Landscape pressures in fisheries governance systems ranging from the impacts of climate change to the detrimental impacts of overfishing are beginning to pressure regime actors to act. One way regime actors have responded to fisheries issues is through the promotion of sustainable seafood certification. In this paper, we utilize the Pathway for Transitions (Geels and Schot, 2007) as a theoretical lens to examine how the sustainable seafood certification innovation represents a transformation pathway through regime actors' power. In addition, we bring light to alternative niche groups which base their governance strategies on local ecological knowledge and work to be inclusive of small-scale fishers. In many traditional fishing communities in Japan, local knowledge structures regarding social-ecological systems are crucial for sustainable governance. While some studies have been done on sustainable seafood certification, how they impact local knowledge structures has yet to be fully examined. We found, despite local knowledge structures theoretically acknowledged, powerful political-economic actors do not draw from them, but instead push for sustainable seafood certification as a way to cope with external shocks. Our research illuminates three groups which highlight important aspects of sustainable governance at the niche level, demonstrating the need to incorporate power dynamics as a factor in sustainability transitions. They include; 1) a NGO actively governing through local knowledge, 2) inclusive governance activities, and, 3) a platform for small-scale fishers’ agency. If regime-level innovations, such as sustainable seafood certification, continue to determine how sustainability should be practiced, local knowledge structures will be lost to standardization. We contend that by acknowledging and utilizing local knowledge from local actors, it could contribute to a more just form of governance through equitable participation of small-scale fishers and their local ecological knowledge validated.

In the face of the food security crisis, the nutrition crisis, and the climate change crisis, it is more or less agreed among the international community that the current food and agriculture system is problematic and needs to be transformed and made sustainable. However, there are major discrepancies and conflicts over how, by whom and in which direction the system should be transformed. Even the basic policy concepts of "food security" and "sustainability" are variously defined and used as a tool of discursive power. Relying on critical political economy and critical discourse analysis, this article analyses the trends and problems of hegemonic institutions of and discourses on global food and agricultural governance, and explores the possibilities for counter-hegemonic practices by paying attention to the challenge of food sovereignty and agroecology and the role of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the global level, and the challenge of city-region food systems transformation and the role of Food Policy Councils (FPCs) at the local and regional level. The article concludes with providing some implications on the way critical agrifood policy research should function and the role critical agrifood policy researchers should play in the space of discursive politics of policies in this era of multifaceted crises. A key is re-politicising the recent trend of depoliticised gov-ernance. Key words：transformation of food and agricultural system, global governance, hegemony and counter -hegemony, discourse and discursive power, political economy Shuji HISANO(Kyoto University)

ABSTRACT Rapid growth in the global halal markets in recent years has invited scholars to pay close attention to the development of halal standards. However, the actual processes behind the formulation of the criteria specified in halal standards remain underexplored. This paper examines competing arguments and narratives behind the formulation of halal ruling on pre-slaughter stunning and mechanical slaughter in the new state-led halal standards in Indonesia. Drawing on the notion of ‘backstage politics,’ the results show that the criteria in halal standards are no longer determined exclusively by Islamic dietary laws that explain them. The inclusion of various actors in the formulation of halal standards has cleared the path for non-religious concerns, namely the meat production shortage and protections to the poultry sector, to embed and play an essential role in shaping the approval on pre-slaughter stunning and the ban on mechanical slaughter, respectively. As such, this paper argues that halal standards not only operate as a tool for economic development and facilitation of international trade but also serve as a safeguard to address food security issues and a mechanism to protect the national economy from the adverse consequences of the globalized markets.

In response to the growing concerns about the unsustainable consequences of the current industrial agrifood system and the increasing call for sustainable transformation, the concept of “climate smart agriculture (CSA)” has been developed and mainstreamed in the international community. Given its ambiguous definition and applications, and its advocacy by global agribusiness corporations, there is concern as to whether the concept of CSA may obscure the transformative perspectives of alternative agri-food initiatives and hinder their scale up. This paper utilizes the Gramscian concept of hegemony, to trace the development of the CSA concept and uncovers power dynamics behind the mainstreaming and institutionalization of CSA. In doing so, this paper elucidates the recent corporate consolidation in the agricultural input industry and their strategies for digital agriculture, which is touted as a powerful tool for CSA and therefore a key solution to climate change. The findings show that by exercising hegemonic power to legitimize their CSA model, global agribusiness corporations are turning climate crises into new opportunities for capital accumulation without fundamental transformation of the agri-food system.