Abstract
This study addresses freedom, work and organisation by problematising Amartya Sen’s pluralistic notion of (development as) freedom through a fieldwork study of a Filipino non-governmental organisation that promotes sustainable agriculture. In this context, peasant farmers face increasing threat from intersecting agrarian and climate crises, exacerbated by mainstream economic paradigms for agricultural development. For Sen, development encompasses the process of expanding the ‘substantive freedoms’ of people (freedom to), and removing sources of ‘unfreedom’ (freedom from). However, it is not clear in Sen’s work how such freedoms are relationally constituted and thus the manner of the ‘labour of agential becoming’ at the core of Sen’s thought. We therefore ask: how do agroecological work and organisational practices of grassroots development promote freedom for small-scale farmers under climate threat in the Global South? Our analysis identifies a novel form of freedom – labelled ‘freedom with’ – defined as a set of relational, multi-actor capabilities and organising practices that constitute alternative, future-oriented ways of doing and being. ‘Freedom with’ enables us to better understand how and why the labour of agential becoming works, offering a theoretical extension of Sen’s notion of freedom with implications for debates in our field on sustainability and beyond-capitalist organising.
Keywords
Introduction
This article focuses on Amartya Sen’s (1999, 2009) writing about freedom, or more specifically ‘development as freedom’, by engaging with the aspirations, experiences and organising activities of small-scale farmers in the Philippines. Sen’s conceptualisation of ‘development as freedom’ is the centre-piece of his highly influential capabilities approach (CA) to economic and sustainable development. Sen (1999: 3) famously defines development as ‘expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’ (manifest in various economic, political and social opportunities and rights) and thus ‘advancing the general capability of a person’ (1999: 10). He views freedom as both the ends and the means of development and, in contrast to narrower utility-based measures such as increases in Gross National Product (GNP), directs his analysis of development to the processes and opportunities of individuals (in addition to outcomes) to pursue freely their own livelihoods. For Sen, development is the process of both expanding the ‘substantive freedoms’ of people (freedom to), and removing sources of ‘unfreedom’ (freedom from). For Sen, freedom is thus a pluralistic notion that encompasses both positive and negative liberties (Amer, 2021).
Sen’s centring on and theorisation of the individual agent has attracted significant criticism, notably for its prima facie individualism and apparent assumption of a rational liberal subjectivity (Evans, 2002). While Sen has countered the former criticism by emphasising that individual freedoms are social products ‘conditional on the subject’s inherited landscape’ (Amer, 2021: 105), he appears to retain a notion of a bounded individual human agent. Amer (2021: 95) offers a re-interpretation of this critique by suggesting that Sen’s framework is better characterised in terms of ‘the labour of agential becoming’. By this, Amer (see also Prendergast, 2005) underscores Sen’s reference to the desired goal of development as one of expanding the substantive freedoms of individuals to ‘choose a life one has reason to value’ (Sen, 1999: 74, emphasis added). Sen’s is a more open and future-oriented human subject, according to Amer, yet the labour of agential becoming itself remains an abstract and descriptive notion that requires empirical study and in turn, theoretical elaboration. To this end, the article addresses the question of how, and via which agents, pluralistic freedoms are relationally constituted to achieve valued future lives through grassroots development activities and practices.
Research materials developed in our ongoing research with a Filipino non-governmental organisation (NGO) called MASIPAG allowed us to address this critique of Sen. MASIPAG promotes farmer-led agroecology-based sustainable agriculture across the Philippines. Agroecology involves both the application of ecological principles to agriculture, and a broader social movement that seeks to empower farmers (Anderson et al., 2021; Lanka et al., 2017) and offer an alternative to conventional development (Pimbert, 2015; Wright, 2014). According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (2021), ‘smallholder farmers [defined here as possessing less than two hectares of land] produce around a third of the world’s food’, yet remain chronically food insecure. They face tough working and living circumstances including insecure land tenure and threats to life/human rights posed by muscular and militarised states and the climate crisis (Borras and Franco, 2013). Farmers and the rural poor are disproportionately affected by climate change as they are ‘on the front lines of most climate catastrophes’ while being ‘the ones taking care of our common planet over generations’ (Gioia, 2018: 1403). These circumstances are not uniform, but symptoms of a broader struggle around competing models for agricultural development and rural change (Vellema et al., 2011). In such circumstances, the very idea of development as freedom is a conundrum, a conundrum that small-scale farmers in the Global South, and their organisations such as MASIPAG, continue to grapple with and struggle through.
Our research project, which we draw on for this publication, is wide ranging and ongoing, with the broader aim of supporting the diverse needs and interests of the farmers’ organisations that make up the MASIPAG network. The research is multi-faceted and has involved: contributing to the organisation’s self-reflection and critique of its own organisational processes; collaboratively investigating how the network understands, challenges and practises development (and particularly farmer-led development, see Wright, 2005, 2012); supporting the network through seeking opportunities for funding; and co-producing practical and advocacy materials for the network (including a collaboratively written climate change guide (The Seed of Resilience Research Collective, 2019)). The collaboration, which includes the authors of this article and members of the MASIPAG network, is motivated by the network’s desire to bring insights from the farmers into broader conversations around the meaning of development in academia (Wright, 2010, 2019), in philanthropic discourse (Yap et al., 2004) and in policy circles (Bachmann et al., 2009; Seeds of Resilience Research Collective, 2019). To support this effort, in this article we bring collaborative discussions held with MASIPAG network members into conversation with Sen’s influential CA to development. Our decision to focus on Sen’s work emerged after most of the interviews and discussions had taken place, in response to a call for this special issue that resonated strongly with the discussion and analysis made in the field. As such, while the processes of discussion, reflection and preliminary analysis fit within the broader participatory and collaborative project, our specific interventions relating to Sen come through re-reading of our collaborative discussions in light of Sen’s work.
The context of this study, then, helps address the limits in Sen’s thinking on freedom through the following research question: how do agroecological work and organisational practices of grassroots development promote freedom for small-scale farmers under climate threat in the Global South? Rather than viewing small-scale farmers as powerless ‘victims’ of the systemic forces prefaced above, we and our NGO partners view farmers as active knowledgeable agents whose climate change adaptive practices offer wisdom for understanding freedom and development. Our analysis illuminates the relational nature of the farmers’ work and organising practices, and the entanglements of vital non-human actors (e.g. seeds, snails, frogs, ponds, paddy fields, weather), that literally and figuratively ground an alternative socio-ecological imaginary for agricultural and climate-related development. Through this analysis, we identify and discuss a novel form of freedom – labelled ‘freedom with’ – defined as a set of relational, multi-actor capabilities and organising practices that constitute alternative, future-oriented ways of doing and being. As a concept, ‘freedom with’ contributes a better understanding of how and why the labour of agential becoming unfolds, including the underappreciated yet critical role of non-human actors in this relational work. In thus extending Sen’s notion of (development as) freedom, the concept has implications for debates in our field on sustainability and beyond-capitalist organising.
The structure is as follows. The literature review delves further into Amartya Sen’s (1999) notion of development as freedom, including its application to sustainable development (Sen, 2009), and our position as critical interlocutors with the limitations of his work. It also situates our interest in Sen and the context for the article in MOS (management and organisational studies) literature in the underexplored topics of food work and alternative/diverse organising in the context of climate change. The second section presents key aspects of the Philippines context for our study, and an outline of our methodology, data analysis and researcher reflexivity. Next, we present and analyse two principal sets of relational work and organising practices of small-scale farmers (seeding (un-)freedom; trialling and cultivating positive freedoms) and illustrate them with interview excerpts, journal notes and documentary materials. The fourth section discusses our theoretical contribution and implications, followed by a conclusion.
Problematising Amartya Sen’s (sustainable) development as freedom
Freedoms and capabilities
Sen’s (1999) book Development as Freedom is both a social philosophical intervention into global institutional policy debate on inequality, and a moral philosophical treatise on justice, later articulated in The Idea of Justice (Sen, 2009). Sen (1999: 3) defines development as ‘a process of expanding the real [substantive] freedoms that people enjoy’ (positive freedoms; freedom to), and conversely of removing ‘major sources of unfreedom’ (1999: 3) (negative freedoms; freedom from). Substantive freedoms refer to the capabilities of individuals ‘to choose a life one has reason to value’ (1999: 74, emphasis added). Development is thereby ‘thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people’ (1999: 4) and exercised by choice.
Sen’s underpinning notion of freedom is a pluralistic one (Amer, 2021), forged through a sympathetic critique of the works of Rawls (justice as fairness) and Berlin (positive and negative liberty) (Siani, 2017) to encompass both positive and negative freedoms. He identifies five substantive freedoms (economic opportunities, political freedoms, social facilities, transparency guarantees, protective security), 1 and indicative sources of ‘unfreedom’ like poverty, tyranny, social deprivation, neglect of public facilities or state repression. These (un-)freedoms are interconnected; for example, poverty restricts individuals’ freedom to ‘satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or . . . to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities’ (Sen, 1999: 4). Positive freedoms constitute the primary ends (hence, we can evaluate if development enhances people’s freedoms) and principal means of development. Sen is thus concerned with freedom in relation to the processes and opportunities (not just outcomes) for development, encapsulated in his notion of ‘comprehensive outcomes’.
Sen’s CA is unpacked through a distinct conceptual language. Capabilities are ‘alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve’ (Sen, 1999: 75, emphasis added), with functionings comprising a set of ‘doings’ and ‘beings’, or more prosaically, what individuals value doing or being as part of their lives. These functionings matter because, as Prendergast (2005: 1150) notes, ‘they are [a person’s] life’. The CA adopts an active and agent-centred perspective that refuses to position individuals as ‘passive recipients of the benefits of cunning development programs’ (Sen, 1999: 11). Instead, it views ‘free agency’ as a ‘“constitutive” part of human development’ and conducive to the ‘strengthening of free agencies of other kinds’ (Sen, 1999: 4). The distinctions between ‘the promotion of the person’s well-being, and the pursuit of the person’s overall agency goals’ (Sen, 2009: 287, emphases added), on the one hand, and between achievement and the freedom to achieve, on the other, are important in assessments of capability. On the former, Sen (2009: 287) writes that: ‘Agency encompasses all the goals that a person has reasons to adopt which can inter alia include goals other than the advancement of his or her own well-being. Agency can thus generate orderings different from those of well-being.’ Sen combines this with the freedom-achievement distinction to generate four concepts (well-being achievement; agency achievement; well-being freedom; agency freedom) to assess human development.
The concepts of freedom and capabilities are applied by Sen (2009: 248) to sustainable development in his sympathetic critique of ‘the content and relevance of what we can identify as “environmental issues”’ under the Brundtland definition. 2 Sen argues that the simplistic notions of ‘nature’ in Brundtland as measurable and best served by reduced interference that will sustain the ‘preservation and enhancement of the quality of human life’ underplay important active roles for human beings. In this regard, he evinces the importance of ‘seeing development in terms of increasing the effective freedom of human beings [which] brings the constructive agency of people engaged in environment-friendly activities directly within the domain of developmental achievements’ (Sen, 2009: 249). For Sen (2009: 250), the ‘needs-based’ view of human development (implied in Brundtland) requires broadening to recognise a role for human values and to ‘cherish [people’s] ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate and act’ towards their desired lives.
Critiques of Sen’s work
Sen’s work has received criticism on a range of issues. Van Staveren and Gasper (2002) evaluate his concept of freedom as both over-extended (e.g. in brushing aside values other than freedom that individuals may hold dear as regards development) and under-elaborated. In the latter respect, they argue that ‘we do not get a clear picture of the content of freedom itself, including the varieties, skills, dispositions and preconditions involved; it is instead an abstracted, umbrella category’ (2002: 7). Navarro (2000) and others critique Sen’s work as lacking sufficient analysis of political and historical contexts of development (e.g. of colonial histories; Corbridge, 2002; Makuwira, 2006; O’Hearn, 2009), even the presence of inequalities in the capitalist system itself (Rosati, 2018). It is Sen’s centring of individual (human) agency, judgement and responsibility that has been a particular target for its prima facie individualism and apparent assumption of a rational liberal subjectivity (Evans, 2002).
Sen has responded to the former point by emphasising that individual freedom is a social product. Social arrangements can expand individual freedoms, according to Sen, allowing us to be ‘fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions’, and ‘interacting with – and influencing – the world in which we live’ (Sen, 1999: 15). According to Prendergast (2005: 1162, emphasis added), ‘It is by defining capability as the possibilities that someone has in a particular social setting that it becomes possible to look at capability at the level of the individual.’ That all said, explaining how individual (substantive) freedoms are socially embedded is connected but different from investigating how they are socially and relationally constituted. Prendergast’s reminder that Sen’s capabilities refer to a set of possibilities positions development as freedom as a future-oriented process of human becoming. From this perspective, the model of the individual at play in Sen, critiqued as rational and liberal (Evans, 2002), can be re-interpreted, as suggested by Amer (2021). He describes how ‘rather than assuming a pre-ordained subject to be intervened upon, we thus begin to see how Sen’s account places at its core the labour of agential becoming’ (Amer, 2021: 95, emphasis added). In aligning with Amer’s re-interpretive endeavour, we see that better understanding the labour of agential becoming accordingly requires a grounded account of the relational constitution of development as freedom.
Less noted by critical scholars of the CA, moreover, is its anthropocentrism in overlooking the role of other-than-human actors in (sustainable) development as freedom. Reflecting a broader relational critique of the culture–nature dualism endemic in much sustainability discourse including Sen’s, Ergene et al. (2021: 1326) refuse the conceptual separation towards a view in which it is the ‘entanglements of humans and nonhumans [that] co-create the world and the conditions in which we live’, a world that is ‘in a continual state of flux and becoming’. Haraway’s (1991, 2008) notion of ‘companion species’ theorises such co-constitutive entanglements as ‘bio-social-technical apparatuses of humans, artifacts, and institutions in which particular ways of being emerge and are sustained’ (Haraway, 2008: 134). Davies and Riach (2019) apply Haraway’s work in their multispecies ethnography of bee-work, showing empirically how ‘all beings, or “critters” [Haraway’s phrase] have agential potential, even in unequal power relations’ and how such agency ‘is often expressed or springs forth in unexpected ways, undermining any sense of human exceptionalism, mastery, and autonomy’ (Davies and Riach, 2019: 252). The relational thinking that is required to unpack the concept of the labour of agential becoming can be enhanced with greater attention to such forms of ‘biomaterial agency’ (Moser et al., 2021). The particular organising context of our study – that of food production, sustainability and climate change – adds specific empirical dimensions to our theoretical problematisation of Sen’s pluralistic freedoms.
Organising for sustainable development
Burgeoning interest in sustainability in MOS recognises that organisational activities have consequences for the natural environment, and vice versa (Bansal and Hoffman, 2012). The dominant managerialist stream of work has over time extended the scope of sustainability in organisations to encompass ‘fundamental social concerns including poverty, inequality, health and food insecurity’ (Ergene et al., 2021: 1322). Critical scholars note the depoliticising nature of this stream (Banerjee, 2003). Gayá and Phillips (2016: 803), for example, argue that ‘mainstream organisational discourses refute the need for fundamental shifts in society to bring about a sustainable future, emphasizing instead incremental improvement underpinned by a business case approach based on eco-efficiency’. Ergene et al. (2021: 1325) call for MOS scholars to ‘reclaim’ sustainability in the field by re-engaging radical approaches that prioritise socio-ecological well-being and critical and relational thinking to construct ‘alternative forms for organising that channel efforts for restoring and creating liveble ecologies for all’.
Our problematisation of Sen’s work on freedom through the conceptual lens of the labour of becoming responds to Ergene et al.’s (2021) call. To date, only a few business (ethics) and organisational scholars have used Sen to consider conceptual questions of organisational justice or the ethical basis of business/stakeholder relations (Giovanola, 2009; Shrivastava et al., 2016) and to study the treatment of apparel workers in Bangladesh (Alamgir and Alakavuklar, 2020). MOS scholars have yet to consider his thinking about freedom in relation to sustainable development; at the same time, the kind of affirmative form of critique that the concept of the labour of becoming embodies can address the shortfall of affirmative forms of critique of sustainability in our field.
Existing affirmative modes of critique that call for different socio-ecological imaginaries on the Anthropocene and food production include the development of an ecocentric approach to management and organisational theory (Ergene et al., 2018; Heikkurinen et al., 2016) and appreciation of culture-specific ways of knowing human–Earth relations, especially Indigenous worldviews (Gosling and Case, 2013; Throsby and Petetskaya, 2016) and place-based organising (Guthey et al., 2014). Yet Roux-Rosier et al. (2018: 553) argue that the question of how new/different socio-ecological imaginaries ‘are performed in concrete practices that entrench underlying worldviews’ is underexplored in MOS, save for recent studies of Alternative Food Networks (AFN). AFN are ‘grassroots collectives that deliberately differentiate their practices from mainstream forms of food provisioning’ (Pascucci et al., 2021: 30; see also Beacham, 2018; Watson, 2020). Studies of such ways of organising contribute to an ‘ontology of proliferation’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006) by documenting and analysing ‘non-capitalist practices, desires and subjectivities’ (Zanoni et al., 2017: 579) for different futures. Yet there is little exploration of food production and agriculture in the Global South that privileges the place-based practices and experiences of small-scale farmers. Exceptions include interview and ethnographic aspects of a few studies of certain farming social structures and innovations, local cultural practices and personal identity issues (Dyck and Silvestre, 2019; Greco, 2020; Pal, 2016; Peirano-Vejo and Stablein, 2009; Rastogi and Dutta, 2015; Staelens and Louche, 2017).
As an alternative to mainstream (economic) paradigms, we have chosen to turn to Sen’s thinking because of its adoption of a broader agent-centred (rather than external expert-centred) perspective on development. We are also interested in its democratising impulse, whereby freedom is taken as both the means and ends of development geared to promoting individuals’ ‘capability to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value’ (Sen, 1999: 285). Focused on labour and organisational practices of small-scale farmers in the Philippines pursuing grassroots forms of sustainable development, the empirical context for this article seeks insights into alternative and diverse ways of doing human–Earth relations that contribute affirmative forms of critique of MOS on sustainability, and theoretical extension of Sen’s interest in the labour of becoming.
Research context and methods
The Philippines context
This study is set in the Philippines, a multilingual, multiethnic, predominantly Christian (Catholic) post-colonial state in the Western Pacific. According to the Philippines Statistics Authority (2019), in 2018, 16.6% (equating to 17.6 million) of the population lived below the national poverty line. Also in 2018, World Bank data showed 53% of the total population resided in rural areas, where likelihood of experiencing poverty is higher and ‘nearly one-third of those under the poverty line work . . . as farmers’ (The Borgen Project, n.d.). Most farming in the Philippines is small-scale and rice-based, and most farmers have very little capital. The vast majority of farmers do not own their own land. Following the introduction, in 1973, of a state-sanctioned industrial agricultural model through adoption of the Green Revolution (GR), HYVs (High-Yielding Varieties of seeds) aimed to increase rice crop yields and tackle hunger and poverty among farmers are commonplace. HYVs require intensive application of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
Since joining the World Trade Organisation in 1995, the Philippine government has continued a neoliberal restructuring and modernisation of its agricultural sector (da.gov.ph) implementing the scheduled commitments of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). The Philippines is ‘on the front lines of the agrobiotechnology movement’ (Richmond, 2006: 571), also known as the Gene Revolution, and one of the first countries in Asia to commercialise Genetically Modified (GM) crops. Agripreneurship is a central paradigm for state-led development whereby ‘farming and fisheries should be treated as business undertakings or industries’ (da.gov.php) with greater export potential. Land-grabs by the state of farming land for commercial exploitation by foreign private interests are common (Borras and Franco, 2013).
The Philippines is topographically bio-diverse. It is the most cyclone-prone region in the world (ca. 20 cyclones per annum, USAID, 2017) and vulnerable to climate change as a tropical archipelago of 7641 islands. Climate change exacerbates high social inequality in the Philippines, itself a reflection of the country’s colonial history (Spanish conquest and rule from 1521 to 1898; US control until 1946) with its legacy of concentrated and unequal land ownership, corruption and slow land reform processes (Schirmer and Rosskamm Shalom, 1987). According to Clarke (2013), the Filipino state has been captured by a national oligarchy of agrarian elites and serial dictators, and civil society dominated by powerful upper-class social organisations. Popular activism and NGO mobilisation to address deficiencies of the state’s development efforts have a long history, as do armed insurgencies in rural areas. President Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’ saw a crackdown on civil liberties (Human Rights Watch, 2017).
The NGO sector in the Philippines is marked by heterogeneity, small organisational size (numbers of staff in the tens) and ‘complement[s] the state and market as providers of public goods and services whilst supporting large numbers of people marginalized from effective participation or affected by natural or man-made disasters’ (Clarke, 2018: 376). That said, the heterogeneous foci and interests of Philippine NGOs mean they ‘do not represent a unified development “community”, but mirror the full range of Philippine political interests and contradictions’ (Hilhorst, 2003: 12). People’s Organisations (POs) are a membership-based sub-category of NGOs that organise for public welfare goods, important because ‘“lower class” and “working class Filipinos” are significantly less organised and less involved in civil society than the middle or upper class’ (Clarke, 2018: 378).
Methodology, analysis and researcher reflexivity
The work reported here forms part of a long-term and ongoing collaborative relationship with the progressive Filipino non-governmental organisation MASIPAG (Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag – unlad ng Agrikultura or Farmer – Scientist Partnership for Development) founded in 1986. MASIPAG seeks to improve the quality of life of poor farmers; first through advocacy work, which highlights problems with technology-driven and input-intensive GR approaches in the agricultural sector, and promotes the positive features of agroecology; and second, by developing peasant-led sustainable agriculture as a viable alternative. MASIPAG has evolved into an agroecology/organic farming-based network of ca. 35,000 farming families (average household of five; farm size 1.5 ha) across all main regions of the Philippines (Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao). Along with member farmers’ organisations, it is constituted by member NGOs and scientists in the Philippines and overseas, and has around 40 regular staff.
Our multi-sited and co-designed fieldwork is grounded in methodological principles of Participatory Action Research (PAR; Kemmis et al., 2014; Kindon et al., 2007), which conceives of inquiry ‘as a process of coming to know, serving the democratic, practical ethos of action research’ (Reason and Bradbury, 2006: 7). Such an action-oriented approach aligns directly with MASIPAG’s own dialogical (informed inter alia by Freirian principles of conscientisation) and social change-oriented organisational paradigm, which sees research and contestation around knowledge, as well as the ability of farmers to reflect on and change their realities, as central. We emphasise this project’s ongoing PAR orientation here as our analysis and discussion around Sen in this article stems from the stated desire of the network to contribute to ongoing critique and discussion around the nature of development (Wright, 2010, 2012), and to better understand its processes of organisation and struggle from below (Misoczky et al., 2017; see also Wright and Labiste (2018) for a discussion of a key NGO network member). The multi-faceted nature of the research project means these analytical components, which speak strongly to the potential to critique and advance dominant conceptualisations such as Sen’s, sit alongside other tangible outputs such as a community guide around climate change, and impact studies designed to reveal tangible and demonstrable impacts of a farmer-led agroecology approach (Bachmann et al., 2009).
While the primary data collection for this article took place over 10 days in 2017, it is contextualised within the deeper knowledge and relationships held by the research team through its long-standing relationship with this NGO (which has, over 20 years, involved collaboration on large-scale studies, popular outputs, advocacy materials, rallies and media events, and co-written articles). The specific study involved pre-fieldwork meetings and group discussion in Australia and the Philippines, which generated shared Terms of Reference for the current iteration of joint work outlining our mutual interest and understanding to produce high quality outputs and share, promote and disseminate outcomes to the widest possible audiences that include but are not limited to academic organisations, private for-profit and not-for-profit entities and other interested stakeholders through what was called the SEED (BINHI) Project: Sustainable Development through Youth-led and Farmer-led Agriculture.
Conducted by two of the authors, the fieldwork used multiple methods for data generation (participant-observation and writing field-notes, group-based discussions and documentation, community mapping, film and video recording), with the third author taking part in the post-fieldwork analysis and writing. The sites chosen represented farms/areas in three different parts of the Philippines, with different crop types and topographies, and varying levels of community organisation. The project did not set out to portray a ‘representative’ sample or act as an evaluation of the network as such. Rather, in line with an ontology of proliferation (Gibson-Graham, 2006), it was expressly designed with an overt recognition of the political and performative nature of its intended goals.
We spoke with a sample of MASIPAG office staff and community organisers, farmers and farmers’ leaders, POs, men and women, older and younger participants. Table 1 presents information on the locations we visited, and data collection activities. We have anonymised the names of all individuals, but not that of the organisation. At each site, we stayed with farmers, and our standard plan involved being greeted on arrival, followed by a guided walk around the land to see crops and conditions, formal data collection activities, debrief and departure. Our discussions covered topics including: organising and struggle; understandings and practices of agroecology; critiques of mainstream development theory and practice; sharings of farmer knowledge and experience; and experiences of and responses to climate change.
Data collection activities.
During fieldwork, we generated and interpreted workshop/group discussions and visual documentation data through manual open coding based on in vivo phrases and categories, including those from the agreed Terms of Reference and constitutive research questions. This included small group generation of critiques of dominant development practice and farmer-led responses/conceptualisations of agroecology and development more broadly including, importantly, around responses to the intersecting climate and agrarian crises faced by network members. In this way, the epistemologies of the farmers led the initial analysis, grounded in farmer ways of knowing and doing, and were interpreted through conversations, shared experiences and collective reflection among us, and with MASIPAG organisers. It was at this stage that three major threads or messages emerged through the collaborative analysis: the need for critique/dismantling of current systems including active practices of resistance (which within the later analysis we mapped on to Sen’s ‘freedom from’), the need for farmer-led responses that draw from their real-life practices (which we mapped to Sen’s ‘freedom to’) and the need for relational and collaborative responses (which we have understood as ‘freedom with’). A concern with centring environmental and non-human concerns and actors was also foregrounded by participants, a theme that we have developed into a need to take dominant development approaches beyond anthropocentrism.
After returning home, we produced a climate change guide to serve the transformative practices of the organisation, and, at the same time, the call for papers for this special issue triggered our turn to Sen’s (1999) ‘development as freedom’ as a theoretical framework that would help advance the critiques offered by members of MASIPAG. We thus, noting the resonances of the framework, took key concepts from Sen (e.g. freedom from/freedom to), bringing them into conversation with the core concerns and insights shared by participants including the need for a relational and non-human aspect within this framework. This was then shared with key organisers of MASIPAG and a further final fine-tuning of the analysis occurred. In this way, the analysis we offer here is iterative, moving ‘between emic, or emergent, readings’ and an ‘etic use of existing models, representations, and theory’ (Tracy, 2020: 209).
This research is underpinned by our commitments to practices of respect, reciprocity and solidarity, and to contribute to ‘restoring and creating livable ecologies’ (Ergene et al., 2021: 1325) by advancing the progressive socio-ecological goals of the MASIPAG network. We take research knowledge to be an unending set of translations and interpretations (Nagar, 2019) 3 across the incommensurable worlds of we diverse researchers (a white male British/Australian native English speaker with no Tagalog or vernacular; an Indo-Kenyan Australian, also with no Tagalog or vernacular; a white female Australian who speaks and understands local language) and the diverse participants of the research. We do not claim to speak for farmers, nor for the NGO. Yet, however partially, we have built relationships to understand and amplify how farmers themselves ‘actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical’ (Nagar, 2019: 3). In these relationships unfolded the co-constitution of ‘the “I”s and the “we”s, of here and there, of past and present, of human and non-human’ (Nagar, 2019: 4) as portrayed in this analysis and within the ongoing project.
As such, in the ongoing and complex spaces of participation and action that underpin the processes of knowledge creation of this manuscript, we have aimed both to contribute directly to the stated aims of MASIPAG and our collaborative research project, and proceeded to ask our research data questions stemming from external theoretical frameworks. We have treated the research materials as a source of inspiration for a reflection on Sen’s development as freedom, and written an article that will bear our names (as Philippine collaborators expressly suggested this work be written without their authorship to allow for their ongoing insights to be worked with independently through academia) in ways that undeniably replicate patterns of extractive research practice and work within ongoing relationships of trust and mutual benefit. Our engagement with Sen’s framework, which occurred after the bulk of the fieldwork was completed, carries an epistemic risk of acting as a ‘universalized language[s] that [could] erase the vocabularies and visions’ (Nagar, 2019: 4) of small-scale farmers. Yet, following the desire of the network to speak to, critique and advance notions of mainstream development practice, in staying close to the farmer-led (and other actors’) relational practices of development in our analysis below, in honouring the preferences around authorship expressed by the network, and in continuing our discussions and diverse collaborative practice post-fieldwork with network organisers, we have attempted to remain true, as far as we are able (though indeed we have done so incompletely), to the values of respect, reciprocity and solidarity that underpin our collaborative practice.
Analysis
Seeding (un-)freedom
This first set of practices takes its point of departure from the theme of ‘seeds’ and is analysed primarily in relation to the notion of development as the removal of unfreedoms (freedom ‘from’), hence ‘seeding (un-)freedom’. Considered key actors alongside others in the constitutive entanglements of agroecological farming, human participants perceived and experienced seeds as sites of struggle and ambivalent futures. The struggles (epistemic, ethical, material) associated with ‘freedom from’ the external actions of other actors in this context were manifest empirically in participants’ talk about seeds and evolving technologies for seed production, the origin story of the NGO and observations and accounts of seeds’ entanglements with other non-human actors. Through these struggles, we garnered insights into the seed-related restrictions placed on both processual and opportunity aspects of human actors’ agency and well-being freedoms and achievements, and the power and vulnerabilities of the agency of seeds themselves. The pursuit of negative freedoms was generative of the resistant and change-oriented strategies of MASIPAG from the outset, part of the multi-actor labour of becoming through which freedoms are relationally constituted.
The power of seeds
Prior to fieldwork in the Philippines, the authors coordinated a technical training programme in Australia that chosen MASIPAG leaders and organisers attended. On the first day, we facilitated a ‘keywords’ exercise where we asked participants to discuss in groups: what is a word that is fundamental to your practice? The word given highest priority by all (Philippine, and other) participants was ‘seed’ (for further discussion see also Gibson et al., 2018). They noted that seeds were literally transformative of life; seeds contain their own futures as biomaterial entities, which sustain others’ lives, so doing their own labour, while themselves being ecologically reliant on other actors (soil, water, sun, fertilisers, insects). When articulated by the participants as objects of human knowledge and application, the theme of seeds encompassed competing ideas on agricultural development and socio-ecological well-being. Seeds were viewed as symbolic and material manifestations of power with potential to enliven and constrain, as they are ‘put to work’ with other non-human and human actors in the pursuit of (agricultural and climate-related) development-related struggles over knowledge and ownership.
Seeds of the organisation
The capacity for seeds to restrict the freedoms of farmers was illuminated in the telling by Alex (MASIPAG) of the origin story of MASIPAG. As an organisation that seeks to promote sustainable and equitable agriculture, concerns to dismantle ‘unfreedoms’ are vital. Through the Green Revolution, the Philippine state hoped that industrialised agriculture would tackle major sources of unfreedom including hunger, poverty and social deprivation notably in rural areas and among farmers. Alex reported how a large-scale study was commissioned to reveal the impact of GR in Nueva Ecija. Nueva Ecija is the ‘rice bowl’ of the Philippines, where GR technologies were first deployed. According to Alex, IRRI (International Rice Research Institute based in the Philippines) expected that this study would highlight positive outcomes, but this was not so: . . . [the results] were not favourable. They thought due to increase in yield, it would produce improvement in economic conditions of farmers. But the situation was the reverse. Farmers were becoming indebted due to the high costs of production. They became indebted, lost seeds, lost uncultivated food that nature will provide without pesticide; crabs, snails, frogs and good proteins.
Use of HYVs had negative financial consequences; farmers had to incur large debts to buy the chemicals and equipment to cultivate rice, even though the initial seeds were free of charge. The Green Revolution worked to dramatically reduce seed diversity (in rice, as well as other crops) in the Philippines and to take away the free availability of what Alex called ‘uncultivated food’ (i.e. snails, crabs, frogs) that flourish on organic rice paddies. Despite being hailed, then, by the state as a way of tackling unfreedoms, GR agriculture was reported to effect a series of further restrictions on the choices available to farmers to determine how to be food secure, and thus free of hunger, and a violation of their right to freely available nutritious food. But there is another dimension to these early seed-related practices. According to Alex, state advocacy of HYVs to feed hungry farmers was also to serve to ‘remove their rebellious hearts’. IRRI as an elite institution promoting HYVs played its role in keeping the peasantry in its place, from Alex’s perspective, by ensuring (at least in theory) that farmers’ hungry stomachs did not light a fire of civil unrest for land reform and the pursuit of a different future life they might value.
MASIPAG is therefore narrated to have emerged to combat the restrictions being placed on the processes and opportunities for small-scale farmers to pursue their desired choices and food sovereignty, and on the existence and role of non-human actors (snails, frogs) in generating freedoms for others. Food sovereignty itself emerged as the primary strategy for resistance for MASIPAG farmers, so providing the content of freedom, and a set of relational values and practices to this end. Born out of resistance to the GR and aimed at ‘re-empowering farmers’ (Maggie, MASIPAG), the NGO has become an organisational means to support bottom–up, farmer-led counter-hegemonic forms of sustainable agriculture, vital as frontiers for struggle over freedoms evolved.
Emerging frontiers of struggle around seeds
During the three-day workshop with MASIPAG organisers in Iloilo at the start of the fieldwork, we learned of two more ‘frontiers’ of seed-related practices and struggles for development (biotechnology; climate-smart agriculture). Both frontiers were reported and observed to restrict the agency and well-being freedoms and achievements of farmers, through epistemic and structural forms of violence. First, in response to the many problems of GR, MASIPAG reported that farmers have been pressured in intervening years by agencies such as IRRI into adopting another frontier techno-capitalist fix for hunger and food security; the Gene or Biotechnology Revolution. GM seeds contain genes from a different species giving the seed (and crops) new traits such as resistance to certain pests and diseases. Yet food insecurity continues to be a problem in spite of the existence of these seeds, while the negative impact on the environment of the need for large amounts of chemical fertilisers to grow these seeds was stark to see during our fieldwork. In one field journal entry, one of us wrote: As we reached the top of the steep hill, the farmers told us to turn around and look at the valley below. To the left, luscious hillside, alive and verdant with diverse crops. To the right, decimated, and orange-coloured, land. We were told this was the effect of glyphosate sold as a means of making harvests resilient to changes in weather patterns. In the name of climate resilience, the chemical was killing the ground, leading farmers into debt, leaching into water sources and having potentially harmful effects on the health of farming communities and their environments. (Fieldwork notes, author one, community visit to Guinbialan, Capiz, Panay)
A much-discussed negative aspect, from MASIPAG’s perspective, was the use of patents and Intellectual Property Rights to exert corporate ownership and control over these seed varieties. It is a common practice, according to some farmers, that they may be offered GM seeds for free to start using them, but the seeds cannot typically be re-used, and so farmers have to repeat purchase them and so become dependent on corporations (e.g. /Bayer Monsanto). At the individual level, industrial farming was reported to encourage cash cropping, which integrates farmers into volatile pricing structures and creates competition between farmers for the best prices and scarce resources. Luzia, an organiser with MASIPAG, drew attention to a further consequence – the undercutting and delegitimisation of farmers’ place-based knowledges, customary practices and wisdom. She expressed how: ‘In the process of telling farmers what to do, and to replace traditional seed varieties with GMOs [Genetically Modified Organism], all of the inherent knowledge and wisdom of the farmer was lost.’ A top–down, expert-driven, dependency-fostering system emerged to the detriment of Filipino farmers and their long-held ways of knowing, restricting their food sovereignty; a form of epistemic violence (Spivak, 1988).
A second and related contemporary frontier of epistemic struggle was reported to lie in approaches to tackling climate change (see also Wright et al., 2022). In the Iloilo workshop, we ran an exercise in which we asked MASIPAG participants to think of an existing climate change policy or activity, and to consider the role of critique of Indigenous and place-based knowledges in relation to this policy/activity. All groups mentioned the UN FAO-initiated discourse of ‘Climate-Smart Agriculture’, which was reported to be intertwined with the Philippines government’s agricultural development policy. Participants argued that this intertwinement aligns climate change and agricultural change through favoured techno-scientific approaches promulgated by international climate treaties and organisations. They continued to argue that this alignment constitutes a discursive mechanism to ‘develop’ farmers and farming along the line of the dominant industrial and corporate paradigm and silences or denigrates farmers’ own place-based knowledges (similar to McCarthy et al., 2018).
Seeds and other non-human actors
Beyond these institutional and human actors, seeds are also subject to the agentic powers of other non-human actors, especially typhoons and the manner in which climate change has increased the number and intensity of these weather events. Estelle (MASIPAG organiser) shared her recollection of the effect of Typhoon Frank (in 2008) on one farming community with which she worked where rice seeds were planted: In Typhoon Frank, it destroyed their [farmers’] rice fields because of the landslides and heavy floods. It destroyed their crops. It has destroyed the river; the flood is that strong. And the fish in the river were taken away. The rice terraces were destroyed. The rice paddies were destroyed. They needed to rebuild it again. They did the irrigation back with Bayanihan [communal labour], they helped rebuilding the irrigation system. It is rain-fed so they make small canals for the water to flow through. . . . It is really the marginalised sectors, in rural areas, coastal areas, because their livelihoods are there. They cannot relocate and look for other jobs. It is what they know. And to uproot from that livelihood, it is as disastrous as if they are hit by typhoons.
Here, the co-becoming of livelihood, of the sea, the crops, rivers, rice terraces, of the weather, is primary in this description. The typhoon unleashed a ripping apart of what people know, how they know it, who they are, bound tightly to place, and a web of relations to other non-human objects, including seeds that are washed away. These multi-layered connections of diverse elements reveal a series of mutual vulnerabilities that influence the capacity of MASIPAG to do development as freedom for which ‘seeds are key’. In this context, when a typhoon or flood wipes out a crop, and as a farmer you are desperate or hungry, and you are offered free or GM seeds to grow something that yields and offers guaranteed sustenance, then you may well take it. Estelle, and others, gave many examples of this scenario. In it, the absence of, or weak functioning farmer organising and resources, or the presence of division/conflict between farmers, as reported during fieldwork, do little to keep farmers in organic agriculture. One of the challenges for MASIPAG, therefore, is that while farmers do move into organics, they sometimes go back to conventional farming (and perhaps back and forth again) for a range of life-preserving reasons.
Trialling and cultivating positive freedoms
This second set of practices takes the perspective of farmers’ climate-adaptive labouring practices and addresses how these practices reportedly and observably expand the substantive freedoms of small-scale farmers. Through training and use of agroecology that builds individual and collective capabilities in multi-actor entanglements, farmers’ knowledgeable and active adjustments of the balances that regulate their farm ecosystem embed and nurture ideas of the future. These adjustments take form in farmer-led technical and farm design practices to give peasant farmers greater control over the conditions of their poverty, in part by distancing themselves from the ‘reach’ of capital, and also in the democratising practices that MASIPAG facilitates that organise hope and a collective capacity to aspire. Seeds play a central, yet different role here. They are ‘reclaimed’, as Maggie (MASIPAG organiser) notes, such that with: . . . the seeds in the hands of the farmers, there is freedom . . . MASIPAG brings hope to the farmers with the seeds. These are seeds that don’t depend on chemicals, the corporations. If they don’t depend on the inputs, they farmers can have freedom and control.
Seeds promote freedoms, as we shall see, through multi-actor entanglements with farmers’ customary knowledges and skills, scientific experimentation, sharing and peer-to-peer education, collective labour, democratic organising and collective action that subjectivises farmers as political agents.
Diversified Integrated Farming Systems
Figure 1 presents a visual representation of a Diversified Integrated Farming System (DIFS) created by one of the MASIPAG organiser groups during the research workshop in Iloilo. It displays the conscious design of a farm’s living system based on principles of agroecology, harmonious and beneficial intersection of animals, plants and humans, and the use of polyculture. These various elements comprise the ‘integrated’ aspect of DIFS and portray the multi-actor entanglements that effect farmers’ agency and capabilities. It shows where animals are placed to provide the best fertilisers and nutrients for crops; which crops are on the outside and those closer to the house; it portrays a fish pond to provide food matter; and where (banana) trees are best planted on the farm perimeter. DIFS are the organisational design that MASIPAG promulgates for sustainable agricultural work, and farmers use to meet their well-being goals, and as a means to mitigate climate change risk and adapt. Even this one exemplar DIF demonstrates the multi-actor entanglements – of animals, nutrients, seeds, ponds, trees, soil, land, farmers’ knowledges and skills – that relationally constitute positive freedoms to achieve valued future lives.
A Diversified Integrated Farming System (DIFS).
Through our community field visits, especially to Antique where DIFS are reportedly (according to MASIPAG organisers) better embedded in local practices, farmers led us through their crops and lands and talked with pride about their labour practices including contour farming, crop diversity and the changing of planting times in order to adapt to climate change. Contour farming is where animals, trees and crops are positioned in mutually beneficial locations on the farm. It is used by Rodrigo, a male farmer, whom we met on a field trip to Antique. He told us how: After harvest, I will put my cows and carabaos in my farm so animals can fertilise my farm. I use rice straw and use it for fertiliser – mulch, any banana, and the slope area plant abaca [a type of banana plant]. I plant a rice field at the bottom. So the nutrients from the banana plants and abaca when they rot go straight into my rice field.
With increasingly unpredictable weather and in particular rainy seasons, harvest times are now difficult to know in advance, in turn changing traditional planting times and leading farmers to increase their crop varieties. The importance of crop diversity came through in our field visit to Capiz, where one female farmer told us: Because of MASIPAG, we planted more banana trees. . . . And now we are growing different crops, bananas, sweet potato, other food. With the MASIPAG approach of planting several crops, we can gain more, we are more diversified. That is why the areas of maize reduced in terms of size. We planted root crops and banana.
Root crops, sweet potato and importantly bananas (a good and reliable source of nourishment) have diversified this farmer’s crop yield, decreasing the expensive reliance on GM corn and increasing food security and sovereignty. Topographical and climatic differences within the Philippines were reported to moderate the available crops for purposes of diversification. Interestingly, the bananas created a simultaneous challenge and opportunity for this farmer, as she goes on to say: Because of MASIPAG, we have a lot of bananas and now comes a new problem because of the market. The problem of scarcity of food was solved by bananas, but now is a new problem of getting to market. We have to pay for transport, is very difficult, the road is poor. But there is a solution to that. If we can process the bananas to banana crackers, banana chips, the problem will be solved. Because of plenty of bananas in the barangay [local district; most local unit of government in the Philippines], they distributed it for others around. And then they bartered it for salt, dried fish, was way of exchanging.
Having an abundance of secure food supply with bananas enabled self-sufficiency and market engagement, but it also created a logistical challenge of getting to market, which is expensive for her. The solution was to innovate new products through processing activities, for example banana chips and crackers, which are lighter and easier to transport, and can provide a source for barter exchange.
In this way, the small-scale farmers have worked with MASIPAG to support and expand their substantive freedoms. Providing healthy and nutritious food to the family, reducing the potential for illness from chemical exposure and engaging with the market on different terms (e.g. with product innovations) are ways of reworking the combinations of functionings that have constrained the small-farmers from living lives that they value. While incomplete, the engagement with a farmer-led approach has led to an expansion of economic opportunities and social facilities, with the social organisation of farmers into People’s Organisations providing opportunities to small-scale farmers to engage differently with the market and to push for changes that support their political freedoms (albeit with limited success). Such beings and doings are deeply intertwined with the agency of individuals through specific engaged practices. Yet these practices, these agencies, are not held or produced by lone individuals. Rather, they are produced relationally – with other people (note the use of ‘we’ in the farmer’s story), in family units, with POs and with MASIPAG, and with more-than-human agents such as the crops, the corn, soil and the markets. In this way, the farmers trial and cultivate more-than-human and relationally produced freedoms.
Farmer-led agricultural research and trial farms
Farmer-led seed-related science, the use of trial farms (an eight-stage process of seed planting, cultivation and harvest) and farmer-to-farmer diffusion of agricultural knowledge constitute organisational and knowledge-based practices at the core of MCMP. MCMP is MASIPAG’s ‘Cultural Management Program’, where seeds, farmer place-based knowledges and practices come together to generate individual and collective capabilities. Maggie describes how the MCMP: . . . involves respecting farmer knowledge, go back to farmers and collect sustainable practices of knowledge. We use this as a set of agricultural practices being disseminated to farmers with seeds. There were 49 traditional varieties, which were cross-bred and now we have 2000 plus varieties. MCMP is the technology part, and it enables the seed development.
Cross-breeding and cultivation of new seed varieties, and the collection of traditional seed varieties into a ‘seed bank’, are thus foundational in MASIPAG’s work. On the one hand, these practices centre the farmer as a knowledgeable agent and creator of seeds (rather than passive recipient of outsider ‘expertise’ and (free) seeds). On the other, these practices ensure seeds are collectively held, governed and shared within communities rather than privately. They are bucking the trend of reducing seed diversity associated with GMO-related commodification of seeds as intellectual property, and provide a means of self-determination (enhancing process aspects of freedom) to farmers’ actions for enhancing their food sovereignty and security (enhancing the opportunity, and outcome aspects of freedom). As part of this scientific programme, farmers collaborate with scientists to create climate-resilient seed varieties as part of climate change adaptation. Farmers can then conduct trial farms with the support of other farmers in their community, and MASIPAG organisers through POs, as a means for trying out organic agriculture, a crucial aspect of cultivating freedoms. Returning to Maggie, she notes how: The dissemination works through the farmers. They choose the mix of seeds and thus customise the seeds to suit their preferences and changes in climate, for instance for flood water tolerance or salt water tolerance. This is how agricultural research is farmer-led.
Farmer-led seed science articulates agrarian justice in its re-valuation and recovery of farmers’ place-based knowledge (a source of epistemic justice of peasant/farmers’ ways of knowing), and articulates with climate justice in terms of both mitigation (no/low carbon agroecology) and adaptation (creating resilient seed varieties). In so doing, the individual and collective capabilities of poor farmers are promoted through the freedom to pursue, and actual achievement of, crucial agency and well-being goals (Sen, 2009).
Communal labour and collectivising the capability to aspire
The knowledge transfer on trial farms is observably farmer-to-farmer, but also organised, as our group activities and talks with farmers made clear, through a wider cultural web involving the cultural practice of ‘bayanihan’ and democratic approaches to taking decisions and building collective visions for the future. Bayanihan is communal labour, where other farmers will give their time to help others with seed planting, for instance, but also other tasks to help one another (e.g. moving a house, cleaning up after a typhoon). This practice had reportedly been under threat as a cultural consequence of Green and Gene Revolutions, and its individualising forces (e.g. debt-based, cash cropping, monoculture). Maggie (MASIPAG organiser) explains that: GM erodes bayanihan spirit. In communities where there is GM, each farmer has to pay attention to her own farm as they have a loan. Green Revolution swept away bayanihan, as it turned agriculture into a cash-oriented, individual pursuit, and exchange of labour for cash.
This is a cultural practice that MASIPAG sees as being ‘revived’ through their work. LJ (PO leader, male farmer) describes bayanihan in his experience of doing a trial farm and building a PO (together with fellow farmers) in 2002. Planting seeds became the organising force for collective labour: During that year, MASIPAG staff came here to introduce the farming using the MASIPAG seeds. With Bex and Raff, they attended the training in Iloilo about the MASIPAG technology. From the training, we learned about the procedures – how to plant organic rice. When they got back, in the month of July, they got farmers together and invited them to join an organisation, and crafted by-laws. After our by-laws, we did another orientation . . . how to cultivate organic rice using MASIPAG seeds. After the orientation, MASIPAG staff gave us the seeds, different varieties of seeds, started to plant them through bayanihan. After we transplant the seeds on the trial farm, we shared the seeds to the members with an area to plant. When the members received the seeds, we did the bayanihan, helping one member to another clearing the slope to plant native varieties.
‘Seeded’ within LJ’s quotation above is a further key element promoting the substantive freedoms of farmers: the concern for democratic and social change-oriented organisational learning, development and decision making. Frank (MASIPAG) stated that: The organisational structure of MASIPAG should reflect the farmer-led approach and developing the people’s movement. It does not matter the technology; it is about the people organising it. MASIPAG has played a leading role in developing farmer-led technology, in helping or organising farmers to organise their movement, and developing expertise in organisational development.
We witnessed and participated during our fieldwork for this project (and others) in several farmer-led and democratically structured organisational processes (e.g. training sessions, meetings of PO leaders, deliberative bodies and decision making, collective writing of position statements), cultural events (e.g. seed and harvest displays, cultural sharings of song and dance) and processes of ‘conscientisation’ (explicitly following Freire’s dialogical principles of development) for uncovering farmers’ and community members’ material problems and needs through reflection and action. Through these activities and practices, the farmers together build and exercise what Appadurai (2004) calls a cultural capacity to aspire, to generate collective action and enact and ground ideas about the future.
A capacity to aspire is effected through farmers’ culturally embedded forms of organisation-building and by gathering resources ‘required to contest and alter the conditions of their own poverty’ (Appadurai, 2004: 59). This cultural capacity underscores the relational elements of freedom. MASIPAG and the farmers directly challenge the idea of individual capabilities as the only, or central, way of understanding freedom/development. It is not individual capabilities solely – but People’s Organisations’ capabilities and about building the social organisation. These insights resonate with the work of Ostrom (2010) who argues that beyond the two organisational forms of market and state, there are many diverse institutional arrangements that communities create and manage in more just and equitable ways. MASIPAG and the farmers we met offer polycentric ways of organising, of making rules, of sustaining and protecting resources and of protecting the rights of small and marginal farmers that go beyond market–state dichotomy.
Organising (climate-related) political subjectivities: Weathering the development state
The promotion of substantive freedoms through agroecological grassroots development comes with ambivalences and instabilities, not least as noted earlier the effects of ever-intensifying typhoons on the very capacity for seeds, and human applications of them, to build more sustainable and equitable futures. Different futures are under permanent threat from non-human actors like weather events, but crucially, farmers explained, also from the systemically induced vulnerabilities of farming communities to deal with disasters. We learned directly from farmers that a key source of that vulnerability lies in government approaches to post-disaster relief and (during the Iloilo workshop) of the dominant discursive framing of farmers by state institutions as victims (of climate change) in need of salvation by NGOs or government. This has material consequences in the form of the extension of industrialised/corporate agriculture into post-disaster contexts, and turns ‘nature’ itself into a political subject (Heikkurinen et al., 2016). To illustrate, Maggie (MASIPAG) said: The local government through the DA (Department of Agriculture) after the disaster, they engaged with seed relief operation and they offer GE seeds that are part of chemical agriculture. In contrast, in MASIPAG, we have bayanihan and come up with seed reserves so have seed to use for planting. We share with other farmers who do not have seed.
Additionally, the question of how farmers are framed discursively by state institutions as victims of typhoons or climate change sits at odds with MASIPAG’s view of farmers as active and knowledgeable agents. It has reportedly prompted the NGO to engage with the notion of climate change ‘preparedness’ to challenge this ‘victim logic’ and create a more politicised identity for farmers and for political organising post-disaster: The peasant movements have shifted the thinking of the people, and moved from victim thinking, to how we can assert our rights, after Typhoon Pablo [2012]. They put up a barricade as the government was not circulating the supplies. They were stuck in the warehouses of the National Food Authority. They wanted to distribute the food later, before the elections. The movement noted that the rice was rotting in the warehouse. The people’s movements organised around this. Even when distributed, the government distributed rotten rice and there was discrimination in the distribution. How do you have climate justice, even within a situation like this where the government or bureaucracy takes advantage of the disaster? It is part of preparedness . . . There is a shift in perspective – you do not just organise to receive aid, but also to be aware of what is happening in the government, and to figure out how you can demand those rights.
On the one hand, this quotation is an account of how the government used disaster relief as a political football. Much-needed (ultimately rotten) rice was kept in government warehouses until closer to the election date to curry favour with the electorate when released. On the other hand, such a political reality required an associated shift in perspective, as Maggie calls it, in the organisation to demand rights as a key part of ‘preparedness’ for climate change and build a social movement. It is thus constitutive of both a new climate-related political subjectivity for farmers – the ‘climate change-prepared farming subject’, and for farmer organisations. And as such, it promotes new possibilities for self-regard, expanding opportunities for new forms of identity and freedoms to act.
Discussion
This article has focused on Sen’s pluralistic thinking about freedom in which he combines a positive view of freedom as substantive opportunity (freedom to) and a negative view as non-interference (freedom from). Sen’s (1999: 18) view that ‘positive freedom and the expansion of the “capabilities” that people have to lead the kind of lives they value’ should be the primary goal and measure of development activities has been highly influential and contentious. For some, Sen’s approach assumes a pre-ordained subject to be ‘intervened upon’, yet Amer (2021) argues that Sen’s is a more open-ended and future-oriented conception captured in his (Amer’s) concept of the ‘labour of agential becoming’. As important as this (re-)interpretation of Sen’s agent-centred CA is, both Sen’s and Amer’s ‘labouring agent’ is an abstract, descriptive and anthropocentric notion. Empirical study is required to enable theoretical elaboration of it. To this end, the article addressed the question of how (and why) pluralistic freedoms are relationally constituted to achieve valued future lives through grassroots development activities and practices.
Via an iterative analysis of the climate change adaptive working and organisational practices of farmers and a farmer-led Filipino NGO that promotes grassroots agroecology-based development, we identified two broad sets of practices through which different kinds of freedoms are relationally constituted. In the first, we presented farmers’ voices and practices (practices of ‘negative freedom’/freedom from) linked to the need for, and forms of, critique, dismantling and struggle in respect of dominant neoliberal and corporate arrangements for agricultural and sustainable development in the Philippines. In the second, we highlighted farmer-led responses and practices for trialling and cultivating positive freedoms (freedom to), and alternative, more sustainable modes of development. Across both, we found examples of individual and collective forms of human capabilities, but crucially also highlighted the vital role of non-human actors (notably seeds, but many others too) in the relational constitution of negative and positive freedoms. Not only did farmers consistently underline the need for relational and collaborative responses to their current predicament, their entanglements with non-human actors underscored the mutual imbrication and reality-constitutive dependencies of multiple actors in the pursuit of negative and positive freedoms. Accordingly, we propose that our analysis draws attention to a distinct, and novel category of freedom, which we call ‘freedom with’.
We define ‘freedom with’ as a set of relational, multi-actor capabilities and organising practices that constitute alternative, future-oriented ways of being and doing. We propose that ‘freedom with’ contributes a better understanding of how and why the labour of agential becoming – central to Sen’s framework and conception of the subject of development – works. In terms of ‘how’, the sets of practices explained above act as mechanisms for the relational production of negative and positive freedoms, and the pursuit of resistant as well as new, alternative or diverse ways of being and doing. The ‘why’ of this labour lies in the pursuit of relational ways of doing and being as an ethical and life-preserving imperative, not only for small-scale farmers in the Global South but, to our minds, for sustainable and equitable futures for all. While one contribution is thus an analysis of the mechanisms behind the labour of agential becoming, a second lies in the extension of the relational constitution of development as freedom to non-human agents. Such agents are overlooked and effectively silenced in Sen’s framework, an erasure that reproduces an unfortunate anthropocentrism in debates not only about freedom, but also about sustainability and sustainable development. Such an erasure is perverse and damaging for organisational scholars of sustainability, since it would elide what our analysis shows: that non-human actors are not just ‘victims’ or recipients of environmental change, but also active agents in the kinds of systemic changes required to produce more sustainable and equitable futures.
This study of freedom, agroecological work and organising has implications for the goal of ‘reclaiming’ sustainable development and advancing more radical thinking about sustainability in MOS (Ergene et al., 2021). For one, the study represents a novel setting and underexplored set of perspectives – the voices and place-based knowledges of small-scale farmers in the Philippines, simultaneously a location (the Global South) and form of labour (peasant labour) notably under-appreciated for what they might teach our field about food work (Böhm et al., 2020), beyond-capitalist organising and the Anthropocene (Beacham, 2018). Second, while most critical work on food production and climate change in MOS to date exemplifies negative forms of critique and rarely addresses the intersection of climate and agrarian crises, this study offers an affirmative form of critique grounded in practice-based insights that expand the archive of alternative and beyond-capitalist organising. This is because ‘freedom with’ provides a conceptual lens into how and why things could be otherwise as regards the future sustainability of human and non-human life, and the ontological and ethical role of multi-actor entanglements in (re-)constituting these futures.
Conclusion
This study has explored freedom, work and organisation by problematising and extending Amartya Sen’s pluralistic writing on freedom through a fieldwork study of a Filipino NGO that supports sustainable agriculture based on agroecology. Through collaborative, co-designed fieldwork, we have illuminated the relational practices that ground alternative, grassroots socio-ecological imaginaries for sustainable development and bring into being a series of substantive freedoms. These include a novel, relational form of freedom identified through our analysis – labelled ‘freedom with’ – that highlights the ontological role of multi-actor relationalities in constituting development as freedom, and extends theoretically the core of Sen’s framework (Amer, 2021) – the labour of agential becoming. This article shows how agroecology offers an alternative, more sustainable and equitable future for small-scale farmers and expands the archives of alternative organising from the Global South.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the inspiring and truly courageous people involved with MASIPAG and other peasant and Indigenous social movements of the Philippines. In particular, we acknowledge those organisers and farmers who took the time to share the insights with us for this article. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and special issue editors for their generous insights and support.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship: FT160100353; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Australian Government Australian Award Fellowship: 160086 Building resilience and agri-food systems in Asia through sustainable and equitable practices.
