trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

and South-Korea (e.g. Brown 2011; Financial Times 18th May 2010; UNCTAD 2009). Scarcity-inducedsecuritization of resource access on national and business agendas in the form of food speculation andforeign direct investment in land and water, i.e. ‘land and water grabbing’, further complicates the globalwater security framework (Brown 2011; Kaufman 2011; Sojamo et al. forthcoming). Political decisions onwater security are constantly made both in the unnoticed and institutionalised market structures in theoverlapping agro-food and water governance networks. The position of the corporate and state-ledenterprise actors in the industry structure and in the institutional and ideological setting of the globalpolitical economy of water-food-energy-trade nexus are both significant.This study aims to shed light on the role of the biggest water users – the most powerful corporateand state-led actors in agro-food value chains and networks – in global governance of water security,thus far poorly understood both in theory and in practice. It will especially respond to the need for betterunderstanding of the role of transnational corporations and state-led enterprises besides state and civilsociety actors as rule makers forming coalitions and networks of global water governance. The emphasiswill be on the importance of the thus far non-intentional forms of power of the global agribusinesstraders in sourcing and distributing high volumes of water intensive agricultural commodities.2. Material and methodsLukes's (2005 [1974]) three dimensions of power – material, bargaining and ideational – andFoucaultian notions of knowledge and discourse as power are applied here with Gramscian ideas ofcontestation, resistance, and accommodation connecting corporate and state-led enterprise strategies tothe global water governance regime (Clapp 2005; Levy and Newell 2002). Corporations can eitherexercise material, bargaining and ideational forms of power to contest and resist environmentalgovernance regimes, or engage in organisational and discursive practices inside the regime applyingGramscian accommodation strategy in order to position their business interests as collective concerns(Newell and Levy 2006; Dryzek 1997). These latter forms of agro-food corporate engagement in watergovernance are still rare as water issues are subordinated or only superficially accommodated to most ofthe corporate strategies (CERES 2010). However, as Newell and Levy (2006) emphasise, also contestingand resisting strategies and, even more importantly, non-intentional forms of corporate power matter inthe governance context.The role of the agro-food corporations and state-led enterprises in global water security andgovernance can be thus investigated by building the analysis on 1) their power in material conditionsfrom global water management perspective, i.e. their share of international virtual water ‘flows’, 2)organizational forms and bargaining power in the global agro-food value chain and network governanceand emerging forms of global water governance, and 3) ideational power consisting of their knowledgeand discursive practices in the wider network setting.The economic theory of global water management, i.e. calculation of virtual water ‘flows’ and waterfootprints (notably Hoekstra and Chapagain 2008), gives the volumetric and geographic perspectivecrucial to water security analysis, further justifying the research of the corporations in the global agrofoodvalue chain and network governance setting. Power theory of corporations helps to explain theactions of the corporations in the value chains and networks and also in the wider global watergovernance network context in the global political economy (notably Newell and Levy 2006; Clapp161