Some preliminary research questions:
Framing
- What specific theories and ideologies inform current discourse on (sustainable) economic development? What goals and “goods” do they take for granted?
- How have laissez faire economic policies affected agricultural systems and rural development in Latin America?
- What alternatives to the current agricultural/development paradigm are being pursued? By whom and to what success?
Focus
- How have free trade agreements and economic structural adjustment policies impacted agricultural production in the Dominican Republic? How have they helped or hindered other development goals?
- On what grounds do various groups in the Dominican Republic support or oppose the National Seed Law? How do their broader goals for development compare?
- How is “seed sovereignty” related to the broader goal of food sovereignty, and does this present a viable alternative to export-oriented industrial agriculture in the Dominican Republic?
These questions are certainly not set in stone. In fact, I’m positive I’ll be revising them constantly. But! They are a start.
As far as methodology goes, I imagine mine will be spilt into two big, complementary chunks. The first part will answer questions like How have free trade agreements and economic structural adjustment policies impacted agricultural production in the Dominican Republic? I’ll take a historic approach to political economic research for this, and try to link specific policies to empirical outcomes. This will involve creating a timeline of specific agreements and policies (ie: IMF standby agreement 2004, DR-CAFTA 2006) as well as a more general outline of developmental epochs (ie: 1940s-1970s, Import Substitution Industrialization). Then, I’ll have to dig up historic data related to agricultural production and human development indices. Luckily, there are a lot of agencies that collect this kind of data, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. Trying to tie together policies and outcomes will be the tricky bit. Here’s links to some promising data sources I’ve found thus far:
- World Bank “Data for Structural Economic Analysis“
- World Bank “Agriculture & Rural Development“
The second chunk of my methodology will be much more qualitative—the hope is to breath a bit of life into what could end up being some pretty dry political economic analysis. I want to bring in the lived experiences of people who are directly affected by these policies, because I’m a firm believer that there’s only so much that numbers can tell us about a situation. My plan is to conduct semi-structured interviews to (obliquely) get at questions like On what grounds do various groups in the Dominican Republic support or oppose the National Seed Law? How do their broader visions for sustainable development compare? I want to interview a variety of actors—including campesinos, members of rural social movements, politicians, business people, urban dwellers— to try and piece together the variety of values and interests that must be balanced when making policy-decisions.
Throughout all of this, I want to be constantly pulling in theory so that I can connect this particular case study of the Dominican Republic to a wider body of (critical) literature about the role of neoliberal globalization in sustainable development. This is inherently a highly political, polarized and normative debate, and one heavily laden with ideology on both sides. My hope is to avoid having my analysis bogged down by any of these ideologies or orthodoxies, while maintaining, and indeed sharpening, my own political perspective in the process.