ABSTRACT:
The global food system provides a critical lens for understanding and addressing structural injustices that affect health and equity. Global food governance is conventionally framed as the formal, institutional mechanisms that set standards and norms for safe and effective food systems. Yet the reality is more complex: food governance occurs within a highly contested space where health, environmental, and economic interests intersect, and decision-making is increasingly diversified across multistakeholder networks.1, 2 Within these networks, commercial actors are establishing themselves as legitimate and authoritative participants, shaping policy, evidence, and public discourse in ways that often privilege commercial over public health interests.3 This project aims to interrogate how the food industry achieves and maintains legitimacy in global food governance. We conceptualize corporate authority as an emergent property of entangled networks in which industry, scientific communities, intergovernmental institutions, and civil society interact. Drawing on recent studies and novel theoretical perspectives, we will explore patterns and mechanisms of legitimacy4 5, and examine how these vary across regional and national contexts.