In this paper, we reflect on the evolution of place-based governance from a long-term (15 year) study of rural development initiatives undertaken in a region of Poland as part of its accession to the European Union. We decompose the recursive process of institutional learning arising from initiatives for heritage preservation and rural economic development. In our analysis, we elaborate a typology of unavoidable development dilemmas that must be explicitly managed in order to allow place-based governance to effectively harness the cultural value, social context, and developmental needs of certain locales or landscapes. Although creating and sustaining local value remain contingent on broader realities of governance, proactive management of these dilemmas can help prevent many of the usual contestations around goals and identity from becoming intractable in later periods. Our proposed approach to enabling place-based governance emphasizes conflict recognition and engagement as important complements to more common prescriptive models of governance.

The comprehensive uptake of geographical indication (GI) worldwide suggests that global trade is at the threshold of mainstreaming protections for heritage agri-food specialties. The European GI model is in ascendance thanks to a campaign of institutional entrepreneurship that engendered a powerful macro-organization leading the rapid diffusion of sui generis GI. Through its success in recruiting the intellectual property regimes of most East Asian countries into the European orbit of trade and cultural production, it has become hegemonic, with the potential for ‘crowding out’ useful pre-existing mechanisms of heritage food protection or displacing exchange in agri-food specialties still embedded in the moral economy. Although this new global standard is shaped by the process of integration into new milieux, this paper finds that latent post-colonial tendencies in the European GI model and its poor capacity at self-reflection in the face of inefficiency compromises its potentially unifying role in the heritage food world order.

The global dietary transition is, among other things, marked by the prominence of softer, mechanically easy-to-eat foods and simple flavours. However, maintaining children’s tolerance to adverse dietary experiences, such as eating around bones, or consuming bitter vegetables, is an important contributor to nutritional balance and cultural preservation. Re-framing the capability to eat ‘difficult’ foods as an admirable, broadly useful, life skill would go a long way towards fighting against food neophobia or predilection for ultra-processed foods. In this article, I reflect on a sub-set of data gathered in 2018–20 from interactive food literacy benchmarking activities for 12–17-year-olds in Japan and Cambodia. Among the activities were measures of eating skill and tolerating adversity involving consumption of (A) bitter green vegetables and (B) whole fish. I find that social pressures lead children to derive social recognition from their food literacy and to make cognitive leaps about the utility of being able to face culinary adversity. This presents an alternative for casting adverse foods as personal, lifelong challenges rather than as momentary gustatory revulsion. It also presents an alternative approach to conventional food education, with the possibility for simultaneously measuring food literacy deficits and creating context for their resolution.

This essay explores the ways in which the materiality of rice is encountered by agents along the production-consumption chain, from farmers to processors to urban consumers. Each agent, whether it is a farmer, miller, trader, consumer, or agronomic research agency, defines what is material (i.e., both tangible and discursively relevant) with respect to his or her relationship to rice. Materiality of rice is informally constituted by each actor in ideological standards that guide and configure how different aspects of rice, such as cultivation, milling, and variety, equate with quality and desirability. Technical standards, which originate from ideological standards and discursive norms, crystallize certain combinations of quality characteristics in space and time. Although technical standards initially exist as points of reference within more comprehensive ideological standards, they can multiply and increasingly dominate the material encounter with rice. Local actors, however, can contest this process by trying to bring technical standards more into line with ideological intentions. More specifically, I explore how a technical organic standard is situated within an ideological standard for natural in Cambodia, a country with strong historical and contemporary sympathies for ecological agriculture. I find that organic/natural is an important platform for promoting popular control over standardization and, more generally, over commoditization of food.

Nomadic pastoral communities are considered some of the most vulnerable to climate change. While Indigenous knowledge can play an effective role in mitigating or responding to some impacts of climate change, the extent of their capacity to adapt their livestock and rangeland management is under question. This research aims to assess the scope and applicability of climate change–related knowledge acquired in the management of summer rangeland, with a case study in Semirom, Isfahan Province, Iran. To do so, objective weather conditions (precipitation, minimum temperatures, and maximum temperatures) were evaluated using the Mann–Kendall nonparametric test and compared with subjective evaluations by nomad community members. Specifically, the study targeted a community of 7700 members of the Qashqai, a conglomeration of nomadic tribes in Iran. Their understanding of the weather was evaluated using focus groups and self-administered questionnaires, with a descriptive approach to data analysis. The findings of the climatic investigation revealed a possible shift in the climate in the study area, particularly in winter and autumn. The findings of subjective evaluation showed similar changes in wind, precipitation, and temperature to be the main characteristics of climate change in the region, with about 90% of informants directly citing decreasing precipitation and increasing temperature and wind speeds. The community evaluation also highlighted some adaptations to climate change, such as delays in beginning the seasonal migration, increased reliance on concrete homes, reservoir construction, decreasing livestock yields, and increasing diversification of resources to feed livestock. Understanding the perceptions of nomadic pastoralists, their meteorological basis, and ongoing climate adaptations can facilitate governmental planning.