Legitimating global governance: Publicisation, affectedness, and the Committee on World Food Security

Though global governance theorists disagree on the standard by which the legitimacy of global governance arrangements might be assessed, they do exhibit a degree of consensus on the need for more civil society participation to bridge legitimacy deficits therein. One important sub-stream of this discussion has involved assessing, therefore, the relative strengths and weaknesses of two key principles through which legitimate participants within global governance might be recognised: the ‘all-affected principle’ and the ‘all-subjected principle’. In this paper, I shift the focus of this debate to a case study with two elements. The first involves the invocation of affectedness by civil society actors as part of their attempt to reconfigure or ‘publicise’ the relationship between food system actors and global governance. The second element of the case study focusses on the principles, practices, and mechanisms that have been adopted by civil society to facilitate the participa- tion of the affected in a global governance body that is an impor- tant site for the publicisation struggle: the Committee on World Food Security. This case study reveals both what is at issue in the choice of principles of inclusion and a methodology through which the all-affected principle can be applied.