From “Sustainability” to “Settlement”: Node–Device Governance and the Recomposition of Power in Taiwan’s Rice Supply Chain

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Shifting Technologies of State Knowledge and Power

Abstract

This article takes Yuli rice farming as a case and mobilizes a tripartite lens—governmentality, field theory, and market devices—to examine how sustainability is operationalized through an apparatus-chain of indicators, certification, and datafication. From the perspective of the state system, power enters through governance nodes such as subsidies, procurement, verification, and data infrastructures; for firms, CSR/ESG translates commitments into projectized and auditable programs that function as supplier filters. Amid these shifts in resource allocation, local society attempts to respond to—and to rewrite—the governing grammar through cooperatives and shared nodes. Yet the outcome is not a straightforward realization of moral ideals; rather, it is a recomposition of entry qualifications and capital conversion rates. Actors capable of assembling technology–documentation–institutional rules across relevant nodes are more likely to move upward, whereas those lacking financial and documentary capacity face structural exclusion. Moreover, when these devices are not co-designed with risk-bearing arrangements, risk is likely to be pushed upstream toward producers, and sustainability indicators may instead become stratifying gates.
The article contributes by foregrounding the node–device level of analysis to show how a discourse–device–finance triadic coupling reconfigures power relations among the state, firms, and local society. It further argues that “sustainability” should be institutionalized in the public realm as an accountable capacity for risk-sharing and redistribution: only when collective risk-bearing is itself device-ized can market pricing of sustainability acquire social legitimacy.

Author

• Naiwen Wang, Taiwan National United University