2 - Place, Chains, and Actor-Networks: Conceptualising Economic Linkages

Summary

This book seeks to explore entanglements between global economic dynamics and the Lake Naivasha cut flower industry. The general question of how dynamics in the Lake Naivasha cut flower industry and its surrounding social-ecological system relate to the entry and growing dominance of European retail chains in the global cut flower market can be further subdivided into three main research questions that this book’s conceptual framework looks to address.

How are global economic linkages organised? How are dynamics in these linkages brought about? And how do these processes influence the actors and regions that are part of these settings?

These are fundamental questions of economic globalisation and have been addressed across many disciplines, and by many different theories and empirical studies. The common approach of these theories is to trace connections between globally dispersed places of production, trade, and consumption of a single commodity. The multi-scalar nature of these linkages makes the tracing of products like cut flowers a complex yet worthwhile task to understand globalisation, as David Harvey points out in his famous example of tracing a meal’s inputs:

Tracing back all the items used in the production of that meal reveals a relation of dependence upon a whole world of social labor conducted in many different places under very different social relations and conditions of production. That dependency expands even further when we consider the materials and goods used in the production of the goods we directly consume. (Harvey 1990, 422)

The various concepts dedicated to this task can be divided into vertical perspectives – mostly based on a chain heuristic – and a combination of vertical and horizontal approaches, based on a network heuristic. Previous studies on the Kenyan cut flower industries made use of these approaches: for instance, Hale and Opondo (2005) conducted a study on Global Commodity Chains, Riisgaard (2009a) examined Global Value Chains, and Hughes (2001) applied a Global Commodity Networks framework. These concepts offer methodological tools to analyse translocal relations in the cut flower industry. Moreover, they assist in theoretically interpreting interdependencies between local and global dynamics in the cut flower industry. Chain approaches continue to be popular not only in studies of the cut flower industry, but also in the analysis of economic globalisation in general, as well as in development practice.