Whose work is real work? A triple labor framework for sustainable development initiatives

Abstract

Sustainable development initiatives that seek to ameliorate global crises require new forms of organization and ways of working for participants. Using an alternative food system initiative in Chiapas, Mexico as an ethnographic case study, this article identifies three forms of labor-physical, organizational, and emotional-that emerge within such projects and explores how these labor forms interact in ways that impact the long-term success of such endeavors. Mujeres y Maíz is a development initiative that seeks to protect Mexico's heirloom maize and the lifeways it supports by building connections between food producers and consumers. Together, tortilla makers and organizers mobilize multiple labor forms to build new economically and environmentally beneficial alternative food systems. These varied labor forms constitute collective wealth-in-people. The group's collaborations require embodied culinary knowledge and physical labor, organizational labor to access resources, and emotional labor to gird trust and cooperation. The analysis of these three types of labor shows how tortilla makers and organizers evaluate each other's different skill sets, shaped by class, race, and gender histories, in their collaborative and understandably contentious development work. The resulting triple labor framework is useful for diagnosing and negotiating tensions that impact the transformative potential of development initiatives within food systems and beyond.For many, global crises of social inequality, economic development, and environmental degradation must be addressed by constructing alternative forms of organization, systems, and values. A contested "sustainability project" (McMichael 2005) has emerged that includes an array of development initiatives like cooperatives, triple-bottom line businesses, alternative food systems, and other social movements that seek to transform exploitative arrangements and ameliorate the aforementioned crises.Such transformation requires the creation not only of new products and services but also of new infrastructures, systems, and subjectivities. However, as such initiatives have gained recognition, efforts to build alternatives in both developed and developing countries (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2010) are increasingly incorporated into formal development discourse and relations. Projects focused on "local" issues face pressure to "professionalize" (Murdock 2008) as they integrate into international discourses, connections, and funding streams. As they engage in the challenging day-to-day work of constructing and imagining new forms of social organization, many donors expect these projects to present, and be, coherent and polished images to qualify for continued support.This professionalization hides the varied types of labor that such projects entail. Using a case study of a collective in Chiapas, Mexico, this article identifies three distinct and interrelated forms of labor-physical, organizational, and emotional-each of which is necessary to advance sustainable development initiative...

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Embodied value: Wealth‐in‐people

“…The skills of individuals assemble a collective of persons, each with unique skills or knowledge, that is more than the sum of its parts. King () looks at the qualities of artisan food makers in alternative labor systems. Her holistic perspective shows that physical, organizational, and emotional labor are all mobilized to make a food collective work, bringing together culinary knowledge, individuals' networks of resource access, and the emotional labor of working together and resolving tensions among diverse individuals that may threaten the collective's joint work.…”