The Real Dirt on Responsible Agricultural Investments at Rio120: Multilateralism versus Corporate Self-Regulation

This article uses a fine-grained anthropological and linguistic analysis to expose the routine negotiating practices and power games behind the conclusion of paragraph 115 on responsible agricultural investments during the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012. These negotiations are simultaneously a telling example for the quotidian stuff of international governance-an arena in which much larger forces are played out through small language-based tactics, and they are representative of an exceptional moment when global multilateral policy making in the frame of the United Nations was challenged by the legitimation of private authority and corporate self-regulation. Combining anthropological and linguistic methods, the article focused on language use, analyzing the ways in which people interact in a highly coded language, how they "perform," by exploring, playing with, and twisting the grammatical structures of the spoken language. At issue is the large-scale appropriation of agricultural land all over the world by multinational corporations, investment funds, and foreign governments.