18: Negotiated Inclusion in Global Value Chains

I will discuss a strategy of negotiating inclusion in global value chains. It is about finding ways to engage
global value chains that would benefit as much as possible and as many people as possible in your
locality. I will argue in this video that clusters and value chains can be reorganized at the local level for
the benefit of the local actors such as producers and farmers.

Perhaps, producers in your locality trade in global value chains, but they feel defenseless. For example,
when prices go up and down or when buyers find other suppliers, such inclusion may look better than
not being included at all but it is probably not achieving as much as it could, in terms of LED. Between
this passive inclusion and straightforward exclusion in global value chains, there lies a world of
possibilities in terms of the ways in which small producers participate.

Some types of inclusion are conducive to development and others are not. It has to do with many
factors and you should have thought about them by now.

To pursue a negotiating inclusion strategy, the key issue is whether there is at least one actor in the
locality that has the abilities to:

 gather information from within and outside the locality

 process it into knowledge, and
 act accordingly with others

I named some of these actors, we generally refer to these abilities as local agency.

Local Agency - a concept that groups a series of capacities like:

 Access to Information
 Understanding the Situation
 Connection to producers/trust
 Control over Resources

These capacities normally lead to negotiation and learning which are the key elements to negotiate
what we call the terms of inclusion in a global value chain. These actors were not born with local
agency, they made it along the way. Of course, along the revolution they made mistakes. You invariably
find a path of trial and error in their history, but each error led to more learning and more knowledge,
and the further strengthening of local agency in a cumulative process.

Negotiated Inclusion

Local association (local agency)

Global Value Chain

There are several cases around the world in which the terms of inclusion were negotiated by a strong
local actor that takes it upon itself to manage the integration of the producers in the locality to the
global value chain. These actors act as a hinge between the local and the global they’re usually