As access to food became a priority in the World Bank's food policy discourse, its lending to agriculture decreased. In its infuential 1986 report entitled "Poverty and Hunger", the World Bank cited Sen's 1981 work to make the point that "[…] the loss of real income better explains why famines occur and who gets hurt" (World Bank 1986, 27). The focus in the international discourse shifted from supply to demand, and "entitlement, vulnerability and risk became the new watchwords" (Maxwell and Slater 2003, 532). It was only another four years until the World Bank began to promote targeted safety nets, perfecting an individualized perspective on poverty (World Bank 1990). The share of the World Bank's lending to agriculture dropped from 30 percent in the early 1980s to around 8 percent by the end of the millennium (Shaw 2009, 115).3 The resulting gap in lending to agriculture could not be compensated by IFAD, either, which had limited resources at its disposal (Martha 2009, 459).

The subordination of food security under the free trade paradigm was reinforced in 1995 by the formation of the WTO. Having previously been excluded from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), agriculture became part of the agreement for the frst time (FAO 1998). More than just regulating the international system, domestic policies also became the target of the rules due to their infuence on trade (FAO 1998). While the arguments underlying these agreements were similar to those of the structural adjustment reforms, the WTO had longer-lasting effects on governments' ability to foster production by permanently enshrining rules

<sup>3</sup>The World Bank explains the decline with reference to the falling proftability of agriculture, the increased competition for aid from other sectors, and the opposition from developed country farmers as well as environmental groups (World Bank 2007, 42).

about what types of interventions were permitted and which were not (FAO 1998; Margulis 2017, 50–51).

The FAO, meanwhile, reaffrmed food security and fghting hunger as their top priorities (Shaw 2009, 103). Because the long-term social effects of structural adjustment measures had proven disastrous for many countries in the Global South and had hit poorer farmers particularly hard (Oya 2004, 129–30), the awareness of poverty, undernourishment, and food insecurity began to rise again during the 1990s. A Summit on World Food Security was called by the FAO with the aim to renew international commitments.4 The Summit took place in November 1996 and a target was set to halve the number of people who were undernourished by 2015, measured against the year 1990 (Devereux 2018a, 185). The defnition of food security cited in the introduction of this chapter was also born at that summit, and has since become widely accepted (Margulis 2017, 29–30).

# IOs and Food Policy Since the Turn of the New Millennium

#### *Consensus and Critique*

In 2003, Maxwell and Slater nostalgically asked: "Remember 'food policy'? It is what some of us used to do before we discovered 'food security'" (Maxwell and Slater 2003, 531). Food security has become the core concept and rallying point in international food policy discourse. The above historical account shows how food security has evolved into a central, yet unsuccessfully resolved global problem. This section is concerned with the period since the turn of the new millennium. Architecturally, there has emerged an apparent consensus among the main international organizations that has culminated in two sets of developmental goals. Shortly following the 1996 World Food Summit, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted, in which goal number one was to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger", or more precisely, to "halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger".5 And in the SDGs that replaced the MDGs in 2015, goal number two was to "end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote

<sup>4</sup> http://www.fao.org/wfs/index\_en.htm. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>5</sup> https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml. Accessed May 16, 2020.

sustainable agriculture".6 Both have contributed to a common framework for international organizations working in food (Devereux 2018a, 185), including the FAO, the WFP, and the World Bank.7

Especially since 2008, global food policy initiatives have proliferated, and several international organizations have forged connections within this feld (Fouilleux et al. 2017, 1660). Since 2017, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have joined the FAO, the WFP, and IFAD in publishing their annual fagship publication "The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World", which serves to monitor the progress made on SDG number two (FAO et al. 2019, xvi). As a new body, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) was launched in 2010 by the G20, as a "global partnership" for channeling donor funds (from rich countries and the Gates Foundation) to "public and private actors along the entire agriculture value chain".8 It is administered by the World Bank (FAO et al. 2019, 1665) and its steering committee includes not only representatives of international organizations but also a few civil society groups.9 Since the 1996 World Food Summit, advocacy for recognizing the right to food has also brought the global human rights regime into the picture (Margulis 2013, 58). The capacities of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Human Rights Council to monitor and enforce the human right to food have been strengthened (Margulis 2013, 59). The FAO adopted voluntary "right to food" guidelines in 200410 and since then, has made efforts to mainstream a rights-based approach into its food agenda, albeit with varying success (Anthes and De Schutter 2017). Last, the space occupied by the WFP in the new millennium is unclear owing to the dual nature of its mandate, which has been found to be perceived as somewhat confusing (MOPAN 2013). While its budget is several

<sup>6</sup> https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/hunger/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>7</sup> http://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals/en/; https://www.wfp.org/zerohunger; https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/sdgs-2030-agenda, all accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>8</sup> https://www.gafspfund.org/approach. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>9</sup> https://www.gafspfund.org/civil-society-organizations. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>10</sup>Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security, adopted by the 127th Session of the FAO Council, 22–27 November 2004, see http://www.fao.org/3/j3893e/J3893e02.htm#ad. Accessed May 16, 2020.

times higher than that of the FAO,11 its emergency logistics skills have at times made a larger impression than its developmental food policy visions (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2018, 31; Maxwell 2008).

As international organizations have failed to resolve the problem of global hunger while continuously reconstructing a hopeful narrative (Hickel 2017), the emergence of powerful civil society actors has brought important dimensions of the global food question back to the table (Duncan 2016). A well-known one is La Via Campesina, an umbrella movement of peasants and smallholders from around the world, that was founded in 1993 to connect struggles for farmers' sovereignty over land, seeds, agricultural practices, and food (Borras Jr 2008; Borras et al. 2015).12 La Via Campesina has engaged with the FAO, which is interested in collaborative policy development and knowledge sharing (Claeys and Edelman 2020, 1).13 One recent success of civil society has been the adoption by the United Nations of the "Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas" in 2018 (Claeys and Edelman 2020); another one was the institutionalization of civil society participation in the Committee on World Food Security, whose secretariat is hosted by the FAO, in 2009 (Duncan and Barling 2012; Duncan 2016, 150). 14

An important critic of the global trade system and its effects on food security was Olivier De Schutter, who served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2008 until 2014 (McMichael 2014, 939; Orford 2015, 7). He highlighted that foreign imports outcompeted local production and destroyed agricultural capacities in the Global South, and criticized the WTO for rendering domestic food reserves, the management of prices, and the cushioning of income volatility for the rural poor impossible (De Schutter 2011). He also advocated for better regulations of largescale land acquisitions and for obliging investors to operate in the interest of local peasants (McMichael 2014, 939). Last, when the WTO proposed to regulate the types of permissible food aid, the WFP intervened and launched a public media campaign against the WTO (Margulis 2013, 61).

<sup>11</sup>WFP had raised 7.2 billion USD in 2018 (https://www.wfp.org/overview), while the total FAO budget planned for 2018–2019 was 2.6 billion USD (http://www.fao.org/ about/how-we-work/en/, both accessed May 16, 2020).

<sup>12</sup> https://viacampesina.org/en/food-sovereignty/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>13</sup> http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/201824/icode/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>14</sup> http://www.fao.org/cfs/home/about/en/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

But while the UN organizations have much normative and moral authority, the WTO ultimately makes the rules (Margulis 2013, 63).

#### *Production*

In the new millennium, food production is back on the agenda. As was described above, the focus had shifted since the early 1980s from questions of production to questions of distribution and access. For several reasons, the new millennium has seen a return to the concern of how to produce more food. Devereux calls this the "new productivist agenda" (Devereux 2018a). Given the accelerating effects of climate change, this agenda is inevitably linked to the question of how to make food production not only more yielding but also more "sustainable".

Especially in Africa, agricultural productivity has not substantially increased over the past 50 years so that the continent falls short of feeding itself (Devereux 2018a, 186–88). In light of global population growth, the imperative that results is commonly referred to as the "challenge of feeding 9 billion people" (Godfray et al. 2010). In 2009, the FAO wrote that food production needed to be doubled "[…] in order to feed a population projected to reach 9.2 billion by 2050" (FAO 2009, vi), and the World Bank even estimates that a 70 percent increase in food will be required.15 While the need to increase the overall amount of available food worldwide is highly disputed (Fouilleux et al. 2017), as the current amount could be suffcient if only it were better distributed,16 the "productivist agenda" has brought the important question of supporting smallholder agriculture back into focus.

One of the frst signals of this move was the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report (WDR), entitled "Agriculture for Development" (World Bank 2007). The topic of that year's WDR surprised the development community, given that the World Bank had not paid much attention to agriculture since the 1980s, as indicated above. In fact, except for IFAD, all international fnancial institutions had reduced their relative share of lending to agriculture during the 1990s (Martha 2009, 458). In the report, the World Bank itself recognized that donor neglect had

<sup>15</sup> https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climate-smart-agriculture. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>16</sup> https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/world-food-day-there-enough-foodgrown-world-everyone-op-ed. Accessed May 16, 2020.

contributed to an underinvestment in agriculture in the Global South (World Bank 2007, 44).

The report was seen as a welcome move back toward the unresolved issue of how to foster smallholder production, but criticisms mounted too. The main thrust of the WDR 2008 remained the focus on market-led agricultural development in which the "new role for the state" would consist of "providing core public goods, improving the investment climate for the private sector—and in better natural resources management by introducing incentives and assigning property rights" (World Bank 2007, 24). Such interventions, however, did not promise to resolve the problems created by dismantling states' ability to promote their own agricultural sectors in the Global South, and critics interpreted it as "an ongoing adherence to orthodoxy" (Akram-Lodhi 2008, 1155). Moreover, while paying lip service to peasants, the report failed to resolve the problems they faced in having to operate in a detrimental environment shaped by big agribusinesses and corporate power (Oya 2009, 595).

Raising agricultural productivity and production without further damaging the environment and climate is a widely shared concern. As one solution, the FAO and World Bank encourage techniques of conservation agriculture (World Bank 2012).17 The FAO additionally supports agroecology (FAO 2018) and organic farming (Morgera et al. 2012, v). For its part, the World Bank has promoted "climate-smart agriculture" since 2009, which combines the aims of productivity increase, reduction of vulnerability to climate change, and reduction of emissions (i.e., productivity, adaptation, and mitigation).18 Critics, however, have argued that this concept remains vague enough for the agricultural "business as usual" to continue (Taylor 2018). Research plays an important role in reaching the vision of a "food system simultaneously capable of delivering greater volumes of more nutritious food with a lower environmental footprint".19 International agricultural think tanks have once again gained in importance, not least because state research agencies have suffered in the structural adjustment period (Chang 2009, 14).

While critics point to the confict between free trade and peasant production, a popular attempt at reconciling both is the reliance on global value chains. According to the World Bank, increasing private sector

<sup>17</sup> http://www.fao.org/conservation-agriculture/en/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>18</sup> https://csa.guide/csa/what-is-climate-smart-agriculture. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>19</sup> https://www.cgiar.org/research/research-themes/. Accessed May 16, 2020.

investment in agricultural value chains will contribute to ending poverty and hunger (World Bank 2018). Whether smallholders can beneft from being part of agricultural value chains, however, remains far from clear (Joala et al. 2016). From a very different vantage point, though also aimed at connecting smallholders to markets, farming cooperatives have been rediscovered. Historically, the cooperative movement has been a powerful way of enabling smallholders to beneft from economies of scale while simultaneously serving as a collective body for interest representation and risk pooling (Wanyama et al. 2009). After having suffered considerably from the structural adjustment reforms (Wanyama et al. 2009), cooperatives are now being promoted again, most prominently by the ILO. In 2002, the ILO adopted its Promotion of Cooperatives Recommendation (No. 193) as a guide to governments for revising their cooperative laws and putting supportive policies in place (ILO 2014, xv). The ILO sees cooperatives as having the potential to offer their members decent jobs, better access to global, regional, and national (agricultural) markets, access to fnance, infrastructure, and irrigation, as well as social security (ILO 2014; Pollet 2009).

#### *Protection*

A whole architecture of its own has been constructed from arguments about the (potential) linkages between social protection and food security. The new millennium has seen a wave of new social protection policies across the Global South. They are aimed at providing income security in times of risk during different stages of the life cycle and include social assistance programs (like cash transfers) and social insurance schemes (like unemployment benefts) (ILO 2017, xxix). Many international organizations are promoting the social protection agenda, though from very different conceptual and political angles (for an overview, see UNICEF 2019, 63–68). In 2012, the High-Level Panel of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security produced a report arguing that rights-based social protection could further the realization of the right to food (HLPE 2012, 11). Social protection can play several key roles in relation to food, not only in terms of its consumption but also in terms of its production (HLPE 2012; Devereux 2009).

An obvious way for social protection to contribute to food security is through social transfers, in kind or in cash. They can enable the poor to afford adequate food, and they can smoothen seasonal income fuctuations, especially for subsistence farmers. In many countries, smallholders depend on rainfed agriculture and have—depending on the rain pattern in their region—only one harvest season per year. This leads to insuffcient access to income or food throughout several months of the lean season (Devereux and Tavener-Smith 2019). Social transfers can prevent harmful coping strategies such as reducing food intake or the sale of assets (Devereux and Tavener-Smith 2019).

By raising household incomes, social protection can improve nutrition through making more diverse foods available. Besides the ILO,20 UNICEF is one of the leading international organizations that promote rights-based universal social protection, and produced its frst "Social Protection Strategic Framework" in 2012 (UNICEF 2019, 1). UNICEF recognizes the positive impact that social protection can have on the nutrition of children, as a "good consumption and diet diversifcation [are] a major focus of expenditure when families living in poverty receive cash transfers" (UNICEF 2019, 29). But they also point out that additional concerted interventions are needed to address undernutrition effectively (UNICEF 2019; see also Devereux 2018a, 194). UNICEF engages in programs aimed at improving the nutrition of mothers, pregnant women, children, and adolescents and includes, for instance, breastfeeding campaigns or the supplementation of micronutrients.21 For its part, the WFP connects nutrition, agricultural development, and social protection by sourcing "home-grown" food for school meals, thereby improving educational outcomes while also offering an additional market to local smallholders.22

Social protection can also have productive effects. Especially for smallholders, overcoming fnancing constraints is a key step toward increasing production; yet, the private credit facilities that were supposed to replace the former state-led ones have failed to meet this need (Chang 2009, 18–19). Cash transfers are thus a useful support for farmers to invest in agricultural inputs and assets, such as seed, fertilizer, implements, or the use of processing facilities. In 2003, social protection was stipulated as a

<sup>20</sup> https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/social-security/lang%2D%2Den/index.htm. Accessed May 16, 2020. While the ILO's Social Protection Floors, adopted in 2012, are a key step in building rights-based social protection systems, they do not dwell on issues of nutrition (Devereux 2018b).

<sup>21</sup> https://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index\_action.html. Accessed May 16, 2020.

<sup>22</sup> https://www.wfp.org/home-grown-school-meals. Accessed May 16, 2020. This differs from USAID, for instance, which sources US food for its food aid.

"corporate priority" by the FAO and is increasingly integrated into its assistance missions (FAO 2017, 1). It aims to expand social protection to rural people, to forge synergies between social protection and agriculture, to make agriculture nutrition-sensitive, and to use social protection for agricultural resilience (FAO 2017). Under its "From Protection to Production Project", the FAO, in collaboration with UNICEF, evaluates the productive effects of cash transfer programs.23 Other social protection schemes include insurance mechanisms that protect smallholders against droughts or crop failure (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2018, 6), and supporting rural organizations that can collectivize risks (FAO 2017).

In sum, the current social protection momentum offers a much-needed opportunity to bring back those agricultural policies that were previously dismantled during the neoliberal era.

#### Conclusion

Ensuring that all people across the world have access to food remains an unresolved problem. Despite many decades of investments by international organizations, the number of those living with hunger or undernourishment is on the rise, and the productive capacities of farmers in the Global South remain severely incapacitated. While the formal international architecture around food has failed to address the major underlying structural problems, a growing number of civil society and peasant movements pose vital questions about the current global capitalist order, thereby re-politicizing what has largely become a deceptively peaceful mishmash of micro debates. Not least thanks to the current attention to rights-based social protection, several public interventions that could potentially remedy some of the negative consequences of the neoliberal reforms have been rediscovered. The end of the lean season of global food policies might thus be in sight. But whether this momentum is utilized will also depend on the political power and effectiveness of organizations that could challenge the neoliberal paradigm, which has been successfully "embedded" (Duncan 2016) by the World Bank and the WTO.

 Accessed May 16, 2020.

"on behalf of humanity as a whole" is in itself remarkable (Orford 2015, 9). After all, food production and consumption are fundamentally local activities. Solving the problem of their equitable distribution might need to start from there.

#### References

World Bank. 1986. "Poverty and Hunger: Issues and Options for Food Security in Developing Countries." Washington D.C.

World Bank. 1990. "World Development Report 1990: Poverty." Washington D.C.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Conclusion

# International Organizations and the Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance

*Kerstin Martens, Dennis Niemann, and Alexandra Kaasch*

This book has dealt with the initiatives, ideas, and policy preferences of International Organizations (IOs) in different felds of global social policy. The chapters have focused on felds within the broader areas of labor and

This chapter is a product of the research conducted in the Collaborative Research Center "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen. The center is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 374666841—SFB 1342.

K. Martens (\*) • D. Niemann

Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) and Collaborative Research Centre 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy", University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Kaasch

© The Author(s) 2021 325

Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
K. Martens et al. (eds.), *International Organizations in Global Social Governance*, Global Dynamics of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65439-9\_14

migration, family and education, and health and environment. Each contribution has provided specifc accounts of actor constellations, ideational content, and resulting characterizations of global social policy architectures. In this fnal chapter, we aim to bring together in a systematic manner the insights from these various social policy felds in order to generalize about populations of IOs, ideas and discourses, and patterns of global governance in social policies.

Naturally, most of the chapters in the volume acknowledge that the felds being looked at are driven by many different global actors, with IOs being just one, albeit a central one. None of the chapters nor this conclusion suggest that IOs are always the most important or most powerful actors. Nevertheless, they can be considered the most multi-faceted type of actor, in particular due to their multiple and varying roles, functions, and mechanisms of impact. By IOs we refer to intergovernmental organizations which have their own organizational bodies (e.g. secretariats) and have states as their prime members. Other types of organizations (e.g. bi- or multilateral associations of international exchange or international non-governmental organizations) are mentioned and discussed in relation to and within the context of IOs. In conceptualizing global social governance within social felds, we were interested in mapping each feld according to the IOs active in it and analyzing the discourses they promote. The analytical approaches of organizational ecology and of soft governance within the study of IR were loosely applied in this volume as heuristic frames and offered a theoretical lens for assessing the developments in the social policy felds. First, each chapter in this book shed light on IO involvement in a particular social policy feld by describing the *population* of engaging IOs, namely how a feld is constituted as well as which are the major or regional IOs. Second, each chapter examined the *discourses* within and between the IOs of a respective feld, presenting the major leitmotifs and policies found in a feld. Overall, the chapters described and analyzed what we call the *architecture of arguments* in global social governance.

This concluding chapter resumes the arguments made in the introduction to this volume. We highlight prevailing cross-cutting issues and themes by summarizing fndings pertinent to the different questions we raised in the introduction: How is the feld of IOs in global social governance constituted? How can the discourses of IOs in social policy felds be described? How is the constellation of IOs interlinked with what they address? IOs have actively shaped the architecture of arguments in global social governance for a long time: They have populated diverse social felds and exercised soft governance, shaping how the global discourse on social policy topics is organized through the cognitive authority they hold over their specifc feld. While the dynamics within populations tend to be characterized by cooperation and coexistence, looking at the discourses and ideas promoted in social policy reveals contestation between IOs. This chapter closes by formulating avenues for further research.

#### IO Populations in Global Social Policies

The previous chapters mapped the population of IOs in a given social policy feld by assessing the organizational felds in the realm of social policy. They showed which actors were pivotal and how the composition of IOs dealing with a certain policy evolved. Some IOs appear in almost all social policy felds. This group of almost omnipresent IOs includes the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank in particular, and increasingly also the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to a certain extent. Therefore, these three IOs can be considered as general global social policy actors, working across a signifcant variety and number of specifc social policy areas. This is not fundamentally new or surprising. Studies from as early as the 1990s onward have placed the ILO and the World Bank at the center of explaining global social policies and governance (Deacon 2007; Deacon et al. 1997). Equally signifcant in more recent years has been the OECD, which made notable contributions to the feld and is considered a key global social policy actor (see also Deeming and Smyth 2018; Deacon and Kaasch 2008; Kaasch 2010; Ervik 2009; Mahon 2009). This observation holds true even for most of the policy felds that have barely been addressed by the global social policy literature before.

Also in line with earlier works (Deacon et al. 1997), all chapters have shown how the UN system is a structural determinant of global social policy felds. Particularly the overarching Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), as well as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as global initiatives on the UN level, are mechanisms that bring IO actors together in their commitments to achieve common goals. That has been specifcally mentioned in several chapters, for example, by *Lakeman* on climate change or by *Wolkenhauer* on food.

With regard to single IOs, the oldest one is also one of the most signifcant and visible organizations in social policy: the ILO. Mandated with labor market and social protection issues and uniquely comprised in a tripartite manner of governments, employers, and workers, the ILO appears as a key player in any global social policy feld. In many of the chapters, the story repeats itself: the World Bank appeared on the scene in the 1990s, challenging the ILO (and other UN agencies) and taking on quite a powerful role from that point on (apart from Deacon's work; Koivusalo and Ollila 1997 made such an argument for the feld of health; Mundy and Verger 2015 for education). Similarly, the OECD emerged as an infuential actor in social policy. While this IO is signifcantly different due to it having a limited number of member states and therefore a rather indirect impact on most countries of the world, its ideational and discursive power has also challenged UN specialized agencies (see, e.g. some of the contributions in Mahon and McBride 2008).

Several major and globally acting IOs, like the ILO, the World Bank, and the OECD, successively expanded their social policy portfolios and populated niches which were previously not occupied by IOs. This, among other things, resulted in what Deacon (2007) had called 'overlapping' and 'competing' institutions in the shorter term. In the longer term, however, much of this has turned into collaborative relationships under joint goals or initiatives. In this way, as within the UN system particularly, the ILO and the World Bank were able to take leading positions in wider initiatives, keep powerful positions over extended time periods—even when faced with more IOs as actors in the feld—and set the tone for as well as play a dominant role in shaping the global discourse. This can be seen, for example, in the context of the Social Protection Floor initiative, as mentioned by *Heneghan* and *Kaasch*.

Such fndings help us to specify the meaning of 'populations' as the dominant IOs active in specifc social policy felds, but potentially also for global social policy and governance in general. We can identify several patterns of how such felds are constituted and have developed over time. The fundamental distinction works along two dimensions: frst, density and diversity focus on how many and what kind of IOs are active in a policy feld. The concepts of density and diversity also address whether certain IOs have occupied particular niches within a policy feld. Second, the interaction and relationship of the involved (IO) actors in a feld can be characterized by either cooperation or contestation. Interaction and relationship also refer to the communication between IOs within a population as well as how IOs interact with the organizational environment of states, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other collective actors.

Prime examples of social policy felds which are densely populated by a diversity of IOs are education, as shown by *Niemann and Martens,* as well as the social policy dimensions of climate change, as elaborated by *Lakeman*. In both felds, we fnd a high number of IOs actively promoting their views and ideas. However, both felds also vary: while many of the IOs active in education are either distinct 'education' IOs or have been dealing with education as part of their mandate for a long time, climate change and its social dimension is a feld which almost no IO seems to deny, and even IOs that have a distinctive thematic background and usually do not deal with matters of climate change have contributed to the discourse. In contrast, other felds are covered by a few specialized global IOs. Youth employment, as explored by *Fergusson,* is a policy feld that is focused on a specifc group and a specifc labor market issue. With this example, we also see how global social policy studies are increasingly being organized into sub-felds. Their historical development is usually much shorter and the number of actors smaller—the ILO and World Bank commonly being the key players. According to *Heneghan*, both organizations have also largely shaped the global discourse on pension reform, although at different times and accompanied by a few UN organizations, the OECD, and the European Union (EU). In the case of children and their rights, *Holzscheiter* has argued that the centrality of the UN system and related organizations has become prevalent.

An important new fnding for global social governance more generally that can be taken from the collection of chapters in this book is the signifcance of the United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Although its focus is on education, science, and culture, UNESCO has been identifed as an infuential IO in various chapters. Besides being active in its core competency areas, UNESCO has also covered care and migration policies, disability, and even water issues. In fact, UNESCO was the frst agency to deal with international health worker migration as an issue of global concern, as highlighted by *Yeates and Pillinger*. In the case of disability, *Schuster and Kolleck* underlined that UNESCO became a strong and active supporter of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopting its own action plan for supporting persons with disabilities. Since its inception, UNESCO was involved in water politics, including the launch of UNESCO's International Hydrological Decade, as *Schmidt* demonstrated. Similarly, *Fergusson* elaborated that UNESCO has always been concerned with questions of youth (un)employment and has shaped the discourse in favor of raising the school leaving age. In light of its name and mandate, UNESCO has obviously been an important IO in the realm of education since its inception, although it is neither the only IO within the UN system nor the only education IO, as demonstrated by *Niemann and Martens*.

The relationship between IOs within a policy feld also differs signifcantly. On a continuum, this could range from cut-throat competition at the one pole to cordial cooperation on the other. However, in the case of social policy, we generally fnd that the typical contestations described for global social policies in the 1990s (Deacon et al. 1997) have not remained stable. Now, patterns of cooperation prevail over contestation in many global social policy felds. Even if IOs with very different worldviews and organizational backgrounds interact, like the OECD and the ILO for example, they still manage to agree on some common ground and do not escalate their diverging policy positions into permanent confict. Two major causes for this development can be identifed in the various case studies: global crisis and common (development) goals. For example, *Mahon* described in her chapter how after the global economic and fnancial crisis in 2008, the three major IOs in the realm of family policies—the ILO, the OECD, and the World Bank—embraced the concepts and language of inclusive growth and recognized women's unequal share of unpaid domestic work. As concerns the feld of international health care workers, *Yeates and Pillinger* showed that the International Platform on Health Worker Mobility presents a recent example of cooperation between the ILO, the OECD, and WHO. This also mirrors the way in which the feld of international health care workers is scattered across a variety of IOs which each look at it through a specifc lens. According to *Fergusson*, the feld of youth (un)employment is similarly characterized by recent IO partnerships, in which foremost the ILO and the World Bank collectively interpreted youth unemployment. It is too early to predict patterns of change or new structures in global social governance as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis. However, the chapter by *Kaasch* identifed some signs that at least global health governance might revert back to more individualized IO approaches. The role of the MDGs, SDGs, and other global initiatives, such as the Universal Health Coverage approach described in the chapter by *Kaasch* or the social protection foor initiative referred to in *Heneghan's* chapter, provides incentives to collaborate rather than to compete. Being part of such initiatives, not to mention heading specifc gatherings or joint institutions, provides important leverage in related discourses.

Most of the IOs which were identifed as dominant in social policies are global IOs. This means that their activities are not restricted to a particular region or set of countries. Usually, these global IOs are the 'big players'. However, in some social policy felds, regional IOs were also important and thus occupied their own particular niche. This has become particularly evident in the feld of education, in which many IOs have a regional scope, as *Niemann and Martens* have shown. Despite the dominance of the UN system in the feld of disability, regional approaches are now also visible. For example, *Schuster and Kolleck* demonstrated that the EU has a disability strategy and a focus on collecting information and data on the implementation status of the CRPD in member states. On the African continent and in the Southeast Asian region, IOs promoted and adopted additional instruments to mainstream the rights of people with disabilities. In the case of labor standards, *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* argued that regional organizations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), are better at coming to agreements and overcoming deadlocks since they represent more homogeneous groups of countries.

In addition, the feld an IO is active in is also populated by other actors. Although other actors were not the focus of attention in our volume, it was impossible in some felds to describe the population of IOs without reference to other players, since their interconnection is deeply intertwined. The feld of disability, as shown by *Schuster and Kolleck,* is a prime example, whereby the nexus between civil society actors and IOs is particularly strong in promoting and implementing the CRPD. The feld of youth (un)employment, as explored by *Fergusson,* is characterized by partnerships between IOs, national governments, and also through partnershipbased entrepreneurial solutions. Similarly, in the feld of labor standards, *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* showed that the implementation and enforcement of standards are deeply supported by a variety of actors, including multi-stakeholder initiatives, international unions, NGOs, and also grassroots movements. Furthermore, *Holzscheiter* argued that starting from the 1990s, the feld of children's rights became densely populated by non-governmental, hybrid, and public-private partnership organizations as well as networks which all interact with each other. For education, *Niemann and Martens* reminded us that despite there being 30 IOs active in the feld, some NGOs and think tanks can be more infuential through their fnancial means than many of the education IOs with little budgets.

#### Discourses IOs Spread about Social Policy Issues

As has been shown, all analyzed social policy felds are populated by several IOs. These IOs do not necessarily hold the same preferences or convictions regarding the best policy solutions or the most desirable policy aims. Hence, sometimes IOs discursively compete for who gets their ideas accepted (Béland and Orenstein 2013). In analyzing the cognitive authority of IOs within a given policy feld, it is important to take into account who is able to shape problem perceptions, goal defnitions, and appropriate means. Since this generally refects a soft governance approach, assessing how IOs disseminate their ideas within a discourse is crucial. Discourse dynamics (how framing in a social policy feld varied over time) and discourse coalitions (consensus or diverging ideas) are two concepts that have been addressed throughout this volume. While the frst aspect is tied to the changing nature of a global discourse in a social policy feld, the latter refers to cooperation among IOs when putting forward their ideational framework. To recall, the concept of 'discourse' in this volume refers to the strategic way in which the collective actor IOs frame ideas. Analyzing the discourses which IOs promote allows for insights into their policies and leitmotifs, which shape particular social policy felds, and a better understanding of how views on social policies have evolved over time.

The discourses IOs promote are not static but changing: they have different facets and scopes in different times and contexts. As *Heneghan* showed for the case of pensions, the discourses IOs spread are shaped by paradigm shifts about global economics. Moreover, certain discourses can be highly connected with specifc IOs. In the case of disability, as explored by *Schuster and Kolleck,* it is particularly striking that specifc preferences are strongly interlocked with the involved IOs: while a medical approach to disability is promoted by WHO and involves enhancing welfare policies to support and 'medically repair' disabled individuals, a sociopolitical or rights-based approach to disability policymaking is favored by the UN system and implies an adjustment of the physical environments of disabled persons to suit their needs. The OECD and the ILO instead favor an economic model of disability by focusing on building and ensuring inclusive structures in the labor market. In the realm of family issues, *Mahon* demonstrated that discourses promoted by IOs were bifurcated until the economic crisis of 2008 between the North and the South, whereby the North connected with IOs such as the ILO and the OECD and followed the shift they promoted from the male breadwinner to adult earner caregiver model, whereas the South employed the policies of UNICEF and the World Bank which primarily targeted the children of poor families. After 2008 and with the introduction of the SDGs, both world regions have come to be addressed in a common discourse of inclusive growth. In the case of water policies, we have learned from the chapter by *Schmidt* that IOs contributed to the discourse on water being changed from one where it was seen as a natural resource to one where it is framed as a social good.

In some cases, discourses have become harmonized and previous contestation has been replaced by collaboration and associated agreement over ideas. The chapter by *Römer, Henninger, and Dung* illustrated the tensions and disagreements that importantly characterize the discourse on a set of adequate global labor standards across institutions. In fact, between and even within IOs, there are different viewpoints based on conficting ideological beliefs on labor standards. In addition, there are also strong regional differences. The feld of pensions has typically been described as a feld of contestation of economic paradigms (neoliberal views vs. social investment), where IOs accordingly promote one or the other, as can be seen by the ILO's opposition to the neoliberal-leaning World Bank and OECD. The chapter by *Heneghan* told this same story too, but also provided evidence of global economic crises having an impact on economic thinking. Nowadays, the organizations collaborate under the roof of the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B), and the discourse over appropriate pension reform happens with the aim of interagency agreement on key terms, ideas, and recommendations.

For the feld of climate change and social policy, as dealt with in the chapter by *Lakeman,* the tensions between economic, environmental, and social goals are expected to lead to competing policy ideas and models. However, the feld as such is currently only just beginning to emerge, and the engagement of IOs is still more focused on issues of climate change and its impact on social well-being than on establishing comprehensive eco-social policies. As *Yeates and Pillinger* have argued, some contestation also prevails in the area of health worker migration, where fracture lines within the cooperative Global Skills Partnerships have emerged and where the essential health needs and social protection approaches of the ILO and WHO have been challenged by proponents of mobility, fnancial incentives, employability, and skills transfers by the OECD and the World Bank. For global health governance regarding health care systems, *Kaasch* showed that it is the level of abstraction that produces dynamics of consensus or contestation, respectively.

It also became apparent that the discourse in one social feld is often linked to the discourse in other felds of IO activity. For example, discussing disability rights is associated with preventing poverty and granting access to education for people with disabilities, as *Schuster and Kolleck* have shown. Similarly, children's rights also touch upon the topics of health, education, food security, and social benefts, according to *Holzscheiter*. In addition, social policy discourse can also be shaped by non-social policy issues: *Schmidt* pointed out that water policy discussed by IOs is also infuenced by knowledge from engineering and technological progress. Also, the discourse on development policies contributed to how water was framed as a social good. In sum, the interlinkage between discourses could lead to new evaluations, goal defnitions, or problem recognitions.

In several social policy felds, the authors have identifed a current dominant double-edged discourse in the nexus between economic issues and social rights. In this context, the preferences and leitmotifs of IOs vary and the purpose of a given social policy is defned differently. This does not mean that IOs with different world views are necessarily irreconcilable with each other. It rather means that (groups of) IOs pursue different aims that in turn shape the whole discourse within a social policy feld. In the case of care and migration, the dualism is refected in the availability of health workers on the one hand and the quality of provisions on the other hand, as *Yeates and Pillinger* have argued. The discourse on education revolves around the following two education purposes: a means to generate human capital or a social right to promote citizenship values. While some IOs like the OECD or the World Bank primarily focus on the former, the ILO and UNESCO place education as a citizenship right at the center of their approach, according to *Niemann and Martens*. *Fergusson* highlighted in his study on youth (un)employment that the right to quality (vocational) training is sometimes plotted against considerations of employability (options) in the job market. Finally, in the discourse on children's rights, *Holzscheiter* claimed that a traditional approach to serving children's special needs by providing (fnancial) assistance is contrasted with a more progressive approach of recognizing children's rights as human rights.

In addition, the analyses in this volume also show that IOs may have divergent interpretations of a given concept depending on their specifc angle. While food security in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been associated with securing its production and fghting hunger, the World Bank's solution to food security has lain in providing fnancial access for consumption. From the perspective of the World Trade Organization (WTO), food security has instead been seen as a function of open markets and trade, as demonstrated by *Wolkenhauer*. *Yeates and Pillinger* showed in the case of health worker migration that even though underpinning ideas were shared by relevant IOs, the ideas were taken up in quite different ways. While the ILO, WHO, and UNESCO all subscribe to the UN's normative principles on human rights and equality, each IO blends in different perspectives which in turn refect their specifc fundamental discourses on improving working conditions and social justice (ILO), meeting essential health needs (WHO), or of emigration of highly skilled health workers (UNESCO). As elaborated by *Holzscheiter*, sometimes different views of global IOs and regional organizations become apparent in the discourse. Children's rights, as formulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and interpreted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), are challenged on the grounds of Western bias by regional human rights treaties and institutions, like the ASEAN Commission on the Rights of Women and Children which pays additional attention to a stronger cultural embedding of core principles and ideas codifed in the UNCRC.

## Linking the Constellation of IOs to the Discourses they Promote