ABSTRACT
Assembly and consensus practices serve as the primary decision-making process for several organizations, networks, and other bodies that govern their own affairs globally. This chapter introduces three organizations or networks, among a number of other comparable organizations and movements, exploring the ways in which they are committed to equalizing participation globally in governing their own affairs. The different organizations working at the global scale have very different relations to centralization. The rise of private property regimes in the eighteenth century and the enclosure of the commons have meant decreased access to land for poor farmers. La Via Campesina is a network of over 100 largely rural farmer organizations from all over the world that work together to shape global food, farming, and land policies. Explicitly formed to develop a new mode of politics, the World Social Forum (WSF) broke with the centralized, vertically organized politics associated with labor unions, labor-based political parties, and other organizations associated with the left.
